Why is membership important?
Membership offers the gift of belonging to world where loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression are on the rise. Belonging is a fundamental need for human beings; it impacts not only our mood, but our physical health and our ability to learn and thrive. When we think about membership in our congregations, we need to begin with the premise that we are offering friends not yet known to us a home and a place where they can belong. At our best Unitarian Universalist churches offer safe, loving, and vibrant spaces for folks in need of human connection.
What does membership mean for Unitarian Universalists?
I believe that in Unitarian Universalist churches the only sacrament we have is membership. Remember that sacrament simply means something that we hold sacred, that we value and that rests at the core of who we are. Without a creed to bind us, it is our covenant that ties us together. Covenants are promises we make one to another about how we will be in relationship with one another. Our covenants express our values and connect us to something bigger than ourselves. Membership is a sacrament, because what holds us together in religious community is our agreement and promise for how we will be in relationship with one another; it is an expression of our choice and our willingness to belong to a community.
We should treat membership with gravity and respect, as well as joy and gratitude. In addition to welcoming people into connection, membership also endows congregants with the right to vote in our annual meetings. This is both a heavy responsibility and way to deepen our sense of connection and ownership of the church.
How do we foster membership growth?
As a membership professional I was often the first person to welcome people as they came through our doors. I spent time listening to their stories or who they are and what brought them through our doors. Over and over again, I heard stories of people seeking to connect with something greater than themselves, a hunger for spiritual growth, to create positive change in our world, and a desire to be part of a community that has fun and enjoys spending time together. The goal of membership development for me was to help people get connected within our congregation. I found that people want to be a part of a community whose members love being together, care for one another, and call us to be our best selves.
Throughout my 11 years as a membership professional, I worked hard to create programs and opportunities within the church community for learning, connection, fun, and fellowship. These events were not simply targeted at newcomers, but we’re also intended to enrich the lives of our longtime members and friends.
Some of the social programs I ran included:
- Mystery Friends: a pen-pal program that anonymously paired our youngest with our oldest members. The only rule was that participants could not share their names. Participants but ask questions about each other. The program concluded with a “big reveal party” where the pen-pals got to meet in person.
- Take a Friend to Coffee: random pairings of people were given gift cards to a local coffee shop to get coffee together.
- Potluck dinners in congregants’ homes.
- Annual Chili Cookoff, the winner got bragging rights for the year!
- Special Coffee Hours: Apple-palooza (an all things apple potluck), Holiday Cookie Sunday, Souper Bowl Sunday, Pi(e) Sunday, and an end-of-the-church-year church picnic potluck, among others.
- Coffee Hour Conversations, facilitated conversation for the introverts among us for whom social hour can be daunting.
Learning and Spiritual Growth Opportunities included:
- UU and U Classes, based on the Faith Forward curriculum, this was a series of 8 classes that were offered in rotation throughout the year immediately following the service.
- Roots Class, a class offered by the minister which I helped facilitate.
- Small Group Ministry Group for newcomers.
- Book Discussions.
EXTRAS
Stanford Sociologist Geoffrey Cohen:
When you feel like you don’t belong or when you have that sense of [not being] part of a larger cause, it turns out there’s biological research that suggests that’s one of the worst things our central nervous system can say to the rest of our body is you are alone here. It puts us in a sort of fight-or-flight response. That’s very good evolutionarily to deal with physical threat, preparing to be wounded, but when it’s chronically activated, it can really wreak havoc on our health.
In our faith tradition based on covenant, the people who hold that covenant, and their relationships with one another based on the covenant is what holds us in community.
As a covenantal faith tradition, our covenant organizes dictates tells us how we will and how we aspire to be in relationship and community together.
As a sacrament membership should be treated with great care. Churches should clearly define what it means to be a member and hold one another accountable to living up to this definition. I have found in the over 10 years I spent as a membership professional that newcomers want to be part of a community that values itself. When we have high standards and expectations for our membership, it signals to newcomers that we value this community and all that we offer the world.
These standards have nothing to do with how much someone pledges or how many committees they are on. Rather these standards speak to how we show up in the community, the values we hold dear, and how we live these values in both our church life and out in the world. The higher we esteem our church community, the more value we should place on the role of membership.
