Because the online world of UU bloggers and social media pundits, not to mention UU banter on personal Facebook pages, has erupted into all sorts of chatter on the new UUA logo (It sucks! It rocks! It’s a penis!  It’s a vulva! It’s Sauron from LOTR!), this post may well locate me in the same place I was in high school: far outside the circles of the cool kids…but I am okay with that.  I’ve got lots of practice.  (Cue pity party music…)

Instead, I offer the second part of the post I published yesterday: the terribly unsexy topic of Bonhoeffer’s Divine Mandates and its resonance for Unitarian Universalism today.

Because I engage the spiritual practice of tentative curiosity, and maybe because I am a Libra, when I entered seminary, I was certain of few things except that I wanted to be a parish minister.  I held firmly to this ideal, even in the face of learning that parishes (and congregational life in general) is a dinosaur and the meteor is only a few miles outside the stratosphere.

To honor my tentative curiosity, as well as to sound properly humble, I would say nuanced things like, “Well, my current intention is parish ministry, but I am open to being transformed by my studies and discovering new things about my calling.”  It’s the kind of thing you expect to hear from a seminarian.  It was pretty lip service.

Sometimes, I would ask questions out loud about The Other Option: community ministry.  Crassly, my questions would move from “what does a community minister do?” to the more important question of “how does a community minister get paid?”  I have heaps of respect for my colleagues who are doing this kind of work or plan to, so the snark factor in my tone has to do with economics, not with worth or integrity.  Fact is, with the whole prophesy of doom for congregational life, one can just as legitimately ask that second question of future parish ministers…

At this point in my ministerial formation process (about half way through), I would say parish ministry is still the Big Contender.  Yet not that long ago, as part of a course on spiritual discernment, I saw a possible path of community ministry that had not been visible to me before.  Its entrance into my imagination has brought with it some low-grade anxiety.  So I am sitting with it, observing its staying power, not speaking of it and certainly not writing about it.  Ha!

What are divine mandates?  They are the multiplicity of places and circumstances where we encounter and engage the Sacred, expanding beyond scripture or worship.  They were originally articulated by the mid-twentieth century German Christian theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. According to author Robin Lovin,

So it is not just that we hear the Word of God proclaimed in church and take it into the marketplace, the school, and the government office.  We learn something about the Word of God in and through our participation in these mandates as well as in the World proclaimed to them.

There is no definitive list of divine mandates, so there is room for play.  According to Lovin, the list of the divine mandates includes

• State / government
• World of work
• Intimate relationships
• Education / cultural institutions
• Church

Yesterday, while writing Part I of this post, I envisioned this Part II post to be about the UU’s engagement with what it is calling Congregations & Beyond, but is really a transformational cultural shift in how organized religion stays relevant to people longing for spirituality and meaning, but not for congregational life.  I still think this post is about that, even if it is turning out to be somewhat tangentially.

Bonhoeffer’s divine mandates remind us, rooted deeply in some very deep theology, that the spiritual life is everywhere – it is not just in church (or synagogue or temple or mosque) where we commune with our Divine Source.  Bonhoeffer recognized these divine mandates in the face of one of them – the Nazi State – wildly and horrifically overstepping its bounds and imposing itself on the others.  For one of the truths of divine mandates is that they balance each other, operate in a kind of interdependent web that aims for mutual harmony.

So perhaps as congregational religion of all stripes and colors experiences diminishment in the United States and Europe, this crisis offers us the opportunity to see other essential circumstances – mandates, to use Bonhoeffer’s language – as the opportunities to engage the Sacred they have always been.  Moving beyond congregations (without ejecting them), we see other mandates that allow us to find and make meaning, to see our purpose beyond our small lives, to offer ourselves up for something greater than we knew, and to feel a part of a greater Unity that just might exist out there.

I actually like that Unitarian Universalism is engaging this dynamic, even if the engagement is clumsy and sometimes heads off in the wrong direction.  I have experienced too many others who decry those who don’t come to church on Sundays anymore, as if they are the problem, and everything is alright with the church-on-Sunday that hasn’t changed in decades and the building on Sunday that hasn’t changed in centuries.

I like that there is more and more talk of community ministry, even if I may not end up there.  I like that we are talking and acting, not just because congregations are dying, but because we are finally getting it: that spiritual life is out there, everywhere.

In conclusion I offer up my attempt to play in the non-definitive list of Divine Mandates.  The first five are the same as Lovin’s, though I have adapted two of them – the first to include how we participate in the state (Citizenship) and the other to include a more expansive understanding beyond “church.”  I have also added two new mandates: Nature/Environment, by which I mean not only that I can find the Sacred while walking on the beach, but that how I engage stewardship of the environment is a sacred act; and though I wish I had a better phrase for it, the modern addition of Engagement in Onlife Life because I think there is something adaptive, not just technical, in that realm and it deserves consideration within this framework.

• State / Government / Citizenship
• World of Work
• Intimate Relationships
• Education / Cultural Institutions
• Religious Congregational Life
• Nature / Environment
• Engagement in Online Life