On Sunday January 5 I begin a two month term as the sabbatical minister of the First Religious Society in Carlisle. I will be preaching January 5th, 12th, and 19th and February 2nd, 9th, and 16th. This Sunday’s sermon is entitled “Let’s Have a Jubilee” and calls for the elimination of debt based upon the biblical concepts of sabbatical and jubilee. 

Dan Harper recently penned an open letter to the UUMA Board describing why he is dropping his membership in the UUMA. I was moved to write a long comment that I thought I would repost here:

I admit to being more than a little disappointed with reading this post. Over the last year and a half that I’ve spent as a semi-itinerant minister I have grown increasingly appreciative of the UUMA. I left the parish ministry in the autumn of 2012 to begin working on a PhD and have been supporting myself and my family partially through pulpit supply and officiating rites of passage. The experience of not having my own pulpit has helped me to understand exactly how much the UUMA does for me (I discuss this realization at length here). My membership in the UUMA has provided me with connections that have allowed me to earn higher wages and find more opportunities than I would have otherwise found. In addition, I have been taking advantage of the UUMA’s excellent coaching program this year. The cost of the program is $100 for ten sessions. I’m getting far more from the peer coach that I’m working with than from the professional speech coach I paid close to $700 for a couple of sessions a few years ago.

Frankly, I tired of hearing settled ministers with good salaries and housing allowances complain about how much UUMA dues are. When I was a parish minister I simply paid for my UUMA dues out of my professional expense account. I suspect that most of the settled ministers who complain about the cost of UUMA dues do the same.

These days, I pay for my UUMA dues out of pocket. I live in the Boston area, which is close Silicon Valley cost-wise. My wife and I support our family on my graduate student stipend, pulpit supply fees and her very part-time DRE salary (we are food stamps and receive other forms of public aid). Yet I still think supporting the UUMA is worthwhile.*

In my experience, most of the people who complain about UUMA dues are fairly highly paid and skilled workers (Dan earns almost twice the median wage in the US, and 140% the median household income in California). One of the reasons why UU ministers earn relatively good wages is because of the advocacy, over time, of our professional association.

As for the community minister who makes $200,000 and doesn’t want to pay .5% of his income to the UUMA, all I can say is that maybe he doesn’t value his identity as a UU minister enough. He certainly don’t seem to feel a need to support the organization that helps minister maintain professional standards and wages which, at the end of the day, is what the UUMA does. Those standards are crucial in maintaining the viability, if that is possible in this changing religious landscape, of our profession.

*As a graduate student I also belong to a number of professional academic associations and a labor union. I don’t complain about paying dues to those groups either.

I am excited to announce that I will be preaching at the Theodore Parker Unitarian Universalist Church in West Roxbury, MA on December 1, 2013. Theodore Parker has long been one of my heroes and I am delighted to have the opportunity to fill the pulpit where he first made a name for himself as a preacher.

A video version of my sermon “Present to Each Other” is now available on-line. You can view it here. 

It has been a little bit less than a year since I left my pulpit in Cleveland. My main focus since then has been, rather obviously, school. However, I have also done some pulpit supply and officiated a few rites of passage. I recently put together a ledger to keep track of it all and in the process started to wonder about the hourly rate that I am making as an itinerant minister. My conclusion? About $26.50 an hour. I got this number by adding up all of the fees I have received for sermons, weddings and funerals and divided by the total number of hours I have spent doing them. If I were to break the things I do as an itinerant clergy down by kind funerals would be the most lucrative and sermons would be the least. The hourly rate for funerals would be $58.33, the rate for weddings $35.00 and the rate for preaching a lowly $18.50. Admittedly, the rate for sermons is skewed by the fact that I preached a sermon series of all new sermons while I was serving in Milton this month. When I am not preaching a new sermon the hourly rate for pulpit supply is more like $55.50. Still, it does give me pause.

I wonder if other clergy have made similar calculations. If so, what do you think of mine?

I will be preaching at the First Church in Salem, Unitarian on August 18 and the First Universalist Church of Essex on October 20. I am in the process of putting together a preaching schedule for the upcoming congregational year and hope to have more dates soon.

This morning I led worship at First Parish in Concord. The sermon that I gave was a variation of my “This Land is Your Land?” It appeared to be a success and I enjoyed myself. The building is beautiful and historic. The social hall was filled with portraits of their famous ministers including Ezra Ripley, Dana Greeley and Barzillai Frost, the minister who Emerson makes fun of in his Divinity School Address. I hope that I was a little more inspiring than Emerson found Frost to be. Anyways, here’s the call to worship I gave:

Rain,
heat,
fertile damp,
sunflower bursts,
abundance,
wild black raspberries,
summer is here
with all of her joyous
complicated wonder.

Earth dances,
circles, twists,
its way through the seasons.

Summer follows spring,
heralds fall,
this now is ours,
let us gather
and honor what is,
imagine what might be
and strive to be present
with the all.

Come, let us worship together.