Seeds of a New Way: Nurturing Authentic and Diverse Religious Leadership - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rev. Manish Mishra-Marzetti serves as senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has served extensively in denominational leadership, including as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Association, as well as president of Diverse Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries (DRUUMM). He is co-editor of Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and the Environment and Conversations with the Sacred: A Collection of Prayers.

Nancy McDonald Ladd serves as senior minister of the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a national leader in broad-based community organizing and has served on the adjunct faculty at Meadville Lombard Theological School. She is the author of After the Good News: Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism.

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We call the very existence of our Beloved Community into being morning by morning and day by day. We continually rebirth the Unitarian Universalism that must metamorphize in order to thrive and hold fast to a core identity that does not waver while allowing that which no longer serves us (and possibly never did) to pass away.

I could tell you that we are having another Theodore Parker moment where we wrestle with the transient and the permanent in our community of faith. But I am inclined instead to reach for the Promised Land in Bill’s writing and remind us that as far back as the late 1800s, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper dreamed of congregations filled with radical Moses figures. My heart resounds with the call to build congregations for the Harriet Tubmans of this world, those who choose the journey time and again so that everyone might be free.

There is a reason why Tubman was known as Moses by her people. The idea of faithful communities of radical justice makers taking time to rest together, to make music together, to share meals and celebrations together, to replenish their spiritual wells together, and to hold one another accountable before heading back into the world to work toward our collective liberation is a promise that carries me forward.

Unitarian Universalism is already beloved. We would not be here striving and failing and making amends and trying again otherwise. But will our faith live up to the possibility of Beloved Community?

Our journey will take us in directions we would not recognize today. It will not always seem fair. It will ask us to give of ourselves differently, to sacrifice for the well-being of the whole, and to hold ourselves accountable to the broader society while working to dismantle injustices within it. It will ask us to know our own boundaries and to say no when the task before us rightly belongs to someone else. It will ask us to help one another when we are at our most tired, disillusioned, anxious, and afraid. And time and again, it will remind us that there are others who share our values in the world, and who know themselves to be more joyous, more loving, more faithful, more visionary, more communal, more just, more collaborative, and more hopeful because of their (and our) connections to one another.

Let us hold the promise of the journey itself as that which lights the chalice of our living tradition. Let its origin as a symbol of protection in the face of grave injustice, of willing sacrifice for the liberation of all, remind us when we falter. Together, may we thrive.

—Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt