As a lifelong Unitarian
Universalist it has always been my experience that my faith and my church are,
more often than not, a novelty to those outside what I call my “UU Bubble.”
Needless to say, I have been fielding questions about my religion from friends,
family members and perfect strangers for a long time. Perhaps you and the
children in your life have encountered these questions as well: “What IS Unitarian
Universalism?” “What do UUs believe?” “Uni-what?”
Enter: the Elevator Speech.
Imagine you enter an elevator at the ground floor and the person sharing the
elevator with you suddenly asks you “What is Unitarian Universalism?” The doors
close. You are stuck and have but 20 floors to tell this person about your
faith, of which they have no prior knowledge. What would you say?
As a kid my peers would often
ask me what they thought was an incredibly simple question: “What IS Unitarian
Universalism?” And because I spent a lot of time studying different religions
and UU history in my Religious Exploration classes, by the time I was in high
school my poor peers were suddenly blindsided with my awesome religious
history lecture as I shared with them more than they ever wanted to know about
my faith and the history of the Protestant Reformation. It was an elevator
speech that would have probably inspired one to beg to get off the elevator by
the 5th floor.
What I didn’t get at the time
is that those who asked me about my faith really didn’t want to me to present a
dissertation on the history of Unitarian Universalism (shocker, I know). What
they were really interested in was,
“What does it mean to be a UU and what does this look like in your life?”
They didn’t want to hear about
some guy they have never heard of being burned at the stake; they wanted to
know if Santa still came to our house. They wanted to know if we said a prayer
at dinner, if we went to church every Sunday and if we had a Bible. In short, they
wanted to know how my life was different from theirs because of my religion.
I think that the tendency to
lecture instead of opening a window into our lives is common amongst Unitarian
Universalists. Sometimes we, understandably, get so excited by all knowledge we
think we have obtained on our faithful
journeys and we forget that what we ought to share with the world is not a list
or a lecture, but our passion and fire. Of course the history is important; but
to someone who isn’t yet on this journey, or even for someone who is, sometimes
the real power of Unitarian Universalism may just be a story about that time
when a UU kid stood up for someone else who was being bullied because, to him,
that’s what being a UU means. The
power of our faith is in the stories of what we do every day of our lives. It
is in how we celebrate our holidays and how we are with the people we love (and
the people we don’t).
To me, our faith means that I
never stop looking for new ways to grow and learn. It means that my family
lights a chalice at dinner every night and we enjoy each other’s company in a
sacred space. It means that I pray on some days and meditate on others and I
celebrate holidays that make sense to me and in ways that honor me, my family
and my earth home.
Maybe our elevator speeches
ought to focus on celebrating the ways in which our faith enriches our lives
and the lives of those around us instead of a list of the theologies we reject.
Perhaps it is time to shift our focus: What does our Unitarian Universalist
faith mean to you?
Amy Peterson Derrick
Director of Faith Development
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