MFC History - Arnason

By Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason

With Collaborators Rev. Jane Rzepka and Rev. Ken Sawyer

February 2022

INTRODUCTION

How can you know whether a person would make a good Unitarian Universalist minister? Many members of congregations who have been particularly impressed by a lay worship leader or pastoral care team member will remember asking that person: “Have you ever considered ministry?” the question comes from an intuitional insight that this person could have what it takes to become a minister if the desire is there.

For almost four hundred years, North American churches in the congregational traditions have struggled with whether and how to formally credential clergy. The models within congregational churches range from no credentialing in some Baptist traditions (only ordination of self identified entrepreneurial ministers) to elaborate systems of requirements and hurdles, as in the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Creating the best possible system of training, examinations, tests, and barrier gates to encourage and supplement the intuitional insight that this person might make a good minister is an ongoing work in progress. In our tradition, we’ve asked ourselves about the right balance between standards with measurable metrics, and unique personal or group assessments. We’ve questioned whether minimizing personal assessments through references and interviews is a way to deflect personal bias arising from the social locations of those doing the assessments. We’ve asked ourselves how the ministry is constantly changing from one generation to the next, so that both our metrics and our approach to personal assessments can remain current. As this history was being written between 2017 and 2022, significant reforms based on new philosophies of credentialing have been actively discussed or implemented. I expect that critique and reform of our credentialing system will be never ending.

Nevertheless, because I believe in systems for credentialing beyond congregational ordination, and because I believe that understanding and using any current system should involve knowledge of how that system came to be, this essay was written. Because it was not being written for publication, and because I was lax in the first few years of this project in keeping scrupulous documentation about sources for information in minutes and interviews, there is only minimal scholarly attribution of sources and the attribution is within the text. It is beyond my capacities at this point to go back and try to find and add proper attributions. For this I apologize and ask forgiveness from the scholarly community. I hope that it will not harm the usefulness of this work.

How to Read and Use This History

The time period covered in this history is essentially the sixty years between 1955 and 2015. I had had doubts about whether I should be writing about years and circumstances in which I had personal involvement as a member of the UU Ministers Association Executive Committee from 1988-90 and President of the UUMA from 199395, as a member of the MFC from 2001 2005, and as Chair of the MFC from 2008 2015

I chose to write in the voice of a historian up to the time when I became the Chair, but I thought it would be disingenuous to pretend I could be an objective historian for the period of my own leadership. The years from 2008 2015 covered in Chapters 32 34 are acknowledged therefore to have elements of memoir, as well as history. Occasionally, I speak in the first person in these chapters when most appropriate. I hope they are historically useful, nevertheless.

Compiling a simple chronological history of the changes in leadership, style, functions, and issues that the Ministerial Fellowship Committee has undergone would have been the obvious approach to take to this essay. As the writing evolved, however, I realized that a series of chapters that chronicled themes or constellations of issues would make the essay more as a useful reference document. For example, there has been conversation and occasional controversy about whether the MFC’s approach to disciplinary matters has been consistent and adequate. Creating within the essay a series of chronological chapters that focused on disciplinary matters looked to me to be a helpful way to chronicle that history. This approach also seemed helpful for other major themes running throughout the MFC’s decades. An effort was made to maintain continuity between the chapters in each thematic thread. For the occasional reader who would enjoy reading the essay from beginning to end, the chronological narrative is sustained throughout as well as for each thematic thread that might be read uniquely.

The four themes that are represented by a thread of chronological chapters are:

1. The Culture and Inclusivity of the MFC stories about the members, leaders, and the internal culture of the Committee, along with a tracing of its slow evolution over five decades towards de centering white, patriarchal and heterosexist norms.

2. “Specialized Ministries” stories about the expanding understandings of the diversity of credentialed ministries within Unitarian Universalism, and how they came to be understood not as “specializations” but as a group of intersectional ministries.

3. Requirements and Competencies stories about the evolution of the standards of competency, the requirements for candidates, and the tensions between the UUA and the identity schools regarding who shapes these standards.

4. Disciplinary Matters stories about the evolution of standards and changing approaches to the problem of ministerial misconduct, influenced by particular cases.

Various topics that are important parts of the MFC’s history haven’t been chosen as part of this framework of themes, but they are covered. These include:

continuing education as a concern of the MFC, both for itself and for all ministers the evolution of “Preliminary Fellowship”

the various models for “in care” and contextual learning for students, i.e. familial models, formal internships and mentorships, and the Regional Sub Committees. the transparency of the MFC and its reputation among candidates.

Interspersed throughout the framework of chronological chapters are various unique chapters which highlight the importance of certain commissions, reports, and reforms that influenced the course of the MFC’s history.

Who would want to read a history of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee? It’s unusual for one particular committee and its functions within an institution to be studied in this way. This essay was not written with the expectation that it would be published and sold. The intended audience was the former, current, and future members of the MFC and scholars interested in UU history. Becoming a member of the MFC is like hopping on a moving train. Knowing where the train has been is helpful in determining where it should be going. Even with this limited audience, we have tried to strike a balance between telling an accurate and authentic story and the limits of confidentiality that guide many of the MFC’s processes and that remain in place with respect to the files that the MFC keeps on individual ministers. In November 2022, UUA staff recommended that the full text be made available only to current and future members of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee Distribution to former members of the Committee of this essay with the chapters on disciplinary matters redacted was encouraged.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to so many colleagues and friends who have supported this project over four years. None of them bear any responsibility for errors of fact, interpretation or omission.

Rev. Sarah Lammert has encouraged this project and allowed my access to the minutes of Ministerial Fellowship Committee at the UUA headquarters, and the ever helpful Marion Bell made possible several of my day long visits to these files.

Sarah’s first and most important encouragement was to find collaborators and to recommend Rev. Jane Rzepka and Rev. Ken Sawyer for these roles. Jane and Ken were both long serving dedicated members of the MFC with long memories and deep insights about our credentialing process. Jane was willing to make many sorties into the Library at Harvard Divinity School to review MFC information found in the records of the UU Ministers Association to supplement my study of the MFC minutes. She and Ken created a Google Doc Timeline of information they found which exists a searchable resource for future MFC members and historians. Both Jane and Ken have offered cheerleading and editing that has been crucial to sustaining and improving the work on this essay, and I am grateful to them.

I want to thank the many leaders and members of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee who have allowed me to interview them about their memories. Notable among them has been the Rev. Dr. David Pohl, who had the longest continuous relationship with the MFC as a member and as Executive Secretary from 1968 to 1993. David had retained some personal files that he was happy to share with us, and that we have now turned over to the Harvard Library for preservation and future access. The late Rev. Dr. Eugene Pickett, former President of the UUA and Chair of the MFC from 1996 to 2001 was similarly gracious in meeting with me for an interview and passing on to me his file of monthly and annual reports from his years as Chair.

I was grateful for interview opportunities given to me by the following additional colleagues:

Rev. Dr. Alan Deale Rev. Dr. Charles Gaines Rev. Dr. Marjorie Skwire Dr. Nolan Penn Rev. Diane Miller Rev. Ellen Brandenburg Rev. Dr. Carl Scovel Rev. David Pettee Rev. Brad Greeley Rev. Dr. Fred Muir

Rev. Christina Willie McKnight Rev. Rob Eller Isaacs Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison Reed Rev. Barbara Wells ten Hove Rev. Stephan Papa Phyllis Daniel Rev. Jory Agate Rev. Deborah Pope Lance Kay H. Hodge, Attorney at Law Jesse King

My boundless gratitude goes to my wife, Rev. Kathleen Rolenz, whose companionship and support throughout this project has been the foundation on which it stands. Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason, February 17, 2022

CREDENTIALING BEFORE CONSOLIDATION

The Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) lives and works at a unique interface, the interface between the member congregations in a congregational polity association, and the authority the association exercises over the ministerial leaders that serve them. Since this history is mostly about the MFC after the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America in 1961 into the Unitarian Universalist Association, it would be valuable to understand how this interface had evolved by the time of the merger.

Two scholarly essays from UU historians have provided a resource for this chapter. In November 1989, the Rev. Charles A. Howe wrote an essay on the historical background of our credentialing process for the members of the Commission on Appraisal as they prepared their report on “Our Professional Ministry” published in 1992. In a 2012 essay prepared for the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Rev. Dr. Susan Ritchie has traced the history of the idea of ministerial credentialing among us Dr. Ritchie notes that “credentialing” was never a part of the original Congregationalist model for governance and for spiritual leadership instituted in the Massachusetts colony. An ordination was understood as the recognition by one congregation of the fitness of one minister to be called to serve them. Ministerial “fellowship” originates from the literal fellowship of the various ministers serving independent congregations. Ministers were drawn into mutually supportive relationships by their common interests, and a desire born from their Christian faith to sustain healthy churches for the worship of God. Ministerial fellowship is inherently relational, rather than bureaucratic.

Ritchie notes that the Cambridge Platform of 1648, the founding document of American Congregationalism, was created amidst tensions between ministers and lay leaders regarding whether such a document represented an attempt by clergy to exercise broader control over congregational life. As early as the mid 17th century, bodies of clergy were gathered, and claimed authority to admit into their fellowship newly ordained clergy as they saw fit, distinct from their recognition by the congregations that called them.

Ministers held a unique civil role in colonial America, and they would gather easily at the meetings of the General Court. Internal disputes within congregations involving their minister would be a cause for concern to them, although they might not be civil or criminal matters that would come to the attention of the court. Counsels consisting of ministers and ruling elders would instead be gathered to provide advice and recommend solutions, including removal of the minister. From these earliest times, the fellowship of ministers felt responsible not only for recognizing and admitting ministers to their company but disciplining them as well.

Ritchie notes that by 1670, ordinations were more commonly performed by visiting ministers than by the lay leaders of a congregation. By the early 18th century, county ministerial associations were claiming broad powers to license ministers to preach and to discipline them for heresy, incompetence, or ethical violations. The desire to affirm the “learned ministry” was codified into law in 1760 in Massachusetts when the General Court decided that tax supported ministerial salaries would be paid only those who had a formal college education or the backing of the ministers’ association as to their equivalent learning. New sects (such as Universalism) and uneducated preachers within New England were a challenge to the Standing Order

It would be more than a century before the Unitarian ministers in 1864 organized their first national Ministerial Union, the ancestor of today’s Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. Susan Ritchie describes an important distinction made by the Ministerial Union as it considered the authority it wished to claim over ministerial fellowship:

“The increasing number of ministers who had not trained at Harvard or Meadville had also created a new anxiety that non Unitarian seminaries would fail to weed out “incompetent and unworthy” ministerial candidates. Hence under the first rules of the Ministerial Union, graduates of Unitarian affiliated Harvard or Meadville were admitted into the fellowship without question. All others could be admitted into common fellowship only by the Committee on Membership, a committee of three ministers directly elected by the membership as a whole. The Union claimed the authority to dismiss members for immoral conduct undertaken against fellow members but denied any jurisdiction over the behavior of ministers within their own congregation. Indeed, the Ministerial Union always insisted that while it would control admission to its own membership, in a setting of congregational polity it was not the proper body to credential Unitarian candidates for ministry in general.”

This decision left a gap in the oversight of the clergy from the point of view of the congregations. Four years later, when the National Conference of Unitarians was re cast as an association of congregations, rather than of individuals, the President of the Conference, Rev. Dr. Henry Whitney Bellows brought forward the issue of what authority the congregations might exercise in the recognition of ministers. In 1878, the National Conference created a Fellowship Committee of twelve members, with four geographic regions represented by three members apiece, functioning within the larger committee as regional subcommittees. In 1915 the committee was expanded by six members representing two new western geographic subcommittees. The Fellowship Committee was charged to ascertain whether applicants for ministerial fellowship had a proper professional education, although graduates of Meadville and Harvard were automatically presumed to have such. The committee was also asked to review the “conduct and character” of applicants to determine that they would be suitable representatives of the larger Unitarian movement. A decade later, in 1888, the Fellowship Committee was given the authority to remove ministers from fellowship. The authority of the committee was not

further extended, but its importance was enforced in the 20th century when settlement assistance for ministers not in fellowship was withheld. As the number of seminaries involved in educating Unitarian ministers expanded, the automatic deference to the two historic Unitarian seminaries came to an end. It was not unusual, however, for a candidate with a degree from a trusted seminary to be accepted into fellowship without having to appear before one of the subcommittees in person. Transfer applicants from other denominations received the most scrutiny.

The Universalist Church of America (UCA) evolved differently in its attitudes towards ministerial fellowship. In the early Universalist Church, ordination was not an ecclesiastical formality and only after legal questions about Universalist ministers’ authority were raised did they feel a need to create procedures and ceremonies. Strongly rooted in state conventions of congregations, the authority to both ordain and fellowship ministers remained the prerogative of the state conventions or area associations Congregations within them were forbidden from calling ministers not in fellowship. A “License to Preach” would be issued to student ministers after an initial interview with the state convention’s fellowship committee, and if all went well, the student would be granted ordained and welcomed into fellowship Efforts to centralize this process in 1933 were abandoned, and even though a central Fellowship Committee was eventually created, it only had authority to recognize ministers who were from a place with no area association or convention.

As early as 1917, the existence of federated churches with dual associational affiliations, and ministers in dual fellowship, created both complications and opportunities for ministers and congregations in both the Unitarian and Universalist traditions. By the 1930’s, it was not unusual for newly fellowshipped Unitarian ministers to be automatically given a certificate of ordination by a Universalist State Convention to facilitate being of service as a supply preacher to more remote Universalist congregations. The need for pulpit supply in rural Universalist congregations also resulted in the Universalists offering a “Licenses to Preach” to accomplished lay leaders who did not have and would not seek a seminary degree.

In both traditions, the granting of fellowship and the settlement process were considerably more informal in the decades prior to merger than after. The patriarchal roles of each Association’s senior leadership, both relationally with the ministers and congregations, and in terms of the authority they exerted, was at least as important as the policies and procedures.

The Unitarian model for ministerial fellowship was adopted at the time of the consolidation in 1961. Within that model, all the elements of what it means today to be “in fellowship” with the UUA had already been in place for decades, namely:

1. The Association of Congregations claims the authority to recognize and admit into, or to remove, ministers from the fellowship of the Association, and in doing so grants them certain professional rights and privileges.

2. Requirements for admission to fellowship are defined by the Association’s fellowship committee, with awareness of seminary requirements for degrees, but without obligation to defer to the standards set by the seminaries

3. The Ministers Association separately recognizes and admits ministers into their fellowship (now known simply as “membership”) and has their own processes for admission, for disciplining, and for removing ministers from membership. Cooperation and coordination with the MFC’s processes for recognition of fellowship or discipline has been voluntary.

4. Ordination remains within the authority of congregations, with encouragement but no requirement or sanction for congregations to ordain only those who have achieved UUA ministerial fellowship.

Requirements and Competencies Part 1 (Leading Up to Consolidation)

In the 1924 Rules of a newly created Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the American Unitarian Association (succeeding the committee sponsored by the National Unitarian Conference), we read that there shall be an “investigation” of applicants desiring to be credentialed as Unitarian ministers:

“The investigation shall extend not only to moral character and spiritual gifts, but also to education, judgment, tact, and to any characteristic which the Committee may believe to be essential or useful in an efficient minister of the Unitarian Fellowship. The decision of the Committee shall be guided by such evidence as it may deem material in regard to the character and record of the applicant, by such proof of his moral earnestness and integrity as it may discover upon careful investigation, and by consideration of the probability of his being able to render useful service.”

Two things are striking about this text. One is the use of judicial language: “investigation”, “evidence”, and “proof”, all words suggesting a model that informed the work of the MFC for many decades. The other is the emphasis on character rather than academic or experiential qualifications. Trust and deference were accorded to the seminaries around these qualifications. In comments on an interview that he conducted with Rev. Arnold Crompton about the fellowshipping process during the 30’s and 40’s, Rev. David Sammons wrote that “the fact of graduation from a Unitarian related seminary was virtually all that was required for fellowship for a Unitarian student. Review was restricted, almost entirely, to those seeking transfer in from other denominations.” Since it was not unusual for the candidates from Unitarian seminaries to not be required to meet personally with the Committee, we must presume that the interviews with transfer applicants would focus on character, academic qualifications, and Unitarian polity. At this time, only one year after preliminary fellowship was granted, the Chair of the Committee could award the minister final fellowship. At the urging of a special committee of the Ministers’ Union, in 1941 a conversation was initiated which resulted in the usual period of preliminary fellowship being extended to three years.

After World War II, during a time of growth for Unitarianism during what we have called “the Fellowship movement”, a burst of organizing many new lay led congregations, Rev. Dan Huntington Fenn, Director of the Department of Ministry, wrote in a memo:

“In consultation with Mr. Munroe Husbands, it has become apparent that we are facing the necessity of some sort of training for the leaders of the different Fellowship Units. At the present time, we are finding ourselves embarrassed by such individuals turning to the Fellowship Committee and asking that they be fellowshipped and ordained as ministers. This, obviously, is going to be increasingly embarrassing as the time goes on.”

A partial response to this concern during 1950 51 was the implementation of a system of four regional Advisory MFC’s (AMFC’s) that would do vetting interviews with both transfers and Unitarian seminary applicants. They were located in regions titled Meadville, Southwestern, Western, and Pacific Coast Arnold Crompton served on the Pacific Unitarian Council Fellowship Committee and is quoted in paraphrase by David Sammons as saying that “the standards used by the committee were that the person be academically prepared, had a good Unitarian church background, understood congregational polity, and was able to work within it, and had no glaring faults”. These regional committees would pass on a recommendation to the continental AUA Fellowship Committee.

During the post war years and up to the time of consolidation, the AUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee was Boston based both culturally and geographically. It could meet monthly as needed, because all the members were on the eastern seaboard.

The concern about an increasing number of lay leaders of new fellowships seeking ministerial training or fellowship in a system that was very personal and informal may have been a factor in a major new requirement implemented in 1952. All students entering seminary and interested in applying for Unitarian fellowship were required to have psychodiagnostic testing, developed under the direction of Dr. Molly Harrower. Dr Harrower is remembered as the developer of the multiple choice Rorschach Test and was one of the first clinical psychologists in America to open a private practice. Implementation of this requirement marked the beginning of a Dr. Harrower’s eleven-year relationship with the Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist Ministerial Fellowship Committee’s For a time during the years of his public notoriety, there was a piece of gossip accepted as fact that Timothy Leary had been the first psychologist to work with the MFC. The truth that is contained in that rumor is that Leary did begin a relationship with Starr King School in 1949 while he was completing his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Starr King was a very early American seminary to employ psychological tests such as the IQ, the MMPI, and the Vocational Interest Test as part of admissions, and Leary was a pioneering psychologist during these years in testing the reliability and value of these tests in various populations

Dr. Molly Harrower had similar interests and had initially been testing a smaller number of Unitarian students who received Horace N. Stevens Fellowships at her New York office. Her work attracted the attention of the Department of Ministry, and over time she developed a method of administering the psychological tests in group settings at the five theological schools that attracted the most Unitarian students. In 1958, this testing requirement was expanded to cover everyone seeking Unitarian fellowship, including transfers With the expansion of the requirement, and its carry over into the new UUA fellowshipping system, eventually students would be allowed to take some of the tests at home and send them in

Dr. Harrower worked directly with the Committee until 1963. Dr. Norman Handelman succeeded her as the MFC’s consulting psychologist. Consulting psychologists also served with the early regional subcommittees or “Advisory Committees” of the AUA MFC, and this carried over to the UUA MFC. In all cases, if the psychologist was present in the interview (and this was desirable and expected) the psychologist would be asked as deliberations concluded whether there was anything in the evaluation that should qualify the tentative agreement the panel was reaching.

In the Universalist Church if America, during this same post WWII period, a seminarian who had been recommended as a student minister to a congregation by the State Convention Superintendent would have to appear before a State Convention Fellowship Committee to receive a “License to Preach” That license did not include administering the sacraments, or “Christian ordinances”, as the Universalists called them. Upon receiving the seminary’s degree, the applicant would appear before the Committee again to be approved for ordination.

A 1952 policy regarding the relationship of Unitarian fellowship and Universalist ministers states: “Any Universalist minister who wished to be granted affiliated fellowship with the Unitarians is without questions given an application form to fill out, and an official statement of “good and regular standing” is requested from the Universalist headquarters. Upon receipt of this, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee invariably and without interview, votes to grant affiliated fellowship.”

The composition of the AUA’s MFC during the 50’s is striking (compared to contemporary composition) in that the AUA President and Legal Counsel were ex officio members of the committee, and there were only three ministers (one appointed by the Unitarian Ministers Association) compared to five lay people

In 1956 58, several additional requirements were added to the fellowshipping process, in an apparent attempt to “toughen up” the process. An interview manual was issued in 1956 jointly by the AUA and UCA Departments of Ministry. This was followed by the first Required Reading List in 1957 Also in 1957, further study of the AUA MFC’s interview process led to a recommendation that all the members of the MFC be able to review the transcripts and files of the applicants before their interviews. They also recommended and implemented by 1958 a requirement for a 2000 3000 word essay from each applicant on the subject “What is Your Idea of the Unitarian Church?” This was to be mailed to each of the MFC members prior to the interview The Committee also decided at this time to consider limits on the number of interviews that could be offered at a given meeting, and to consider further what should be the prescribed time frame and process for moving from preliminary to final fellowship.

The volume of candidates for the ministry in the late fifties required an expansion of the AMFC’s to include new ones in the Mid Atlantic and the Mid South. Up until that time

the MFC had given most of its attention to “transfers”, understood as clergy transferring from another denomination. Now they were seeing more “transfers” from previous careers (as opposed to graduates from seminaries), and these transfers required a different kind of attention

At the time of merger in 1961, the shape and the requirements of the AUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee were taken as the model for the new UUA MFC. That pre merger MFC had up to nine members: including at least three ministers, three laymen, and three laywomen, elected by the UUA Board of Directors to four year terms. In addition, the MFC had four ex officio members: The UUA President or alternate, the Executive Vice President, General Council, and a Unitarian Ministers Association rep. The record is not clear as to whether the UMA rep was counted among the three ministers or was an addition. The AUA MFC met monthly in Boston.

The process for being accepted as a minister in preliminary fellowship pre merger was summarized by Leon Fay, the UMA’s rep to the MFC, as follows:

1. “An Inquiry is made by the man (sic) concerning an interest in the ministry

2. The Inquiry is acknowledged and the steps to pursue is outlined, including a request for a letter of sponsorship from a Unitarian minister.

3. A Biographical record is filled out and a 3,000 word essay submitted on “What is the Unitarian Church.”

4. References are submitted and followed up

5. A Regional Advisory Committee is then notified. The Candidate may be interviewed by that group, if the location of candidate makes this necessary.

6. If a Regional Advisory Committee endorses the candidate, he then takes the psycho diagnostic test costing $25 to him and $25 for this denomination ”

7. Some significant differences with later practices include:

8. interviews could be done by a Regional MFC or the Boston based AUA MFC, depending on convenience.

9. The seminaries were trusted to have provided an appropriate theological education

10. The Chair of the MFC was authorized to grant final fellowship.

11. During the lead up to consolidation, the Joint Merger Commission discussed the shape of a new MFC and included in their recommendations establishing for the first time a three year probationary fellowship period subject to annual review in each of the three years.

THE UUA MFC BEGINS

The consolidation process that brought together the Universalists and the Unitarians took four years to complete Halfway through the process, in 1959, an initial joint General Assembly was held in Syracuse, NY and approved a Consolidation Plan and draft by laws for the new association. The following year, at concurrent May 23, 1960, Meetings, both denominations voted to go forward with the consolidation. Five interim study commissions were created to hammer out the details that needed to be settled in important areas. Joint Merger Commission #5 was focused on ministry. They consulted with the AUA’s Department of Ministry staff and MFC leaders, with the Universalist General and State Superintendents overseeing their credentialing process, and with the ministerial association leaders from the Universalists and the Unitarians. The work of Commission 5 gave birth to a consolidated UUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee which was both old and new at the same time.

A Coordinating Committee brought together the work of the five Commissions and delivered their final report on March 1, 1961. On May 12, 1961, the by laws were ratified at the first annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the official birthday of the UUA was celebrated on May 15, 1961. Three weeks later the UUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee met for the first time, and on June 6, 1961, passed its own policies and rules of procedure.

The Committee had a different structure and membership than the AUA Committee. Gone was the required balance of lay leadership over against the appointed and ex officio ministerial members. In a 1996 interview with Alice Kendrick published in David Cole’s “Oral History of the Consolidation” (1997), Rev. Max Gaebler, a member of Commission 5 and the last President of the Unitarian Ministers Association, reflected on this change:

“The proportion of the membership of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee which was made up of ministers was vastly greater than it had been in either denomination. We made sure that ministers were represented on the Unitarian Fellowship Committee, but it was usually two or three. In the new group, it became a majority….and at that time, I had real reservations personally. “

The by law wording read:

“The MFC shall be composed of seven persons: Two, but not more than two, members shall be members of the Board of Trustees and five, but not more than five, members shall be ministers in full Fellowship.  There shall be an Executive Secretary of the Committee who shall keep its records but shall not be a member thereof.” Like all Standing Committees of the new Board of Trustees, the MFC’s members had two-year terms but no limit on how many times they could be reappointed

As Director of the new UUA Department of Ministry, Rev. Leon Fay was the first Executive Secretary of the MFC. The founding chair was the Rev. Robert Killam, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland, OH. According to David Pohl, in an interview transcribed by Ken Sawyer, Bob Killam seemed “the logical choice,” as a Unitarian minister with a strong Universalist background. He attended St. Lawrence Theological School and had served federated (U and U) churches in Utica, Springfield, and Cleveland. He had been active outside his parishes, most recently as Regional Director of the Meadville Unitarian Conference. He had a major role in one of the Consolidation commissions and he was close to the first UUA President Rev. Dana Greeley. Killam served from 1961 to 1965, when he unexpectedly died in August 1965. Rev. Rhys Williams served as interim before the next chair Rev. Robert Doss, succeeded him in January 1966

The regionally based Advisory Ministerial Fellowship Committees (AMFC’s) were retained but their role in interviews was scaled back. In a message to the AMFC’s, MFC Member Rev. John Brigham told them that their role was: “to serve as eyes and ears of the Continental Committee within geographic areas.  Your Committee of six or seven persons lay and ministerial meets from time to time on the call of its secretary to interview applicants for ministerial fellowship who are, for the most part, transferring from other religious denominations.” It soon became apparent to Killam and Fay that the workload of this more centralized committee would require more members. They asked the 1962

General Assembly to increase the MFC’s membership to 11 people, including a UUMA rep, to be designated by the UUMA. (Ministers still retained the majority, 7 4.)

Authority over ministerial disciplinary matters, with the power to impose “suspension or removal of ministers for unbecoming conduct” (1961 UUA by laws) were retained as part of the responsibility of the new UUA MFC. Within a year, Killam was struggling to find an appropriate framework for disciplinary decisions. The informal and personal authority exerted by the previous generations of UUA and MFC leaders would no longer be suitable. In 1962 Killam appointed a sub committee to examine MFC procedures with regard to their relationship to the Rules of Evidence employed in civil jurisprudence. The AUA’s MFC had never formally used a civil jurisprudence model for disciplinary cases. The Universalists had used that model, but loosely and with latitude.

The most dramatic developments in the first four years of the new MFC’s existence had to do with matters outside their jurisdiction but very important to its mission the recruitment, education, and formation of new ministers. As part of the consolidation process, a Joint Committee on Theological Education had been convened in 1959 chaired by the Universalist Ministry Department leader Rev. Raymond Johnson. Working with consultant Harold Taylor, they released in 1962 “A Plan of Education for the Unitarian Universalist Ministry”. Citing financial pressures, the plan recommended moving towards three “centers” for UU theological education across the country (at a time when there were five “Identity” schools, if you include Harvard).

Acting as MFC Executive Secretary, Leon Fay recommended the UUA Board endorse “ A Plan of Education for the Unitarian Universalist Ministry” and support its quick implementation because, he said: “there is a need for a substantially more adequate type of preparation and training,” judging from the candidates coming before the MFC.  The UUA Board did not adopt the whole report, especially the part about the Association funding the schools. The UUA set up instead a “Joint Emergency Fund for Theological Education” and encouraged congregations to commit 1% of their budgets to that fund, but they also encouraged the schools to also do their own fund raising.

By 1964, the Trustees of St. Lawrence Theological School in Canton NY voted to close their theological school, after considering and rejecting proposals made by the Taylor/Johnson Commission to merge with the other remaining Universalist seminary, Crane (located on the Tufts University campus), or to merge with Meadville Lombard in Chicago Crane had for most of the century been an integrated part of Tufts University and was not accredited as a separate institution. Financial unsustainability forced it to close in 1968.

The Taylor/Johnson report also suggested a series of competencies and knowledge for all candidates for ministry to be pursued “inside and outside the Divinity School,” instigating several years of self examination within the MFC about their standards and how they needed to upgraded. The Committee had already in 1962 clarified that the schools should encourage their students to interview before the MFC early in their programs because they might need a second interview in their last academic quarter or semester In 1963 they specified that the interview should take place no later than the end of the sixth quarter or 3rd semester of the student’s program.

In February 1965, the Committee passed an expanded description of what they expected from their candidates, adding this into their Rules:

“Examination of Applicant.  An examination shall be made of every applicant’s qualifications.  In addition to the general requirement of graduation from a college and a theological school approved by the Committee, or equivalent education, the Committee will require that the applicant have a strong motivation for our ministry and a good potential for it, a balanced and healthy personality, a capacity for self understanding and a concern for others, intellectual ability and the quality and capacity of ministerial leadership expected by our churches.  The Committee will further require that the applicant be well informed on the history and development of Unitarianism and Universalism, familiar with the Constitution and By-Laws of Unitarian Universalist Association, and fully committed to the purposes and objectives of the Association The Committee may consider any evidence which it deems material and relevant and may reject any application.”

Preliminary fellowship for a period of up to three years was a carry over from the AUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee. The process for moving through preliminary

fellowship and the evaluations required became better defined after 1966, when annual evaluations were initiated, and the term “final fellowship” was used to recognize the end of the credentialing process. The AUA’s MFC had on their list over a hundred ministers who were jointly credentialed with other denominations or who wanted to have their affiliation and sympathies with Unitarianism or Universalism on the record. In 1966 the MFC created “Associate Fellowship” to better describe this category of credentialing, with the term “Full Fellowship” reserved to describe ministers whose primary and singular fellowship was with the Unitarian Universalist Association.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 1 (1961

1974)

Letters and documents that recall the experience of serving as a member or being interviewed by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee during its first dozen years of existence are few, but consistent in how the culture and atmosphere of the Committee is remembered.

After consolidation, the new UUA MFC had much the same culture and patterns as the AUA MFC. The membership became more geographically diverse, and the monthly meetings were no longer possible. The Committee continued to meet at the Unitarian headquarters, 25 Beacon Street, with the meeting room location in the building changing over the years as rooms were available or re purposed. Often the meeting room was “the front room”, on the second floor facing Beacon Street, a room later known as the Greeley Library. Later when the Department of Ministry was located on the 4th floor, the Committee met there in the outer vestibule of the suite of offices at the front of the building. Smoking was routine and allowed. The air in the room would be heavy, recalled Leon Hopper (who joined the Committee in 1969). Candidates would be received by a staff member. Early on that staff member would be a secretary, and later after the position was created, by the Director of Ministerial Education. The candidate would wait in the hallway outside the room until their turn to be interviewed came around.

Rev. Jim Hobart recalled seeing the Committee in the early sixties. He remembered the atmosphere as more formal than he expected, like a courtroom. As the son of a minister, he knew more than half the people in the room already, and that may have led either to the formal atmosphere or to his surprise at experiencing it.

Questions to the candidates were asked seemingly at random, with most members of the committee taking a turn, but not necessarily all. Although there were lay women serving on the Committee during the sixties and early seventies, men dominated the questioning.

The materials available to the Committee members in advance were modest. Spirit and stencil duplicators were in use at the UUA during the sixties in department offices with xerographic copiers purchased late in the decade and used sparingly. Summaries of the candidates’ biographies and qualifications were prepared and sent to the members in advance and when essays were required copies were made available. The minutes of the meetings in the Sixties are mostly a record of decisions made, with little else describing discussions that occurred around business items.

There is no indication that the UUA Board or the Ministerial Fellowship Committee gave much thought to whether their membership should be diversified beyond the majority of white men during the first five years of the UUA MFC’s existence. The candidates coming before the committee to be interviewed were almost exclusively white men. The patriarchal Boston Brahmin legacy of the UUA was embodied in the first few years of the UUA by the first President of the Association, Rev. Dana Maclean Greeley, by several members of the UUA Board, and by some of the New England based members of the MFC. Rev. David Pohl is representative of the new appointees to the Committee coming

from outside New England. He was serving in Ottawa, Canada when he was appointed and was not a Boston Brahmin. However, he had served as an Associate Minister with the Chair, Rev. Bob Killam, at First Unitarian in Cleveland. It was a shock to the MFC members and to Pohl personally when Killam unexpectedly died in the summer of 1965. Rev. Rhys Williams became an interim Chair as the Committee began to shape a new identity in the absence of its founding chair. David Pohl is the consistent personal thread of continuity on the MFC from 1965 to 1993. He served his first six years as an appointed member, and from 1971 to 1993 he sat with the committee in three different staff roles, including serving as Director of the Department of Ministry from 1979 93. He recalls the meetings in the Sixties he attended as formal, but with a friendly collegiality among the clergy and lay members

The first MFC in 1961 62 was required to have five ministers in final fellowship out of only seven members. Those two remaining seats were filled by a woman, Muriel Davies, and a layman, Theodore Karam. When the committee expanded in 1962 63 the number of lay people and women doubled, and the culture began to change.

Up to three women at a time had served on the earliest versions of the AUA’s MFC. Having at least one woman on the first UUA MFC represented a modest recognition of the fact that women were important participants in local congregations and their opinions about prospective ministers should be represented and would be of value. Muriel Davies is listed in the UUA Directories as an MFC member under her husband’s name, Mrs. A. Powell Davies (the distinguished minister of All Souls Church in Washington, DC). While this was the custom of the time, it should be noted that Mrs. Davies appointment was not merely political or symbolic. Muriel Davies had a significant career in denominational leadership roles which continued with her election to the UUA Board in 1962.

The second woman to serve the UUA MFC joined Muriel Davies when the Committee was expanded to eleven members in its second year. She was single, so she was listed in the directory under own name, Miss Helen Stevens. The increase in the MFC’s membership by four people after 1962 resulted in only one additional regular female appointee. Often the Board of Trustees would use one of its own Board member appointments to fill this informal quota. The female membership of the MFC’s of the Sixties peaked in 1966 67 at three members out of eleven, and that lasted but one year.

Mark Morrison Reed has identified Dr. Nolan Penn, a clinical psychologist as the first African American sitting with the Committee, but there is a mystery about the nature and length of his service. Morrison Reed has identified him as appointee to the MFC according to the UUA Board Executive Committee minutes from their October 1969 meeting. However, Dr. Penn’s name never appears in the UUA Directory listings of MFC members in either the 1969 or 1970 directories. Directories were compiled in the late fall of the year prior to the year with which they are identified. During the Sixties, appointments to committees were routinely made at the June Board of Trustees meetings for terms that began July 1, but also could be made at any other Board meeting. Directory listings are therefore not as reliable as records in minutes.

In Revisiting the Black Empowerment Controversy, Morrison Reed lists African Americans elected or appointed to UUA leadership roles in the wake of the Empowerment controversy. Referencing the September 1969 Board minutes, Morrison-Reed states that

the UUA Board appointed Rev. Renford Gaines, minister of the UU Church of Urbana Champaign, IL to the MFC. Within a year of his initial appointment, Renford Gaines had changed his name to Mwalimu Imara and was called to a new settlement as minister of Arlington Street Church in Boston. Rev. Mwalimu Imara would be reappointed twice, serving a total of six years. Usually, he has been identified as the first African American member of the MFC.

However, Morrison Reed says that Imara “joined” Nolan Penn on the MFC. The Penn appointment, however, is not announced until the October 16, 1969, Board Executive Committee minutes, as a replacement appointment for Dr. James Bond, who is described as “unable to serve”.

The answer to this mystery is that Dr. Penn was appointed to serve as a consulting psychologist to the MFC, not as a voting member. His name, therefore, does not appear in UUA directories. Dr. Bond was initially appointed to succeed Norman Handelman but was unable to accept the appointment. Nolan Penn was a member of the First Unitarian Society of Madison WI and was recommended to the UUA Board by his minister, Rev. Max Gaebler. In an interview, Dr. Penn recalled attending at least three, and possibly four meetings of the MFC in Boston, Chicago, and Berkeley. These would have been for meetings in fall of 1969 and winter/spring of 1970. Dr. Penn strongly believed that the consulting psychologist to the MFC should be an independent consultant and should not be voting on the candidates. He would offer comments and interpretations of the test results but would not have any opinion on what that result might mean for the candidate’s future in ministry.

This opinion about the role of the consulting psychologist was under scrutiny during 1969 70 for two reasons the cost and the value added of an independent psychologist. The cost became the reason for not renewing Nolan Penn’s appointment in late 1970. He and his family moved from Madison to the San Diego area in the fall of 1970. Penn is listed in the UUA Board minutes that fall as having resigned, but his own memory is that he was told that the UUA could no longer afford to pay his travel expenses to attend meetings from his new location in San Diego. The costs were prohibitive. The 1970-71 budget was a difficult one for the new administration of UUA President Robert West, and many cuts were being made. This was one travel expense that could be eliminated from the MFC’s budget

It is possible, however, that eliminating the independent consulting psychologist was a suggestion that came from the psychologist on the committee who was a voting member, Dr. Robert Wilson. From 1971 forward, a psychologist who was an appointed and voting member (initially Dr. Wilson) would review the text results and offer comments on them as he or she felt necessary prior to or after the interview.

In 1968, four new seminary graduates had doubled the number of African American UU ministers in full or part time settlements who were in relationship with the MFC’s fellowshipping process, from four to eight. There was not a large pool of possible candidates to consider or willing to serve on the MFC.

Appointing Gaines/Imara to the MFC was a decision that could arguably described as “affirmative action” in that he had only graduated from Meadville Lombard and received his call to his first congregation in June of 1968. He could not have been a minister in final

fellowship. He had been one of the youngest prominent leaders in the Black UU Caucus and at the 1968 and 1969 General Assemblies. Gaines’ appointment was part of a wave of elections and appointments of African American leaders in 1969 to UUA leadership roles as the Association came to grips with the ways it had ignored the concerns of its African American members. Imara served until 1975.

The issue of appointed members needing to be in final fellowship also reduced the pool of available women to serve on the Committee, but there was no affirmative action for female clergy during the Sixties. Rev. Joyce Smith remembers that she was the first female minister to serve on the committee, beginning in December 1974. There were only fourteen women serving U congregations in 1974. Six of them were in settlements and eight were in junior roles in multiple staff ministries. Many of these had not yet been received into final fellowship.

In Chapter 4, there has already been reference to a changing culture within the MFC from its pre consolidation membership, tilting the Committee towards a majority of ministerial members. In 1970, the UUA MFC saw the first layperson appointed as Chair, Dr. Charles Begg, a member of the Plandome UU Congregation on Long Island, NY. Dr. Begg was a pathologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City. He joined the committee in 1965 and had served two terms when he was asked to be Chair. David Pohl remembered him as a man with “kindly demeanor and a keen intellect”. He used the role of Chair to hold up the needs of congregations for quality ministers in a culturally stressful time. Begg was particularly interested in moving forward clinical pastoral education as a required part of ministerial formation. He served four years as Chair, leaving the Committee in February 1975.

CHAPTER 6

“Specialized” Ministries Part 1 1961 1974

From the beginning of the conversations about a consolidated UUA MFC, there was conversation and controversy about whether the committee should only credential for parish ministries. After consolidation, the UUA established a Committee on Specialized Ministries to study the matter further. In 1965, the UU Ministers Association Executive wrote to this committee recommending that districts establish formal certification programs for lay leaders, issuing three year renewable credentials in “worship, fund raising, religious education, administration, etc.” Only one District, Ohio-Meadville, would pursue this idea and eventually implement it.

Rev. Robert L’H. Miller, speaking in a 1996 interview with Alice Kendrick published in David Cole’s “Oral History of the Consolidation” (1997) recalled that recognition of “alternative ministries” was discussed at length by Commission 5: “..are we going to recognize Ministers of Education, Ministers of Music, etc.? And the decision was made not to recognize alternative ministries, which personally to me was a big disappointment because I had hoped we’d have at least Ministry of Education, as well as parish ministry.”

Religious educators in the new UUA had pressed the issue around how they would be credentialed and recognized. Rev. William Rice, one of the architects of the consolidation and of the UUA’s MFC, encouraged the Liberal Religious Education Directors Association to look to the MFC for standards and criteria. In 1962 a study group with that task was created by the UUA Advisory Committee to the Department of Education. Edna Bruner formally proposed to the study group that the MFC might credential religious educators but was rebuffed by Director of the Department of Ministry Leon Fay, who wrote in October 1962 that ““...leadership in religious education is the province of the Education Department and not that of Ministerial Fellowship.”

This next step would be a formal commission on Standards and Certification for Religious Educators, which included the Chair of the MFC in its membership. The Director of the Department of Education, Dr. Henry Cheetham, proposed a plan to them which included fellowshipping as Ministers of Education for candidates who had B.D. degrees with a specialty in education and “certification” for Directors of Religious Education who lacked the degree but met defined requirements for education and competencies. Under Cheetham’s proposal, both the fellowshipping process and the certification process would be managed by a subcommittee of the MFC. The Department of Ministry and the MFC leadership did not want to have the MFC assume this responsibility. Ultimately, the plan which came forward and was presented to the UUA Board for endorsement in March 1967 was for a separate Religious Education Accreditation Committee, whose membership would include one appointee from the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Ministerial candidates who had a specialized focus on education in their undergraduate or seminary degrees would continue to receive fellowship as parish ministers.

The fellowshipped ministers in “specialized ministries” outside the parish created a different dilemma for the Department of Ministry, however. Ministries outside of the parish were well understood in Unitarian Universalism and in other denominational traditions. The chaplains in hospitals and in the military, campus ministers, educators serving in higher education, and various forms of executive/administrative ministers in judicatories and non profits were all assumed to be trained parish ministers who had later found employment in these roles. During the mid sixties, there emerged newly fellowshipped ministers who had decided to become entrepreneurial “urban ministers”, working for a network of congregations funding their ministry (in Cleveland, for example) or for a social justice agency. The question of whether one could be recognized a UU minister in preliminary fellowship expressing the intention to specialize in one of these roles, rather than in a parish-based ministry, was a new issue for the MFC at that time. The Committee had to address three concerns: accountability, evaluation, and connection to the life of the Association of congregations.

The year 1965 66 brought two new faces to the membership of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Rev. David Pohl and Rev. Robert Doss both joined the Committee. Doss had served less than a year on the MFC when he was asked to assume the role of chair following the death of Bob Killam. He served four years, leaving after two terms in 1970.

In the same year that Killam died, 1966, there was also an impending change at the Department of Ministry as Leon Fay was departing. The Minister of King’s Chapel, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Barth, was UUA President Dana Greeley’s lead candidate to be the new Director, despite opposition from the UUMA focused in part on his Christian identity. Barth was given the job, and as 1967 began there was new leadership and influence on the MFC. These changes in leadership resulted in changes in how the MFC would think about specialized ministries.

In his own historical reflections on the MFC, David Pohl recalled that “in 1963 a study commission called ‘The Church and Leadership’ chaired by Duncan Howlett, had called for the formal recognition of the non-parochial ministry. Joseph Barth had written a series of papers reflecting on the “specialized ministries” and in his new role as Executive Secretary of the MFC, Barth pushed for formal recognition of the ministers seeking to enter these non parish ministries. According to Pohl, Barth’s solution was “to view all forms of ministry as ‘specialties’ including the parish. While parish ministry would continue to be the overwhelming choice of candidates for ministerial fellowship, we should be free, he felt, to recognize candidates who opt for ministries of education, counseling, the inner city, etc who meet our general academic and personal requirements and fulfill the standards of the appropriate accrediting body…there was to be no automatic transferring of one’s specialized credentials to parish ministry or vice versa.”

In April 1969, after three years of conversations in response Barth’s papers, the MFC sent to the UUA Board a proposal for Rules changes that would give the MFC the authority to recognize “Specialized Ministries” as a category of preliminary fellowship, rather than as a waiver from the standard rule that a minister was someone who served a parish. The changes created a new rule 4(a) describing and defining Specialized Ministry.

In voting to become open to recognition of specialized ministries, the MFC decided to put a time limit on the experiment and evaluate it after four years. The specialized ministries endorsed were ones that could demonstrate having an outside accrediting body to which the minister could be accountable during preliminary fellowship, or else an evaluating board, personnel committee or supervisor to whom the minister was accountable and that could communicate with the MFC. Sometimes these were easy requirements for ministers seeking preliminary fellowship in a specialized ministry to fulfill, especially if they were pursuing chaplaincy accreditation. Other ministerial candidates who did not feel called to the parish but were not formally pursuing another accreditation at the same time as they were finishing seminary often had to take more time to receive preliminary fellowship.

The cultural and political eruptions of the late sixties and early seventies pushed the MFC to stretch their definitions of what a specialized ministry could be. In 1971, the Rev. Howard Matson, Associate Minister in San Francisco, was the first to apply to the MFC to be recognized a specialized minister to migrant workers. Matson was already a fellowshipped parish minister, but the recognition was important to him symbolically, but also because he was leaving his parish ministry, but not retiring. Matson wanted his work and his compensation acknowledged as ministerial work. Similarly, Rev. Richard Hood, another fellowshipped minister described to the MFC his geriatric ministry outreach to nursing homes and to homebound elders in 1972 and was recognized. Each of these was relatively easy for the MFC to approve with appropriate structures of accountability. When Ric Masten approached the MFC in 1971, describing himself as a “troubadour minister”, the MFC entered uncharted waters. Masten had never received a ministerial degree although he had a relationship with Starr King School through Howard Matson and his wife Rosemary, who worked at the school and was a member of Masten’s home church in Monterey. They encouraged him to apply to the MFC to have his troubadour ministry recognized. Masten was a beloved artist, poet, songwriter, and touring musician within Unitarian Universalism. The MFC was ambivalent at best and took more than one meeting to decide. In 1972 Masten was awarded fellowship in a divided vote.

These developments changed the conversation within the committee as they evaluated their four year experiment. Pohl writes that “applicants sought credentialing for specialties where we had no expertise and they could suggest no reliable way for us to hold to account their performance and their connection to the Unitarian Universalist movement and ministry.” The last straw for some of the MFC members was their divided views on whether they could recognize a minister for final fellowship as a “Minister of Ecology” in late 1973 and early 1974. Rev. Dennis Kuby was already fellowshipped as a parish minister,

but in 1973 was working as an insurance agent. He applied for recognition of his one man ministry in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with a locally recruited Board. Although Kuby was given the recognition he wanted, the discussion about it tipped the scales away from continuing to grant such recognition after the experimental time period ended.

In January 1974, this first experiment in recognizing a variety of “specialized” ministries came to an end, when the Committee voted “that there be only one fellowship process recognized. The category of Specialized Ministry will no longer be recognized. All candidates (will) apply for Parish Ministry. Ministers, if accepted, could then engage in whatever specialty they chose, and should have involvement with the denomination.”

One minister who felt betrayed by the change in the rules of the game went on to play a role in the next phase of the conversation about community based specialized ministers. Rev. William (Scotty) McLennan studied for a divinity and a law degree at Harvard at the same time, but never intended to serve in a parish. He graduated in 1975 and had to patch together qualifying years of experience in parish based or endorsed ministries to get his preliminary fellowship years recognized for final fellowship. Working for the Benevolent Fraternity of Unitarian Universalist Churches in Boston, McLennan went on to be a founder of the Urban Church Coalition and from that base continued to lobby for a renewed recognition of ministries outside the parish. McLennan continued throughout his career to serve outside of the parish in prominent campus ministry roles.

Requirements and Competencies Part 2 (1961 1974)

In 1964, Molly Harrower, the first clinical psychologist to work with the MFC, published a paper based on a longitudinal study of a hundred and thirty-five Unitarian and Universalist ministers. She compared the results of their psychological testing with metrics that would suggest “success in ministry” after ten years. Charles Gaines quoted one of her conclusions in a paper he delivered in 1982 to a conference of UU Advance as follows:

“(Let us) assume that all persons not specified as failing or definitely unsatisfactory may be considered successful in some measure.”

For some critics of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee’s process and criteria, such a quote could be held up as “damning with faint praise”. Surely, the critics say, we should be able to create a system that has definable and achievable standards for candidates for ministry that congregations can be confident will reliably result in excellence in ministry.

During the first decade of the UUA MFC’s existence and at regular intervals since, the search for this holy grail of perfect standards has been taken up by multiple generations of leaders in credentialing.

From March 1 2, 1966, at Senexet House in Connecticut, UUA President Dana Greeley convened a summit meeting of theological school presidents, denominational staff leaders, and UUMA leaders concerned with standards for ministry. The Senexet Conference recognized that within the first five years of the UUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee’s existence, the basic enduring architecture of the requirements and competencies that the Committee expected candidates for UUA ministry to fulfill had been put into place, but that new experiments and flexibility in standards would be required to improve the quantity and quality of the candidates for the UU ministry.

The stages and requirements for attaining ministerial fellowship by 1966 included:

Candidates were expected to be college graduates and have a degree from a seminary or its equivalent.

Candidates were expected to be “in fellowship” with the UUA prior to their ordination by a congregation, although the MFC balked around making this a mandatory rule, out of respect for congregational polity.

Candidates were expected to cooperate with the MFC’s requirements, including completion of a reading list, and submission of academic transcripts, required essays, evaluations, and the results of psychological testing

Candidates were expected to engage with a personal interview with a regional and/or continental panel of clergy and laity. The interview could result in being approved for fellowship at the time of seminary graduation, or it could result in being required to do additional work and schedule a second interview.

In written materials and in the interview, the candidates were expected to demonstrate knowledge of Unitarian Universalist history and polity, and familiarity with the Association of congregations. They were expected to demonstrate good character, healthy personalities, and what was described as “intellectual ability and the quality and capacity of ministerial leadership expected by our churches”. Notably absent from expectations is any form of creedal or theological test

After receiving preliminary fellowship, a period of further formation and evaluation lasting three years was required (while presumably working as a minister) before “final fellowship” would be granted. Final fellowship completed the credentialing process unless a minister engages in “conduct unbecoming” a UU minister, in which case final fellowship could be reconsidered and possibly revoked.

Originating within the patriarchal and privileged context of New England based Unitarianism, this basic architecture for credentialing has endured for more than a half a century, despite many changes in UU culture, in the identities of the candidates and the people sitting on the MFC. From the earliest years of the UUA, it represented a unique credentialing process among Protestant denominations: theologically more open and liberal, but academically more demanding and conservative. If architecture provides us a possible metaphor for this structure, we might say that the foundation and the external framing of our house of credentialing was completed early in UUA history, but within the internal frames of the rooms inside our house, we have been continually upgrading and re decorating.

The “rooms” that have undergone the most routine upgrading and re-decorating might be imagined as the Reading Room, the Requirements Room, the Competencies Room, the Interview Room, the Preliminary Fellowship Room, and the Disciplinary Room. During the years that Bob Doss chaired the committee, there was considerable upgrading and re decorating in several rooms

In the winter of 1967 68, the members of the MFC were polled on the criteria that they believed should be used to judge candidates as suitable for granting preliminary fellowship. The answers were given in short reflective prose statements, rather than as responses to survey questions that pre-defined the criteria. The Department of Ministry staff, led by Rev. Joseph Barth, compiled and summarized the results of this survey and made a report to the committee in March 1968. They identified twenty nine criteria that had been identified by more than one member of the committee, and in all but a few cases by more than three members. The descriptions having the most multiple mentions in differing words were:

• Understanding of persons and interpersonal relationships (14 mentions)

• Ability to learn and grow (12)

• Dedication (12)

• Maturity (10)

• Openness to Differences (8)

• Good self expression

• Charisma (8)

• Objective about self

Although the survey did not ask the members specifically what skills they expected the candidates to acquire in their seminary education, many members volunteered their opinions, naming preaching, group organization, church administration, leadership in rites of passage, writing and counseling as the most important of these skills. In making this distinction, it is clear that from its beginnings the UUA MFC saw itself as a group best equipped to judge character and social skills, rather than test candidates on content knowledge or specific ministerial skills.

Nevertheless, in 1968, two changes in requirements for candidates were made to help MFC members have greater confidence in the candidate’s content knowledge and skills. The first revision to the pre-consolidation Reading List used in the 1950’s was approved. That same year, a requirement for each candidate to present a short sermon to the committee as part of the interview was added.

Both in the AUA’s MFC and in the first years of the UUA’s MFC, the regional MFC interviews held in some of the regions were the critical ones for candidates from Boston especially for candidates far from Boston. By 1968, the MFC had concluded that performance and the costs associated with the regional MFC’s were uneven and they should be eliminated. The interview with the continental MFC in Boston would become the only requirement and only option for all candidates, wherever they lived. This seemed to the committee to place an additional burden on candidates coming from farther distances. The MFC considered and did pay for some candidates’ travel to Boston to attend their interview. Doss recalled that this was the time the Committee began to travel outside of Boston to visit the schools and hold their meetings closer to the two major centers for candidates outside of Boston. Tensions with the two remaining “identity schools”, Starr King and Meadville, were increasing in the late sixties nevertheless, as the changing requirements of the MFC and the centralization of their authority chafed against the schools’ beliefs that they were the primary educators of ministers.

The most important addition to the requirements of the MFC that changed the timetable and pattern of a student’s progress through theological school was making a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) a requirement for ministerial fellowship. CPE was well known in Unitarian theological education prior to the merger. The founding meeting of the “Council for Clinical Training of Theological Students”, the ancestor organization of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) was held in the study of former AUA President Rev. Dr. Samuel A. Eliot at the Arlington Street Church in Boston in January 1930.

Initially CPE was a movement arising from conversations between New England theological educators and medical educators. By 1932 Clinical Pastoral Education began to be available in the curriculum at Andover-Newton Theological School and later at the Chicago Theological Seminary. Four different networks of clinical pastoral educators and

programs finally joined together to form the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education in 1967 and in 1968 they began to operate with a common and centralized standard for CPE across the United States. This standardization of practices within an interfaith context made it possible for the UUA MFC to consider making CPE a required experience for all candidates. Many students for ministry were engaging in CPE but during the early sixties it was viewed as an asset for people considering hospital chaplaincy as a specialized focus and less crucial if your goal was parish ministry.

In a personal note to David Sammons, Bob Doss remembered that “we began to require CPE at first selectively (towards the eventual mandatory requirement)”. Ken Sawyer does not recall the requirement being mandatory during 1969 70, the year he saw the committee, but Wayne Arnason remembers that by 1972, the year he interviewed, it was “strongly recommended” to the point that it was a de facto requirement. By 1975, the requirement was formally implemented.

The late Sixties was a time of some innovative experimentation in ministerial formation and leadership One such innovation during these years was called the Stevens Gesner Program, an MFC endorsed effort to provide an independent study theological education alternative that could cooperate with theological schools for some of its course work, but not be based in any one school. Six Stevens Gesner certificate holders achieved final fellowship during the course of the experimental program which ran from 1968-73.

UU seminarians at the three remaining identity schools (counting Harvard among them) all had field education requirements, and often internships. Starr King strongly encouraged its students to spend a block of time in another culture, either an international culture or an American culture that was foreign to the middle and upper class culture of UU congregations.

The openness to “specialized ministries” cited in Chapter 6 was responsive to the changes in ministerial formation and identity during this time. In 1970 because the MFC was more open to fellowshipping “specialized” ministers, the Committee said that “attention would be given” to the involvement and experience that candidates demonstrated in UU congregations through three letters of reference required in the candidates’ paperwork.

As testimony to the intense concern about theological education and credentialing during the MFC’s first decade and following the Taylor/Johnson Committee whose work bridged the consolidation years, the UUA Board created four successive special committees or commissions to study and make recommendations on various aspects of theological education for religious professionals. This stream of commissions reflected the fact that responsibility for ministerial education had been impossible to contain within an otherwise hierarchical UUA structure These commissions all took up persistent issues that had no quick or permanent solutions, including the status of religious educators and their accreditation, the relationships of the school’s curriculum to the MFC’s requirements, and funding for theological education, schools, and scholarships. The funding issue was

particularly difficult because there were always multiple appeals to the same donor base from the UUA and from (initially) five different theological schools

The last in this sequence of commissions was recommended by UUA President Robert West and charged by the Board in January 1972. It was chaired by the Rev. Carl Scovel and his name is usually associated with the report that was delivered two years later. Chapter 9 of this essay is devoted to this commission’s work and legacy.

Before going there, however, we turn to some reporting and reflections on disciplinary matters

The Scovel Commission Report 1972 75

The fourth formal commission since consolidation chartered by the UUA Board to study ministerial education was charged in January 1972. It was formally called the Ministerial Education Commission, but in popular parlance it became known as “the Scovel Commission” after its chair, the Rev. Carl Scovel, minister of King’s Chapel. The members of the Scovel Commission included many key figures in ministerial and religious education credentialing from the Sixties through the Eighties:

• Rev. Robert Clarke, the chair of the most recent Commission on Education for Professional Religious Leadership.

• Rev. Robert Doss, the immediate past Chair of the MFC,

• Roberta Nelson, a respected DRE representing the Liberal Religious Educators’ Association, and future MFC member,

• UUA Trustee Edna Griffin (one of the new wave of African American leaders elected and appointed to UUA roles after the Black Empowerment controversy),

• Eleanor Vendig representing the Veatch Program (a major funder of theological education), and

• Rev. Charles Gaines, a newly appointed member of the MFC, who would become a future MFC chair and Director of the Department of Ministry.

President Robert West recommended the Commission to advise him and the Board about how to find and allocate resources for professional religious leadership at a time of financial crisis for the Association. The crisis had forced West to pare down and reorganize the UUA’s staff. The UUA was aware that the two remaining independent UU theological schools had been losing some of their “market share” of theological students to non UU schools. The commission found that the number of UU seminarians studying in non UU schools had increased from 15% of the total in 1969 to 43% of the total in the fall of 1973. In surveying the reasons why prospective seminarians chose a non-UU school, they found that three quarters of their respondents did not actively reject Meadville or Starr King. They did, however, find that mainline Christian seminaries with good reputations and better geographic proximity to their families or jobs were often able to offer them better scholarships. As the sixties changed to the seventies, many Christian seminaries were more interested in being able to attract and accommodate UU students.

For President West and the UUA Board, the issue of whether and how much money to allocate to the UU schools was increasingly important. While the charge to the Commission on Ministerial Education was framed largely in terms of advice about money, they were also asked to make their allocation recommendations “following the criterion of improving the quality of education for our professional religious leadership.” The commission took this part of their charge quite seriously.

The Ministerial Education Commission delivered its preliminary report to the UUA Board on October 27, 1973, and in January 1974 Scovel returned to UUA Board’s meeting to respond to criticisms that had been levelled at the report, especially those coming from the theological schools. The schools’ major criticisms were around the recommendations they saw as threatening their UUA funding and reducing their power and authority over ministerial education and giving it instead to the UUA through a new Ministerial Education Council and through the standards of the MFC. Scovel would back off from the commission’s initial recommendation that the schools should be fully funding themselves rather than receive subsidies through the UUA.

The Commission’s central recommendation was the creation of a new Council on Education for Professional Religious Leaders (CEPRL), which was formed and funded and then discontinued in 1979 by the next UUA President Paul Carnes. For the purposes of this essay, however, the story of this short-lived Council and the controversies around the ongoing question of how theological schools could or should receive money through the UUA will not be explored in any depth. Additional material on the relationships between the schools and the MFC’s requirements and competencies appears in Chapter 12. We will instead focus in this chapter on the most important long term legacies of the Scovel Commission for the history of the MFC and of ministerial formation. They were:

(a) deepening the conversation about the competencies and character a Unitarian Universalist minister should have,

(b) adding a formal internship to the requirements for fellowshipping,

(c) articulating the need for and value of continuing education for ministers as part of a career long process of formation that does not end with completion of the credentialing process, and

(d) instigating a new staff position at the UUA which through various iterations has evolved into two positions, the Director of Ministerial Education, and the Director of Ministerial Development, two staff roles each having within their portfolios important relationships with and service to the MFC.

Shaping the Competencies

The Scovel Report reflected on the academic competencies that should be required for candidates for ministry but strongly emphasized the practical experiences that they felt were not being adequately offered in ministerial formation. The report articulated a four fold standard of ministry: “We need ministers who are intellectually strong, professionally able, personally integrated, and religiously aware...” In their research, the commission members visited the three schools with historic UU relationships (Harvard, Meadville, and Starr King) as well as the Stevens-Gessner Program and the Intermet Seminary in

Washington DC, each of these latter two being unique experiments with new approaches to theological education. They came away with a sobering conclusion: “…we found some schools which were failing to give adequate academic preparation, and we found no school that was giving what we believed were the only viable models of practical training.”

Their solution was that the UUA needed to take responsibility for insuring that these practical experiences of education for both parish ministry and religious education leadership were available to and used by students. In so stating, and in recommending that a new Council be given responsibility for oversight of these opportunities, the commission respected the authority of the MFC and the RE Accreditation Committee to set the formal academic and independent study requirements for their candidates. They did make suggestions for areas of competency which they felt were not adequately represented in the current requirements, but that they described as “highly desirable”:

1. The practice of spiritual discipline

2. The literature of religious experience

3. The doing and being of music in church

4. Liturgy and the shape of space

5. The Minister as Person: The task of maintaining one’s physical, mental and spiritual health, growing as a person, continuing one’s education, living one’s faith.

6. Community Action

7. Personal Development

“These courses which deal with the practice of ministry”, said the commission’s report, “should be grounded in the theological and historical issues which are raised and discussed in the academic courses. They are in no way opposed to the theory but rather based upon it.”

They further recommended that all those involved with ministerial education and formation for UU ministers should pay closer attention to UU history, theology and polity, and expressed concern about how “thorough” the current offerings and emphasis were. The Commission also offered a list in unique requirements for those preparing for accreditation as professional religious educators.

Adding a Formal Internship to Ministerial Formation

The Scovel Commission believed and strongly recommended that an intensive parish internship experience under a qualified supervisor was the best way to get practical learning experiences in many of the new areas of competency that they suggested were highly desirable. They noted and appreciated that Meadville Lombard had been offering a formal internship program for several years supervised by the school and funded by a

foundation grant, but they skimmed lightly over Starr King’s approach to internships which included a highly encouraged multicultural experience. They concluded that “none of the field work/internship programs run by the three UU schools provides the kind of supervision of the supervisors or receives the kind of emphasis in the curriculum that makes it a significant training program.” They urged the UUA to assume the responsibility for the internship program but stopped short of recommending to the MFC that they make it mandatory for all candidates. Instead they recommended it be available to those seminarians who elected it, and those of whom the MFC required it. The internship duration was proposed to be ten months and available after the first year of academic study. Many of the features of our long standing internship model were proposed by the report: a learning/serving agreement, a formal written evaluation involving all the professional religious leaders who worked with the student at the site, course credit, some form of cohort group for students experiencing internship, and a stipend. The stipend was proposed to be paid for by the UUA, as well as travel costs to and from the internship site, with churches being asked to contribute some or all the costs.

Continuing Education as Part of Ministerial Formation

The Scovel Commission Report minced no words about their conviction that ministerial education did not conclude at seminary graduation or at final fellowship: “ Education is a lifelong process….Only the minister who continues to read, think, reflect, meditate, converse, and write in increasing depth can find that personal refreshment and intellectual insight to continue his or her work effectively. Education is therefore always continuing education.”

Once again, they recommended that only the UUA could exercise the oversight to encourage and assist ministers in having access to continuing education in three recommended forms:

• Professional skills

• Intellectual and spiritual growth, and

• Personal refreshment and re discovery

The commission recommended that the UUA encourage congregations to provide continuing education time and sabbatical leaves in ministers’ letters of agreement, and also provide counseling and funds to support continuing education. They hoped that the theological schools would offer some of these continuing education courses and opportunities but noted that they would have to be approved by their proposed Ministerial Education Council.

Staffing for Ministerial Education

The Scovel Commission recommended not only a new Council on Ministerial Education, but a new full time staff person, an Associate Director in the Department of Ministry, who would be responsible for recruitment, administering the internship program, oversight of scholarships and loans, and oversight of continuing education (for ministers, religious educators, and lay leaders!).

The proposed budget for their recommendations was $285,00. Of that, $85,000 was for the new internship program, $30,000 for the new staff person’s salary and expenses, $52,000 for scholarships, and $42,000 for money already promised to Starr King School (which relied on UUA support for an important piece of its budget.) The rest was for programs offered by seminaries and for the RE Accreditation program.

Although the Scovel Commission’s major recommendation for a council they titled the Council on Education for Professional Religious Leaders (CEPRL) did not have a long institutional life, the legacies left by the Report reflect well on the leadership and vision of the members of the Commission.

The process of responding to and implementing the recommendations in the Scovel Commission’s report over the next three years brought Rev. Eugene Pickett to the UUA as the first Director of Ministerial Education. An internship program was created and by 1981 a formal internship requirement was established. Continuing Education was prioritized differently by both the UUA and the UUMA after this report. Ultimately the UUA oversight role in continuing education was given to another additional staff person, a Director of Ministerial Development, and the UU Ministers Association established its own “CENTER” program dedicated to offering continuing education opportunities for their members. Over the six years following the Scovel Commission Report, the MFC worked to develop and refine “The Grid”, a spread sheet of competency requirements that brought together the knowledge, skills, and character elements that the MFC wanted to see in its candidates. All of these developments will be noted again and discussed in the next Chapter 12, Part 3 of the Requirements and Competencies thread in this essay.

There is little doubt that the Ministerial Education Commission of 1972 chaired by Carl Scovel was the most consequential of the UUA’s commissions, initiating changes in the conception and staffing of ministerial credentialing that have been sustained throughout the time frame encompassed by this history.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 2 (1974 1981)

The MFC in the early Seventies was literally a crowded and often smoke filled room dominated by white men. The Boston based meetings during the mid Seventies were held in the Department of Ministry office suite on the 4th floor of 25 Beacon Street, which was a more cramped space than the 2nd floor front room. Smoking indoors was still tolerated. Despite the appointment of ministers of color and female ministers the majority of members were white men.

By the time the Seventies ended, much had changed. Boston-based meetings could be held in rented hotel spaces, just like the Chicago and Berkeley meetings, instead of at 25 Beacon Street. While there would never be more than two people of color at once serving on the committee during this time, the male/female proportion changed to fifty fifty. This change came in part because of the decision to limit the number of two year terms that an MFC member could serve to four, for a total of eight years. Partly because of this, there was more turnover in the late seventies. As the decade ended the MFC began to plan a retreat day into one meeting to allow the members to get to know one another better and discuss more expansively the variety of “big issues” they were asked to consider beyond the interviews.

One element of diversity in the MFC membership was the attention paid to having a Canadian member. When David Pohl was appointed to the MFC in 1965, he was serving as minister of the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa and was conscious of the distinct context from which Canadian candidates arrived at the MFC. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties the UUA Board’s practice would be to insure that their appointments would always include at least one Canadian, often a lay leader, among the Committee’s membership.

The concern about recruiting more women for ministry became less intense after the mid Seventies because women were enrolling in larger numbers, especially mid life women. In his January 1980 report to the MFC Leon Hopper reported that 51% of seminarians were now women. In a meeting with Starr King faculty the following month, Prof. Ron Cook confirmed the trend in Starr King’s enrollment, reporting 51 students with less than half of them being heterosexual white men. The candidate list by 1979 was very different than it had been ten years before. Seven out of ten candidates at the November 1979 meeting were women.

The focus of the conversation about women in ministry among the Department of Ministry staff was turning towards career development and unequal compensation for similar positions. One letter noted in the MFC’s minutes of 1978 sent by the female students at Starr King School suggests that bias against women in the MFC’s process was still under scrutiny and challenge. The students wrote describing the psychological evaluation process as sexist, with the tests themselves based in male experience and

psychology. In an informal description of the letter considering a response, the observation was made that when there are more women in psychology the evaluative instruments will change, implying that there wasn’t much that the MFC would be able to do about this alleged bias.

Alan Deale became the Chair of the MFC as 1976 began. David Pohl remembered him as “the very embodiment of a learned minister, well grounded in the liberal arts, but also a master of parish ministry skills. He relished engaging certain candidates in theological dialogue and was a forceful advocate for raising the bar of ministerial standards, often citing the Israeli Air Force training manual as an example of our need to toughen our own requirements.”

There were often four UUA staff members attending the meetings in the mid Seventies. The Director and the two associate staff members of the Department of Ministry would be there, plus one Inter District Representative (IDR) from the field staff. (President Paul Carnes decided this was overkill and pulled the IDR from the meetings in 1978.)

Three of the participating staff members stand out as important figures in the MFC’s ongoing reflections on the meaning of our credentialed ministry. David Pohl had moved from serving on the MFC as an appointed member to sitting in as Director of Ministerial Settlement in 1971. Gene Pickett joined him in 1974 as the first Director of Ministerial Education. In 1977 in a major reorganization Pohl became head of the “Ministry Section” and continued to sit with the MFC, while Pickett became the Director of a consolidated Ministerial and Educational Services Department (and later UUA President when Paul Carnes died.) Pohl’s role as Executive Secretary of the MFC was also formalized in 1977, the same year that Leon Hopper joined the staff as Director of Ministerial Education.

Beginning in 1972 a current or recently graduated student in preliminary fellowship was invited to sit with the committee as a non voting but participating member and write a report for fellow students about the experience. John Buehrens was the first student so invited. Wayne Arnason was among those asked to serve in 1975. He remembers the experience on the other side of the Ministry Department door being more free wheeling both before and after the interview than he expected. The interview itself was not structured in advance. The student attending was not given much of a chance to participate in questioning unless that individual had the temerity to break in.

The ten minute sermon requirement had become a standard practice from the beginning of the seventies, and the time frame available for the interview, including the sermon, was one hour. The addition of the sermon at the front end of the interview created opportunities for sermon critiques that would sometimes include wisecracks. Alan Deale recalled one candidate who gave a bad sermon. The candidate was asked “when the sermon was written”. He replied: “On the bus ride coming over”. Paul Carnes retorted: “You should have taken a longer bus ride!”

On the other end of that spectrum, Deale remembered favorably Charles Gaines’ technique for dealing with a bad sermon. Gaines would say: “I’m having a problem with you: I didn’t like the sermon. Maybe you can help me with it.” Then he would invite a deeper conversation about what motivated the candidate to offer that sermon and what he or she was trying to say. Gaines reflected a great deal on the process of the interview during his tenure on the committee, and when he had a chance to take over as chair as the Seventies ended, he led the way in restructuring the process. The Committee began to plan how to ask questions in a logical sequence and formalized the preparation of the interview to give all the members of the panel a chance to participate. The process of preparing for an interview during the seventies included asking the psychologist for an assessment of the material in the packet and having discussion about that assessment prior to the candidate coming in.

The Committee began to feel pressure about how many interviews they could schedule. The AUA MFC had met monthly, but quarterly meetings for the UUA MFC that now included more members from beyond New England seemed like a reasonable pace. However, the number of candidates requesting interviews increased throughout the Seventies. Alan Deale remembers that that the committee at that time began to do six interviews a day, 3 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon, which would explain why they could see as many as 24 candidates per meeting at peak if demand required. It wasn’t until 1983 that the Committee voted to limit the interviews at any single meeting to a maximum of twenty.

One factor in the increase in candidates was the interest of more women in the UU ministry. Another was the beginning of a new stream of LGBT people after the 1974 General Assembly vote that established an Office of Gay Concerns at the UUA. More mid life people of all genders were becoming interested in ministry as a second career. By the end of the decade six interviews per day became standard practice. Charles Gaines reported in a 1982 paper that he had participated in about 600 interviews over his ten years on the committee. He estimated that 30% of the candidates he had seen were women.

The expectation among students that whenever you were ready for your interview you could get scheduled for the next meeting changed during the Seventies. By the end of the decade scheduling your meeting well ahead was strongly encouraged. MFC members from the last years of the Seventies remember discussing their concerns about candidates having their interviews too late in their formation process. If they did not receive a “1” they had no plans for what it would mean to continue the process with a second interview, as much as a year later.

As always, no one on the Committee reveled in giving candidates lower numbers although some configurations of the Committee could be tougher on candidates than others. In the Seventies they were using a three point scale for candidate ranking. “1” was

preliminary fellowship granted, “2” meant a second interview was required, and “3” meant that the Committee didn’t want to see you again. Alan Deale remembered one day when three candidates in a row were turned down with “3”’s, and the committee members were very upset. As Chair, Deale felt that he should console and encourage them for their courage, despite their sympathy with the candidates’ plight. He told them: “This was your finest hour”.

Between 1972 and 1975, the numbers of women and African Americans serving in congregations reflected the changes that the MFC had begun to see in the diversity of candidates that came before them. In those years the number of women in solo settlements in congregations increased from two to thirteen, with seven more in associate roles in that period. The increase throughout the decade for African American ministers was much less dramatic and a continuing cause for concern. The number of African American UU ministers in settlements or chaplaincies increased from seven to only nine during this decade during which the full consequences of the Empowerment controversy had negatively affected African American participation in congregations. There was much hand wringing in the administration and to some extent in the MFC about what “affirmative action” for UU ministry recruitment would look like. During the Carnes administration the term was used to describe intentional efforts to recruit both women and African Americans to UU ministry and incentivize their settlements.

During the Seventies the MFC’s culture reflected little awareness that the Committee’s requirements or process might be a deterrent to African American candidates considering UU ministry. In a December 1981 letter from the MFC’s UUMA appointee Rev. Nick Cardell, responding to an inquiry from UUMA President Ed Harris , Cardell wrote that the MFC would be taking up the “continuing question of the Committee’s responsibility for the largely white complexion of our ministry”. He told Harris that the Urban Church Coalition would meet with the MFC in May to explore some aspects of this.

Following Mwalimu Imara, the next African American UU Minister to serve on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee was the Rev. William R. Jones, who was appointed in 1979 and served to 1988. Jones had been ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1958 and was in the early years of his long and well respected academic career, marked by the publication of his book “Is God a White Racist?” in 1973. Jones brought a theological rigor and a deeper analysis of white supremacy to the deliberations of the MFC at a time when the UUA was still in a state of shock and retreat from the struggles of the Seventies.

SPECIALIZED MINISTRIES PART 2 (1974 1981)

The term “specialized ministries” was used in the early decades of the UUA to describe all ministries that were “not parish settled”. This language made sense when no one was questioning whether a UU minister could be accredited by a single standard of competencies and requirements. There would be ordained ministers serving in chaplaincies, campus ministries, faculty roles, and occasionally as religious educators. These parish ministers had “specialized” their ministries within the context of hospitals or nursing homes or the military or in institutions of higher learning, rather than in the traditional context of a parish church. This chapter and subsequent chapters in this thread will continue to use this consistent heading, “Specialized Ministries”, but will also document how this term slowly became obsolete and out of favor over twenty five years, and then in 1997 swung back into favor as the UUA and the MFC re-adopted the “one ministry” philosophy.

The MFC’s Independent Study Program

After deciding in 1974 that they could no longer credential ministers with self identified specialties, the MFC continued to respond to the changing identities of the people who wanted to become UU ministers. More female and mid life candidates entering the ministry meant that family responsibilities made it difficult for every potential candidate to consider moving near a seminary and enrolling in a multi year residential M.Div. degree program. When Rev. Alan Deale became Chair, the MFC decided that it could develop its own ”independent study program”, as an alternative for a select and limited number of candidates to complete their M. Div. requirement without having to attend a residential seminary.

For a time, the consideration of an MFC “independent study program” also included conversation about one of the recommendations of the Ministerial Education Commission (“the Scovel Report”), namely that the UUA establish a program for commissioning lay leaders. The program envisioned would be managed by the Districts but with oversight and credentialing authority through the MFC. The MFC and the UUA Board first considered this in April 1974, drafted a proposal for how it might work, and circulated the draft for feedback from staff, UUA committees, and district leaders. Fierce opposition came from the RE Accreditation Committee. In a three page letter dated April 16, 1974, they outlined many questions about the implementation, costs, and effects of a program that was seeking to respond to a variety of concerns about lay leader education, empowerment and recognition through credentialing. They expressed concerns about their own role in credentialing lay religious educators, especially if lay leaders in religious education found they could choose between two UUA credentialing programs. Would one have more status than the other or be perceived as an easier path? What would this mean for the possibility

of ordained recognition of ministers of religious education, a goal still strongly desired among professional religious educators. Ultimately, in view of the mixed feedback to the proposal, the Department of Ministry accepted an offer from the Ohio Meadville District to pilot a lay leader credentialing program. This program has survived and thrived since 1976, but for much of that time was the only such program operated at a regional level in the UUA. New interest in lay leader accreditation has also produced Leadership Schools and in the recent era of Regions some other regional programs of recognition and accreditation. However, the MFC recognized in the Seventies that it did not have the capacity to manage accreditation for ministers, religious educators, and lay leaders within their volunteer and staff capacity.

What they felt they could do was create and empower an Independent Study Program leading towards ministerial fellowship and ordination. By the fall of 1976, the MFC’s Independent Study Program (ISP) was rolled out. Ultimately, the Committee recognized that they would need the support of a seminary to make this work, and so they partnered with Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago. The ISP presumed and required that enrolled students have a year in residency in an accredited theological school or graduate department of religion (not necessarily Meadville Lombard). At the conclusion of the ISP, candidates would need to pass a comprehensive examination prepared, administered and evaluated by Meadville Lombard. Despite the support from Meadville Lombard, it was an ambitious undertaking for a volunteer credentialing committee to create and supervise a graduate program of theological education and ministerial formation.

In any given year, no more than fifteen students would be in the program at any one time, and the usual expectation was that no more than three people would be accepted in any one year. Prospective students had to formally apply to be in the program, and the MFC would approve applicants only at the September meeting. Candidates had to list their previous course experiences that could fulfill MFC requirements, and the courses they planned to take at which school(s). Clinical Pastoral Education and an internship remained as requirements. Each ISP student was required to have a Preceptor, an academic advisor familiar with the requirements of the MFC. The candidate could nominate one to three people for this role and the MFC itself would choose the Preceptor.

A subcommittee of the MFC with three members was created to operate the Independent Study program. They would review both the applicants for the program and annually review the progress of each student. The subcommittee did not have necessarily have to be comprised of MFC members, however. Only the Chair was required to be a member of the Committee. The Director of Ministerial Education would staff the Committee.

As the conversation about creating a Ministry of Religious Education developed and gained momentum, it became obvious that the Independent Study Program would be a good path for fulfilling the M.Div requirement for working religious educators who wanted to become ministers.

Changing Perceptions of Ministry

Between 1977 and 1991, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee gradually moved away from the position that there was but one form of ministry with a variety of specializations. The Committee by 1991 formalized this change of attitude and brought to the General Assembly for approval definitions of three ministry identities, each equally valid and valued: Parish Ministry, the Ministry of Religious Education, and Community Ministry. This section of this chapter will focus on the story of how the MFC came to recognize the second of these three identities, or “tracks” as they were often called: the Ministry of Religious Education. The struggle to gain recognition for the specialty of religious education leadership and family ministry as a unique and separate track for fellowship and ordination broke apart the “one ministry” paradigm and opened the door for community based ministers of various specialties to assert that they too had a unique identity that required a separate track.

Liberal religious educators had agitated for twenty years for inclusion within the accreditation process of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, starting with the consolidation conversations, and then later in the early years of the UUA. They were rebuffed. As noted in Chapter 2, a separate but equal RE Accreditation Committee and process was created instead. At that time, the Association’s leadership was largely a patriarchy of ordained clergy, and there were no leaders within the patriarchy who could imagine that this guild of mostly female religious professionals was engaged in a ministry that could or should be recognized and accredited by the MFC. The prevailing assumption was that parish ministers supervised religious educators.

In a few congregations ordained ministers served as directors of religious education, and the term “Minister of Education” had been traditionally used in the fifties and sixties, regardless of fellowship or ordination status. The MFC made it clear during the sixties that a candidate for ministry serving in such a role, regardless of their title, or ordination in another tradition, would need to meet the same requirements for fellowshipping as any other candidate.

There were few if any models of egalitarian partnerships in shared ministry among parish ministers and religious education professionals in the Sixties. Rev. William Rice, one of the major architects of the consolidation, and chair of the UUA’s Ministry Advisory Committee, wrote to the Liberal Religious Educators Association in 1962: “LREDA should make people realize they are not going into ministry but into an equally honored profession.”

As the Sixties became the Seventies, however, feminism began to influence Unitarian Universalism. The women who were appointed to serve on the MFC were no longer confined to active lay leaders but included religious professionals, both ordained ministers and directors of religious education. Rev. Joyce Smith joined the MFC in December 1974, and Rev. Betty Baker, a senior ordained religious educator, would join in 1980.

The lobbying for a re assessment of religious education credentialing was being received differently in a new climate of respect built on the personal relationships that influential ministers had built with their religious educator colleagues. Larger congregations were understanding the ministry that a professional religious educator offered as an essential ministerial role within a multiple staff team. MFC Chair Charles Beggs (a lay member of the Plandome, NY church) was succeeded in 1975 by Rev. Alan Deale, Senior Minister of First Unitarian Church of Portland OR. Both congregations and their leaders had benefitted from strong religious education professionals. On the UUA Board at that time there were clergy like Rev. Gordon McKeeman and Rev. Leon Hopper who had always had positive collegial relationships with their religious educator colleagues and who had advocated for egalitarian professional recognition. Hopper served on the MFC as a UUA Board appointee and then would become the Director of Ministerial Education in 1976, succeeding Gene Pickett. Roberta Nelson’s strong advocacy from her LREDA leadership role was joined by MFC member Rev. Charles Gaines as they both served on a new study group to follow up on the Scovel Commission, a group charged with a detailed study of how a merger of clergy and religious educator credentialing would work. When Alan Deale’s term ended, Gaines was appointed as chair of the MFC and took the recommendations of this commission across the finish line into implementation.

The Benson Report

During the last years of the administration of UUA President Robert West, a Special Committee on Education and Certification for Professional Religious Leadership was commissioned to “explore the possibility of merging the functions of education and accreditation for professional religious leadership.” The Special Committee final report was delivered to UUA Board, by their Chair Russell Benson on April 23, 1977, just two months before the UUA Presidential election won by Rev. Paul Carnes (an MFC member from 1964 1972). The Benson Report (as it was usually called) recommended “that the UUA recognize two forms of ministry in our Association, the parish minister and the minister of education”, and “that the responsibility for certification of both parish ministers and ministers of education be vested with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.” Implicit in this recommendation was the abolition of the RE Accreditation Committee. They also recommended that a new Independent Study Committee supervise all independent study for both the parish ministry and the ministry of education. After two years of discussion and debate about the Benson Report, votes at two successive General Assemblies beginning

in 1978 would finally be held on the by law changes creating the Ministry of Religious Education.

The Ministerial Fellowship Committee had not embraced the recommendations in the Benson Report at the outset. Joyce Smith reported in her memoir letter about her service on the committee that the initial MFC straw vote after their first discussion of the Benson Report in the fall of 1976 was 5 opposed, 4 in favor, 1 abstention. The Chair, Rev. Alan Deale was a supporter, however, and kept pressing for a consensus. He recognized that the opposition within the committee had to do with a legitimate issue: would there be common standards of evaluation for accrediting ministers of religious education and parish ministers? Should all DRE’s become ministers and maintain “one ministry” or should a separate set of standards be developed for the ministry of religious education? The fear was that religious educators who were not evaluated by similar standards as parish ministers would inevitably be seen as second-class ministers.

One hurdle that needed to be overcome to arrive at a consensus within the MFC had to do with whether religious educators who had been recognized by the RE Accreditation Committee would need to go through the entire MFC accreditation process, including obtaining an M.Div. or its equivalent in order to become ministers. There were accredited DRE’s with long service who had been to seminary and had B.D.’s or M.Div.s or Masters specialization in Education or Religious Education. This small group included people like Eugene Navias, Christine Wetzel, and Betty Baker. They were immediately recognized as fellowshipped ministers. The preliminary recommendation from the Benson Committee was that all settled accredited DRE’s employed half time or more should be granted preliminary fellowship without an interview if their congregation chose to ordain them. That was not acceptable to the MFC. They were more amenable to the Benson recommendation that those accredited religious educators who had three years of service could be granted preliminary ministerial fellowship without requiring them to complete an M.Div. degree program if they could demonstrate that they had fulfilled the academic requirements for all ministers. The requirement for these candidates to appear before the MFC for an interview was not waived, however. Almost all these experienced and accredited religious educators were women, so they were often described as being “grandmothered” into final fellowship. Their three years of service in supervised and evaluated ministries as accredited religious educators was considered to be the same as the three years of evaluation that any other minister underwent in preliminary fellowship moving towards final fellowship. The MFC balked at granting preliminary fellowship without an interview to accredited DRE’s with less than three years’ service and less than a full time job. They instead insisted that these DRE’s present their credentials to the MFC in paperwork to demonstrate equivalency and have a preliminary fellowship interview before their preliminary fellowship could be granted.

In April 1977, with a consensus and endorsement from the MFC now in hand, the UUA Board accepted the Benson Report recommendations and took up the by law changes and preparation required to implement it. The 1978 and 1979 General Assemblies each passed by the required majorities the motion to allow the MFC to grant fellowship for the Ministry of Religious Education. After a year of preparatory work to develop the standards that would be followed, the MFC began fellowshipping Ministers of Religious Education in 1980.

Maintaining the educational requirement for an M.Div. or its equivalent added a particular challenge for the UUA if it was to recognize and serve the needs of lay religious educators who were aspiring to be fellowshipped ministers. As noted above, in the early 1970’s more and more women were entering ministry but struggling with the conventional paradigm for pursuing an MDiv, which involved uprooting yourself and your family to move to the city where your school of choice offered a residential program. Religious educators aspiring to become fellowshipped ministers were usually already employed in congregations. Many of them were single mothers with children in local schools. Uprooting and moving to Berkeley or Chicago or Boston was very disruptive to the family and the congregation. The ability to take individual courses to meet knowledge gaps towards fulfilling the MFC’s requirements required innovation in the Independent Study Program.

The Religious Education Accreditation Committee had requirements that involved formal study without undertaking a residential M.Div., so there was knowledge within those who ran that process of how non residential theological education might work. The Benson report had recommended that a new Independent Study Committee supervise all independent study for both the parish ministry and the ministry of education. The UUA would assume staffing responsibility for this Independent Study Program, rather than have it done by the volunteers from the MFC. Rev. Leslie Cronin (now Westbrook) was the first minister in this role, followed by Rev. Judith Mannheim. This new UUA independent Study Program became a primary path for working religious educators to complete their academic requirement and replaced the RE Accreditation Committee. The ISP remain housed within the UUA’s Section on Religious Education and continued to be run in a cooperative relationship with Meadville Lombard Theological School. The religious educators pursuing their M.Div. through the ISP noticed that they had requirements they had to fulfill beyond those for students in Meadville Lombard’s M.Div. program, including a requirement for a final thesis.

There were people who were part way through the Accreditation program in the late 70’s who would have to decide whether to shift their focus to ministerial fellowship, once the standards they had to meet became clear. Several of these early candidates reported that the standards at the beginning seemed to be a moving target. In assessing the market for religious education professionals during the early Eighties, it became clear that there would be many congregations and RE directors who did not want or need the

broad ministry skills and education that a minister of religious education had or aspired to. Ministers of Religious education would be requiring higher salaries than the Directors if the recognition as co equal ministers with parish ministers was to mean anything. Many congregations did not want to pay those salaries, and many aspiring religious educators did not want to incur the costs of pursuing a M.Div. degree or its equivalent, which was required for all people aspiring to be fellowshipped as a UU minister. Creating a credentialed Ministry of Religious Education could not mean that continuing education for lay religious educators was going away. If anything, what was needed was an ongoing lay RE professional education program that could be seen as equally demanding as the MFC’s requirements for ministers. A Lay Religious Education Leadership Committee was created by the UUA at the same time as the initial Board vote to create the Ministry of Religious Education. Working closely with leaders from LREDA and UUA staff, this committee laid the foundations for what became the Renaissance Program, a comprehensive series of trainings in issues and curricula for lay religious professionals. Completing a certain number of Renaissance modules became the moral equivalent of being an accredited lay DRE.

One of the Benson Committee’s recommendations was that the MFC have at least two professional religious educators among their members. The Board by convention had been already been using one of their appointments to insure that a minister in final fellowship with a religious education specialty was serving on the committee. Rev. Alexander Meek was the first such appointee in 1978. The MFC and the UUA Board resisted the lobbying from LREDA to specify that in addition to the LREDA appointee recommended by the Benson Committee one other seat on the MFC be designated for a lay religious educator. In 1979 the UUA General Assembly approved the Benson recommendation that the Liberal Religious Education Directors Association (LREDA) have the right to make one appointment to the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, equivalent to that given to the UU Ministers Association. LREDA’s influence within the MFC was significantly enhanced within an MFC membership of eleven resuming that the Board of Trustees might consider religious education credentials as a qualification for one of its appointments. LREDA’s first appointee was Rev. Betty Baker, who would serve a two year term. She would be succeeded in 1982 by Rev. Roberta Nelson, outgoing LREDA President and a member herself of the Benson Committee.

Requirements and Competencies Part 3 (1974 1981)

Three major developments shaped the Ministerial Fellowship Committee’s conversations about the requirements and the competencies that it wanted to see its candidates fulfill during the late Seventies. These were:

• the proposal for a “Grid” of competencies initially brought forward by the Ministerial Education Commission,

• the tensions between the MFC and the theological schools in defining their roles in preparing ministers for service in UU settings, and

• the question of how the diverse ministerial roles that were increasingly required of candidates would require diverse preparation requirements, particularly in the context of the consideration of a unique Ministry of Religious Education.

The Grid

Chapter 9 of this essay has already been devoted to the important 1974 report of the Ministerial Education Commission, chaired by Carl Scovel, that instigated a new understanding of requirements and competencies for ministerial education and formation which would prevail for the following three decades. The report reflected on the traditional academic competencies that should be required for candidates for ministry but strongly emphasized that courses in UU history, theology, and polity were essential no matter what seminary you attended. The report also described the practical competencies that they felt were not being adequately offered. This was reflected in a paragraph that listed these competencies and that described them as “highly desirable” (underlining is in the quoted report). Back in 1968 the survey of the MFC members that Joseph Barth had initiated to shed light on “personal leadership qualities essential for ministry” had touched on many of the practical and experiential competencies that the Commission identified but had not attempted to codify them or make them explicit to students as requirements. A striking addition that appears for the first time in the Commission’s Report is the use of the term “spiritual discipline” as something that UU ministers should have or experience.

Students from the Seventies recall their uncertainty about how to prepare for their Ministerial Fellowship Committee requirements and interview. Was completing their seminary courses and the required reading list all that they needed to do? How do they prepare to demonstrate “personal leadership qualities?” There was ambiguity about internships because the MFC encouraged them but had not yet required them, whereas the seminaries arranged and supervised them. The MFC had undertaken to describe a boundary around internships when they decided in 1973 that internships could not be a pathway to settlement in the same congregation, by creating the “three year rule”, a waiting period between the time an internship concluded and the time a person could be considered for a position in the internship church.

Seminary faculty could be detached or even hostile to the MFC’s requirements, nevertheless they felt the obligation to remind or even enforce them. Starr King student Jane Rzepka recalls being commissioned as late as 1976 to correspond on behalf of the student body with the MFC to request something more explicit about what the MFC required beyond reading and how a student should prepare for their interview.

Hoping to standardize the requirements that candidates from all seminaries should meet, the Commission on Ministerial Education proposed that their Commission be succeeded by an ongoing oversight body, a “Ministerial Education Council”. The Commission further recommended strongly that internships were the best way for students to exercise academic competencies in the field and develop the practical and experiential competencies (spiritual disciplines, worship skills, community activism) upon which they placed high importance. They wanted internships to become more accessible and routine, if not required. Again, they proposed a centralized approach: that the UUA take over management of internships, especially for those students from non UU schools (43% according to Scovel) which had no field education or internship program, and who wanted such an experience, or were encouraged by the MFC to find an internship.

In response to these recommendations, the MFC and the schools both worked together and fought together for the next four years, often within the structure of the Council on Education for Religious Professionals, to develop and implement what they described as “The Grid” of requirements and competencies for students. The term “grid” was the MFC’s invention and reflected the desire for students to have a chart that they could follow to meet requirements within an appropriate timetable. The Ministerial Education Commission Report does not use the term or offer any chart.

The MFC’s motivational leaders for this work were Chair Alan Deale, and member Charles Gaines, who had been the MFC member serving on the Ministerial Education Commission. In 1979, the new list of requirements, competencies and expectations known as the “grid” was implemented with students appearing before the MFC being held accountable for its content.

For both Starr King and Meadville Lombard, the years in which this conversation about the grid were happening coincided with their scheduled accreditation process with the American Association of Theological Schools. It was an especially important time for Starr King which received its first accreditation. At Meadville Lombard, the faculty were working on designing their new 3 year M.Div degree, finally acknowledging that the M.Div had become the standard degree required by the MFC and observed by other schools. The process had been going on for over a decade. The 1981 ML Self Study for ATS Accreditation acknowledges that the new curriculum “incorporates features that are either required or strongly encouraged by the UUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee. These include not only Unitarian Universalist history but also the CPE requirement and the full time parish

internship. Throughout its planning process the school has been in regular contact with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee and its representatives and has enjoyed frank mutual sharing of concerns about theological education.”

Tensions With The Schools

Arliss Ungar’s 2006 documentary history of Starr King School, With Vision and Courage brought together some helpful quotes and facts from various sources that have informed this section. She quotes Eugene Pickett’s memories of the immediate response to the Scovel Commission’s proposal for a centralized model for internships:

“CEPRL (the Council on Education for Professional Religious Leaders) was appointed with representatives from Starr King and Meadville Lombard among the membership. With a special grant from the Veatch Program, the Council contracted with Harvard’s School of Education to develop a comprehensive internship program that would serve as a model that the theological schools could use. Both Starr King and Meadville Lombard were critical of the Scovel Commission report and both were skeptical, as well as antagonistic, regarding the work of the new Council. A major area of contention was the fact that the Association provided little financial support for the schools, while at the same time asking the schools to cooperate with the Council in creating new programs. “

Money was sometimes a carrot and sometimes a stick that the Scovel Commission and later the Council would use to move the schools in the directions they desired. In its draft report, the Commission had recommended that the long-standing direct budget subsidies from the UUA to the schools be phased out by 1977, to be compensated by relief from the restriction that the schools’ independent fund raising could only support scholarships. When the new Council (initially called the Council on Ministerial Education) was established, its charge included securing money from a variety of UU sources (UUA, districts, congregations, foundations, grants, and fundraising) for theological education. During the three years of the Council’s life, and especially after Paul Carnes became President, both the Council and the schools were in regular conflicted conversations about funding sources and allocations for money for theological education. After the Council was disbanded, starting in 1981, a stable resolution of the funding controversies was finally achieved with the support of the UU Congregation at Shelter Rock, in the form of an endowment grant for a UUA Panel on Theological Education. The funds available to the Panel provided a relatively reliable line item budget grant to the schools for years to come and funding for other theological education programs, notably the Independent Study Program operated by the UUA and later Meadville Lombard.

At the heart of the controversies between the schools and the UUA was the question of who should control the standards, the forms, and the evaluations of theological education. Each of the schools strongly identified with Unitarian Universalism in history and current student enrollment had their own educational culture, which they felt strongly

about defending from interventions by those from “Boston”. The internships recommended by the Commission were more a point of contention with the schools than the academic priorities they articulated.

For the two UU identity theological schools, and for some the seminaries that students interested in UU ministry, contextual education was nothing new. They felt their experience was ignored or glossed over by the Commission and the Council. David Pohl, in an interview, remembered that he began to feel tension between President Malcom Sutherland of Meadville and the MFC before the Scovel Commission report back 1969 70. Although resisting the UUA’s control, internally Meadville Lombard was also examining its requirements. The Meadville Lombard Long Range Planning Committee (Donald Harrington, chair) citing student complaints that they lack suitable preparation for the routine work of the parish ministry, recommended in 1971 that the school “increase emphasis upon the student’s education in churchmanship,” and move towards replacing their MA/D.Min. degree with an M. Div. In 1973, as the preliminary Scovel Report was being released, Meadville Lombard changed Neil Shadle’s appointment and title to “Assistant Professor of Field Education,” overseeing their Internship program.

When the preliminary Scovel Report was released, Robert Kimball, Starr King’s President reported to their Board (as noted in the November 1973 Board minutes): “while Starr King has had an in field program for twenty five years, and more especially an intensive internship program for the last five years, the report ignores this fact in discussing its concept of internships…The Commission’s report seems to repudiate the plurality factor in the denomination, and the fact that no particular ‘ministerial model’ can fit all societies.”

The MFC had been experimenting with holding its meetings in the home cities of the identity schools since 1968, when they decided that the performance of the Regional MFC’s was uneven and eliminated them. The MFC Chairs and members therefore had annual opportunities for first hand feedback from school leaders and students. In an interview, Alan Deale described the school’s leaders as “furious about starting the internship program…. They said ‘You think we don’t do an adequate job!’ and the MFC said back to them ‘Yes, that’s right!’ “ This kind of bluntness was reflected in some unfortunate visits to the schools during the MFC meetings held regionally. The Starr King community was especially enraged by disrespectful comments and attitudes they perceived among MFC leaders and members in the late 70’s, but there were some tense gatherings at Meadville as well. In 1979, the tension came to a head when the Board of Trustees of Starr King School wrote a formal letter to the MFC complaining about the insensitivity and rudeness they had experienced. After assuming the role of Chair, Charles Gaines made improving relationships with the school communities a personal priority and records and memoirs from students and leaders from that time reflect an improvement in attitudes. In his role as Director of Ministerial Education at the UUA, former MFC member Leon Hopper helped interpret the

cultures and needs of these groups and institutions. He stood at a particularly important intersection following up on the Scovel Commission’s Report because he was the staff member who served the Commission on Professional Religious Leadership and took the lead on trying to develop a common model for internships that everyone could support. In September 1981, the internship requirement was finally formally implemented, not simply as a recommendation, but as a requirement for all candidates.

One of the important unintended consequences of the Scovel Commission Report and the tensions between the identity schools and the UUA was that schools came to know each other better and cooperate more in response to the perceived threat from a “common enemy”. The meetings of CEPRL to which representatives of the schools were invited created opportunities for conversation between the school Presidents and Board Chairs. At the suggestion of Meadville Lombard Board Chair Peter Fleck, who invited representatives of the schools to meet at his home to discuss common concerns, the Joint Schools Committee was created. Everyone involved reported institutionally and reflected personally on how valuable the bi annual meetings of this group were as they continued through most of the 80’s. Among their projects were cooperatively planned programs in UU history, internship supervisor training, and preaching. These programs were especially useful to independent study candidates.

Diverse Requirements for Candidates for Professional Religious Leadership

One of the recommendations of the Commission on Ministerial Education was that a Special Committee on Education and Certification for Professional Religious Leadership be created and commissioned to “explore the possibility of merging the functions of education and accreditation for professional religious leadership.” This group’s work was chaired by former UUA Board Secretary Russell Benson and their recommendations, delivered in 1977, became known as the Benson Report. Chapter 11 above goes into more depth about the response to this report.

The Scovel Commission had three years earlier than this listed separately the requirements and competencies it proposed for accredited religious education professionals. They presumed that there would have to be a stronger emphasis on some requirements (pedagogical and developmental theory, for example) and less emphasis on other requirements (preaching). Thus presumption carried over into the MFC’s discussions about any candidates for the Ministry of Religious Education would be received and credentialed.

The Religious Education Accreditation Program had already developed a demanding program of academic study, competency requirements, and in service experiences for religious educators who wanted to be credentialed. In some ways, the Accreditation Program was a dream model for those who most strongly supported more centralized control of credentialing requirements as envisioned by the Scovel Commission. This

credentialing program had been created by the UUA as an alternative to the proposals made just after consolidation that all religious professionals be credentialed by the MFC. It was not a program of a seminary. It was a program and process managed by the UUA. There was therefore no independent educational body that felt like they owned their own pedagogical process and culture in contrast with the UUA’s. The designers of the accreditation program were responsible primarily only to other professional religious educators, the participants in the program, and ultimately the UUA Board. Most assessments of the program’s requirements have said that it compares very favorably and indeed often surpasses in its rigor the MFC’s requirements which served as its initial model. In terms of practical experiences to develop experiential competencies, the requirement of evaluated “internship” service as part of preparation was there from the beginning. So why was there such resistance initially in the MFC to accepting and creating a Ministry of Religious Education and credentialing for it?

At the time, ministry was still understood primarily through the role of spiritual leadership from the pulpit. Although religious educators engaged in the ministry of worship leadership, people saw that leadership as primarily with children. Other forms of ministerial leadership were seen the same way. Religious educators engage in counseling, but primarily with families. Religious educators are administrators, but within one of the programs of the church. Religious educators teach and lead in justice work, but through curriculum creation and interpretation, and through motivating members of the church community, especially youth. The hierarchy of supervision in congregations, the significant compensation difference for religious educators, and the value assigned to the church’s religious education ministry all made it initially difficult for some MFC members to expect that they would have to prepare a unique group of competencies and requirements distinct from those for parish ministers. The rules changes that were drafted after the UUA General Assembly approved the Ministry of Religious Education began with distinct definitions of the two ordained ministries:

Rule 7. ..” For the Purposes of the Rules, the term Parish Ministry applies to those ministers who are qualified to perform all ministerial, administrative, and pastoral functions such as preaching, counseling, services of worship, celebrations of new life, marriages, memorial services, services to the community, and other services undertaken by ministers serving a society.

Parish Ministers shall be those who are settled in one or more societies which are members of the Association, in a chaplaincy, in one of our theological schools, or in the UUA or one of its related organizations, or as a teacher of religious studies in an institution of higher education.

For the Purposes of the Rules, the term Ministry of Religious Education applies to those ministers who are qualified to perform all educational functions relating to religious

growth and development in a society. These shall include administration and facilitation of programs for children, youth, and adults; counseling, services of worship, the celebration of new life, marriages, memorial services, and serving the larger community.

Ministers of Religious Education shall be those who are settled in one or more societies which are members of the Association, in one of our theological schools, in the UUA or one of its related organizations, or as a teacher of religious education in an institution of higher education.”

Despite the excellent reputation of the RE Accreditation program, it had not inspired a will to work towards a fully unified credentialing system for those who wanted to be fellowshipped Ministers of Religious Education. The definitions presume that parish ministers did not need to understand how to “perform all educational functions relating to religious growth and development in a society” but the list of all the things that an MRE should be able to do essentially matches the details in the parish minister’s definition.

The Accreditation Program was never intended to create the equivalent of an M.Div degree. This was not a requirement to be a credentialed religious educator. A Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work was required. Whether an accredited religious educator with a Bachelor’s degree would be required to complete an M.Div. was one of the initial discussions within the MFC as the MRE requirements were shaped. The resolution came easily. The “equivalency” language already in the MFC’s requirements in Rule 8 allowed for some interpretation of what would be equivalent. As noted previously in Chapter 11, the status of the experienced credentialed Directors of Religious Education who had led the charge towards creating the Ministry of Religious Education received special attention in the transition to credentialing MRE’s. The decision was made to recognize accredited religious educators who had three years of service as candidates for final ministerial fellowship without requiring them to complete an M.Div.

What about preaching skills? The MFC decided that they could continue to review the public presentation experiences of religious educators seeking to be recognized as ministers, and require the sermon as usual before the interview, but that they could give this aspect of the candidate’s presentation a different weight in their assessment.

The Grid was revised to include academic knowledge of philosophies of religious education, pedagogical theory, and the history of UU religious education, with the expectation that expectations would be higher and interview questions would be directed towards the candidates for fellowship as an MRE, with less or no emphasis on these competencies for candidates for the Parish Ministry.

In accepting the Ministry of Religious Education, the Fellowship Committee and the Department of Ministry devised one limiting requirement for the proposal to go forward: “tracks”. This meant in part a recognition that there were now two standards for

ministerial formation reflected to some extent in the Grid and the Rules and Policies of the MFC. No one could prepare and apply for fellowship an MRE and a Parish Minister in the same application and interview. They had to be done separately (although some of the preparation requirements could be completed concurrently. After preliminary fellowship, however, the two tracks were similarly firmly distinguished. An MRE could not be a candidate for a parish ministry settlement in the UUA without a special application to the MFC. Similarly, a Parish Minister could not be a candidate for an MRE position. A person wishing to “change tracks” had to apply for permission from the MFC.

This “track” distinction continued for the next two decades to shape the professional ministry as the MFC moved forward during the late 80’s to distinguish as a distinct identity and track the community-based ministries previously encompassed within both the Parish and MRE definitions. By the turn of the century, however, there was increasing recognition that the track system had become unmanageable.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 3 (1981 1991)

The decade represented in the years covered in this and the next three chapters of this history of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (roughly the Eighties) is a period of contradictions and contrasts. Three chairs served during this time: Rev. Charles Gaines, Rev. Nick Cardell, and lay member Burton Johnson. David Pohl described this decade as “our most challenging years since merger”.

An Increasing Workload Requires Attention to Process

The MFC during this decade was being asked to do more than it had ever done before. There were more candidates applying for preliminary fellowship and these candidates were different from the candidates a decade earlier more experienced, more female, more LGBT. Although there were more candidates applying, the MFC only had so much capacity to schedule interviews. Compared to the previous decade, the Committee had added an average of one more interview per MFC meeting during the Eighties, but the increase in interviews was eliciting complaints from the volunteer members. In addition to the load of interviews and preliminary fellowship renewals increasing, this decade would be filled with tensions with the UU identity schools about who was really in charge of ministerial formation. At the same time as this discussion was occurring, the MFC was faced with an increasing number of disciplinary cases involving ethical violations that had never been publicly acknowledged and discussed before. The MFC’s response to these disciplinary cases resulted in what one member from that time has described as a “flood of upset, anger and vituperation”. These different challenges are described under the thematic chapters that form the structure of this history, but the reader needs to keep in mind that everything in these next four chapters was happening at once! The stress had consequences. By the late Eighties there would be calls from ministerial students, from ministers, and finally from the UU Ministers Association to undertake a comprehensive re evaluation of centralized ministerial credentialing and the ways in which we practiced and understood it. Chapter 18 describes the culmination of and response to these calls for re evaluation in the decision of the Commission on Appraisal to undertake a comprehensive study of “Our Professional Ministry.”

The MFC entered the Eighties with Rev. Charles Gaines becoming Chair of the Committee at the last meeting held in 1979 after serving as a member since 1972. Approaching the mandatory term limit of eight years, the appointment of Gaines as Chair required some lobbying with the UUA Board’s Committee on Committees. They were urged to make an exception to the term limitation so that Gaines could serve as chair for at least two years and possibly more. As 1984 approached, David Pohl was granted sabbatical leave. Gaines successfully applied for the vacant position of Director of Ministerial Settlement at the UUA. He also became interim Executive Secretary of the MFC during

Pohl’s sabbatical. He continued his relationship with the Committee as a staff member providing support until 1990. Charles Gaines’ eighteen year relationship with the MFC is second only to that of David Pohl in longevity and influence.

Gaines’ continuing leadership in all his roles brought a more orderly and inclusive process for panel interviews into the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. The ease with which the extroverted men on the panel who were accustomed to being leaders in small groups could dominate questioning and post interview conversations was changing, in part because of formal process reforms. Gaines brought a new discipline to the process of preparing for the interview and dividing up the questions among the members. David Pohl remembered in his own essay on MFC history that Gaines would preside over the meeting “with a stop-watch atop his carefully organized papers, starting and ending our sessions on schedule, always focused on the agenda, always guided by a deeply held Universalist vision of an egalitarian inclusive and growth-oriented ministry. Charles was especially gifted at discerning the committee’s process, finding expression in such aphorisms as ‘A No Decision will always postpone what should be dealt with now’, or ‘Sermons are for candidates to deliver and members to hear; not vice versa’. “

THE DIVERSIFYING IDENTITIES OF MFC MEMBERS

The culture of the MFC was changing during the 80’s not only through the identities of the candidates they were seeing but also by the identities of the MFC members themselves. In an interview, Charles Gaines reflected on his belief that one factor in his being appointed to the MFC was that he was a Universalist. It’s a speculation, but it may be that he was among the very last significant UUA appointees whose pre consolidation Universalist identity was a consideration. The buildup to the 1977 UUA Presidential election had included pressure on Gordon McKeeman to become a candidate (which he did) because there were those who believed the field needed a Universalist. By the 1985 Presidential election, however, the identity focus in UUA leadership had shifted to age and gender. Rev. William F. Schulz was a post consolidation ministerial candidate who came of age as a Unitarian Universalist. Moderator Sandra Caron was a lay female candidate.

Rev. Nick Cardell became Chair in 1984 and was the last MFC chair whose ordination (Unitarian) preceded the Consolidation of the Unitarians and Universalists. His early life was shaped by his wartime experience as an enlisted man and POW. He had served with Gaines on the Benson Commission that recommended the creation of the Ministry of Religious Education and subsequently was appointed in 1981 to the MFC by the UUMA in the middle of his longest ministry at May Memorial UU Church in Syracuse, NY. Cardell wanted to enhance the worship life of the Committee and hand crafted a chalice for the Committee’s exclusive use. One of the constant refrains for which he is remembered is “Fellowship is not a verb!”. He saw the Committee’s work as gatekeepers to a community, rather than as agents conveying a status.

Burton Johnson succeeded Cardell as Chair in 1988 as only the second lay person to assume the role and the first since 1975. Johnson was probation officer and a member of First Unitarian Church in San Diego. He had been a minor league baseball umpire in earlier years and had an umpire’s decisiveness and integrity when it came to “calling the balls and strikes” as he saw them during the misconduct cases which took a lot of his time as Chair.

The MFC’s culture of shared leadership among lay and clergy members was sustained during the Eighties. This has been a consistent commitment of the UUA Board and the Committee. In every decade of its existence the UUA’s MFC has had at least one lay person serve as Chair. David Pohl in one of his own historical essays on the MFC, recalled a time around 1980 when the UUA Board was being lobbied to change the balance of ministers and lay people on the MFC. He quoted from a letter sent to the Board by the MFC in response: “The perspective of our lay members offers insights that cannot be duplicated by the professional religious leaders whose perspective is often more collegial.

Congregations, after all, call the ministers to their service.” During periods of evaluation when the votes of lay and ministerial members on the panel were recorded, they would bear out the anecdotal recollections of many MFC members that the lay members were harder on the candidates than the clergy. In May of 1985, in a recognition of the demands on working lay members of the Committee, the MFC voted to meet Thursday through Sunday instead of Monday through Thursday, except during the month of September, when ministers felt that they could not give up a Sunday in the pulpit.

Throughout the eighties, the culture shift that was most obviously represented in the membership of the Committee had to do with the number of women serving. Gaines recalled that during his tenure the maximum number of women on the committee was three. By 1984, the MFC was half female. Of the five women members by the fall of 1984, three were ministers and two were lay people. The change happened in part because of the recognition that the MFC needed to regularly have religious educators, both MRE’s and lay DRE’s within their membership if they were going to credential Ministers of Religious Education as of 1981. The Liberal Religious Educators Association was given the authority to make an appointment to the MFC, and all of the LREDA appointees during the Eighties were women. In the fall of 1984, both of the appointees from the UUA Board and the Canadian appointee were woman, one a minister and the other two lay leaders. Appointments by both the professional groups and by the UUA Board’s Committee on Committees were starting to be influenced by a perception of the identities needed on the MFC. Despite this, people of color and LGBTQ identities throughout this decade never were represented on the MFC by more than one member. Gaines recalled that his MFC “had to do internal learning about sexism and homophobia” and that he was “criticized by the black and gay ministers for his blinders.” The criticism was taken to heart, for in his later staff roles in the UUA Charles Gaines is remembered well for his advocacy and support for settlements for LGBT ministers and for women during a time when congregational cultures were still leery of both.

CONSTANT SELF-EVALUATION LEADS TO CHANGES

Members of the Committee who served in the Eighties recall the commitment to self evaluation that became part of every meeting. Out of these conversations, usually held at the end of meetings, came many of the changes and innovations in Committee process. One frustration that Committee members and staff in many decades of MFC history have expressed is the inability to study whether success in a ministerial career is correlated positively with success in completing the MFC’s requirements as efficiently as possible. One of the dilemmas in undertaking such a study is that you can’t prove a negative. In other words, you can’t demonstrate that candidates who were given 2’s, 3’s, or 4’s had more success in their careers than they would have if they had been voted a 1 and given fellowship without further work. An important part of the MFC’s self-evaluation at each meeting was hearing from the student in preliminary fellowship who had been invited to sit with the Committee at that meeting and share their experience and their own evaluation. These student evaluations regularly offered insights that the Committee took to heart. Later, when it became possible to share widely the written reflections from each student through the internet, the Committee had no hesitation about doing so

There were four MFC meetings a year throughout the Eighties, and two of them continued to be held in Chicago and Berkeley, usually with a public reception at Meadville or Starr King that frequently included questions and answers or a discussion. Members stayed in hotels and would go out in small groups for meals in the evening or on their own to visit friends. There would be a common dinner shared together in a nearby restaurant on the final night. The informal evenings contributed to intimacy and trust among the Committee members. After 1983 when the UUA added a third property on Mt. Vernon Place to its real estate portfolio (later named Pickett House) committees were encouraged to meet and sleep in the same buildings. The communal intimacy among the members of the committee was further enhanced. The opportunity to live together during meetings made the MFC something more than a group of people having a meeting to accomplish a task, but to become more of a community. This became very important during the years when at times the Committee felt like they were under siege. Sometimes the combinations of Committee members at a given time proved to be more contentious than at other times. Then terms would end, or the Chair would change, and the atmosphere of the committee would change. Every so often circumstances could create a turnover of three to four members in this committee of eleven members within a single year, and that would make a huge difference in the social dynamics of the committee. The year 1985 86 is remembered as such a time.

In addition to reading the candidates packets and the interviews, the business agenda of the MFC added further to the demands on the members of the Committee. Major reforms and revisions undertaken during this decade required subcommittee work and this had to be done outside of meetings. Without an internet, this work was best done face

to face, hence there could be yet more meetings in suitably accessible cities for the subcommittee participants. MFC members might also take on UUA related responsibilities, representing the Committee at GA and at other UUA task groups or interest groups that emerged during the Eighties.

At the end of 1982, the MFC voted to limit each meeting to twenty interviews starting in 1983. The actual number of interviews usually would usually end up being less than twenty as the 80’s proceeded, depending on demand. The load of preliminary fellowship renewals, disciplinary cases, and routine committee business also required a meeting that filled four days. Member Brad Greeley is remembered as complaining often about what he called “the crush of business and the rush of lunch”. In 1988, the members’ complaints brought about an experiment in limiting interviews to sixteen per meeting. Within two years, however, the stream of candidates required that they abandon that limitation and raised the limit back to a maximum of 19 interviews.

The Committee decided to take a look at what slowed down their decision making process in interviews and concluded that the choice they usually had to make between a “Category 1” decision (cleared for fellowship) and a “Category 2” decision (required to come back for a second interview) was too limiting. The “Category 3” decision, used more rarely, was a denial of preliminary fellowship and recommendation to discontinue seeking it. (Note here that I’ll use a convention usually found in MFC documents from this time, namely Arabic numerals to describe the 3 category decision system and Roman numerals to describe what came next, a five category decision system.) If they could avoid some of the return interviews previously required by their “2”’s, and create a new category of decision that required more work but not a return interview, it could help keep the increasing waiting list for interviews from getting out of control. In a letter to the MFC dated June 19, 1984, Rev. Peter Raible first argued for expanding the categories of decisions from three to five and drafted the language that continued to describe each category for the next thirty five years. After discussion in 1984 and 1985 meetings, this new grading system was adopted, to begin February 1986. The changes sought to distinguish Category I as being approved for fellowship with the usual routine contingencies (completion of internship and the awarding of the degree) from a new “soft” approval for preliminary fellowship, a new Category II. The new grading system for interviews was changed to read:

Category I = the usual contingencies (degree, completion of internship and/or CPE, and eligible to begin the settlement process.)

Category II = contingencies other than the usual ones, and the Committee will be specific as to whether the candidate can begin the settlement process or as to whether the contingencies must be fulfilled before the candidate can begin the settlement process.

The old Category II was described in the new five part proposal in similar terms as the new Category III i.e. encouraging progress for our ministry, but there is sufficient work still to be done, either academic, in personality, or institutional understanding, so that the MFC wants to see the candidate again when there has bene completion of the work outlined.

The same logic around expanding the “Category 1” into two possible decisions was then applied to the old “Category 3” decision, the denial of fellowship, with two new Categories IV and V being created to allow the Committee to give strong discouragement to a candidate (the “IV”) without completely closing the door. In 1989 the Committee voted to give the Executive Committee the initial responsibility for recommending who could come back to re-interview after any decision less than Category III: “Applicants to appear before the Committee from candidates who have previously received a 4, 5, or NO without encouragement to return shall be reviewed by the Executive Committee. In cases where the Executive Committee does not favor the candidate’s return appearance, that potential appearance shall not be scheduled until and unless the full Committee agrees to it, which it is not obliged to do.”

It is not clear how widely understood this change was among candidates and congregations despite the publicity given to it. Correspondence with the MFC from 1987 still refers to the candidates receiving “green, red or yellow lights”.

On the business side, in 1980, the MFC began using what Charles Gaines called “subcommittees” as a model for dividing up the business so that it all did not have to be discussed in full session. Fifteen years later these subcommittees became consolidated into standing “Working Groups”. Regular use of subcommittees spread out the authority and responsibility for the MFC’s business among the members. Gaines described them in a 1989 letter to David Sammons as a “significant accomplishment” of his during his tenure as chair. He wrote: “The meetings seemed hassled due to the amount of business. So I pushed for subcommittees, as well as the attitude that trusted what the sub committees reported, rather than having to rehearse each subcommittee’s process, and amend each subcommittee’s recommendations. This was handled by having each subcommittee begin with brain storming from everyone, then an interim report was made in order to incorporate serious questions or objections about the direction the subcommittee was going, and (ended) with a final report merely for fine tuning.”

In November 1984 the Committee authorized a prototype of what would eventually become an Executive Committee. This subcommittee met together to set and manage the business agenda and to assign the renewals. It consisted of the Chair, the Executive Secretary, the Ministerial Education Director, and two additional members appointed by the Chair. This informal governance mechanism was not formalized in the Rules of the MFC until 1994. In a 2017 interview, Rev. Midge Skwire, chair of the Committee from 1993 96,

said that the current model of Executive Committee with its expanded responsibilities for hearing the disciplinary cases, did not fully emerge until 1994.

PRELIMINARY FELLOWSHIP RENEWALS BECOME A CONCERN

David Pohl reported that the average number of preliminary fellowship renewals the MFC had to engage with annually in the period between 1981 and 1993 almost doubled to 124 compared to the previous decade. Rather than the full committee dealing with each renewal, the increase required that each member be assigned three to four renewals per meeting. The new tracks system that was implemented in the Eighties (described in Chapter 15) added a dimension of complexity to the renewal process as ministers sought to have work in one track of ministry count for a year of renewal. In 1988 the MFC voted that an individual must spend 50% of their time in an approved position for it count for renewal. In 1989 the Committee voted that “only one interim ministry, whether for one or two years, can be counted toward preliminary fellowship renewal.”

If the renewal application was seen as problematic, the matter would be discussed with the Executive Secretary and a recommendation brought to the full committee. In May 1985 the Committee responded to members’ concerns about some of the increasing number of problematic preliminary fellowship renewals, and voted: “Ministers in preliminary in preliminary fellowship who demonstrate significant problems so as to raise questions about their suitability for the UU ministry may be asked to return for a future interview with the MFC. Significant problems may be one or more of the following: (1) ongoing, persistent difficulty in securing a placement; (2) continuing problems of personality and conflict with parishes served; (3) evaluations for renewal which invoke issues of significant concern.”

RESPONDING TO CANDIDATES FROM HISTORICALLY MARGINALIZED IDENTITIES

In tandem with the conversations happening within the MFC about the quality of the candidates they were seeing, the UUA staff, the seminaries, and the UUMA were having conversations about their recruitment and settlement for new ministers. These conversations were now focused on African American, gay and lesbian seminarians. Transgender candidates wouldn’t be on the radar for some time to come. Rev. Mark Belletini recalls that he was not “out” to the MFC when he saw the committee in 1976, but by 1981 when he was called to be the minister of Starr King UU Church in Hayward, CA he was an openly gay minister. During the early 80’s as more already settled ministers came out, the MFC started to see more openly gay candidates at each meeting. Nevertheless, it was still a challenge during the settlement process for a new minister to be out. Ken Sawyer’s memory is that in 1984 Rev. Lindi Ramsden was the first openly lesbian candidate the Committee interviewed. She received preliminary fellowship and the Committee members were enthusiastic about her ministry but pessimistic about her settlement prospects. They voted at the end of that meeting to send a letter to the UUA Board urging

remedial action. The UUMA discussed whether affirming equal opportunity within their own Guidelines would make any difference. It would not be until 1988 that a UUA program for congregations beginning search called Beyond Categorical Thinking would be implemented.

A UUA Affirmative Action Task Force created in 1978 during the Carnes Administration was concerned with settlement for both African Americans and women.

The Task Force remained active throughout the 80’s. As noted previously in Chapter 10, the concern about recruiting more women for ministry became less urgent during the Eighties because women were enrolling in larger numbers, especially mid life women. The focus of the conversation about women in ministry was now about career development and unequal compensation for similar positions. MFC members were anxious about the financial futures of candidates who came before them with no financial cushion and seminary debt to retire from a minister’s salary in mid-life.

In 1979 upon becoming UUA President, Rev. Dr. Eugene Pickett expressed a strong commitment on behalf of his administration to take up issues of racial justice in the UUA, after these concerns had languished in the post-Black-Empowerment years of the late Seventies. This resulted in the completion of an anti racism “audit” in April of 1981. In December 1981, the MFC ‘s UUMA appointee, Rev. Nick Cardell, responding to an inquiry from UUMA president Rev. Ed Harris. He told the UUMA that the MFC would be taking up the “continuing question of the Committee’s responsibility for the largely white complexion of our ministry”. At that time, there were only four African UU American ministers settled in congregations, and two others who were still in fellowship but retired or serving in higher education. Three African American UU ministers, all of them involved with BUUC and BAC, had resigned their fellowship. However, there were some African American candidates in the pipeline that the MFC was expecting or had seen, and three of them were women.

The MFC responded to suggestions and lobbying from individuals and groups regarding the role that their policies played in limiting number of African American candidates. At the 1981 General Assembly, an organized multicultural coalition of ministers and lay leaders from UU urban congregations successfully advocated for passage of a business resolution that called for the creation of a task force on urban ministry within the UUA’s Department of Ministry and Congregational Services, and that called for “the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (to) examine its regulations for Fellowship for their impact on urban ministry.“ Rev. Dr. Jack Mendelsohn was asked to chair the UUA Committee on Urban Concerns and Ministry.

In May 1982, the MFC invited representatives of the Urban Church Coalition to meet with the Committee to understand better their needs and concerns for ministerial leadership. Their leaders and members included people from most of the multicultural

congregations that had significant numbers of people of color on staff and in the congregation, and ministers working in community based ministry. Work began on a proposal specifically designed to make it easier for “urban ministers” (almost all were people of color) who had ordination in other denominations but who were in basic sympathy with Unitarian Universalism to receive UU fellowship without renouncing any other denominational credentialing that they had. The belief was that this change would be an advantage in attracting “minorities” into our ministry.

In September 1983 in a passionate statement sent to the UUA Board of Trustees on behalf of the full MFC Charles Gaines wrote: “Of over 1000 ministers in fellowship, there are only 17 who are ministers of color. … The Ministerial Fellowship Committee believes that the traditional requirement to waive all connections with other religious bodies before becoming a minister in fellowship with the UUA is particularly threatening and a stumbling-block to those who see our raw statistics and wonder whether or not reality makes room for them in our settlement market.  We believe that a viable affirmative action initiative is one which would provide for settlement and ministerial fellowship without that requirement. Our intent is to make this a Policy of the Committee if the Board of Trustees concurs with our Rules changes in order to implement it.”

In the spring of 1983, the MFC circulated this proposed policy change asking for comment: “It shall be the policy of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee to require ministers of other denominations accepting fellowship in the UUA to relinquish their credentials for ministry in other denominations.  However, the MFC may waive this requirement in those instances that serve and advance the affirmative action or interfaith values and intentions of the UUA.”

To affectively implement this policy change, the MFC asked the Board to concur in a change in their Rules, adding the underlined words in the rule governing the time limits for successive preliminary fellowship renewals: “Except in the case of ministers serving in interfaith or affirmative action situations, approved by the Committee, where evaluation procedures cannot yet be arranged, no person in Full Preliminary Fellowship shall remain in any one renewal period for more than three years and there shall be no more than two renewals before the decision on Final Fellowship is made.”

In the UUMA Newsletter for March 1983, in a letter of support for the MFC’s proposal to enable dual fellowship, Jack Mendelsohn wrote: “Dual fellowship is the posting of a notice that we are in earnest about changing our complexion.”

While the wording of the policy acknowledged both “interfaith action” and “affirmative action” as two circumstances in which dual fellowship would be permitted, the implementation of the policy during the Eighties was exclusively around candidates of color seeking preliminary fellowship. White candidates were told not to expect that this was an option for them. When Rebecca Parker became President of Starr King and in 1991

applied for fellowship while retaining her United Methodist standing, she broke through that informal barrier. To consider the request, the MFC asked member Charlie Kast to review the policy and draft a statement of rationale that could be offered to both the members of the Committee and later to those who questioned the decision.

When this policy change passed it began to make a modest difference as an affirmative action initiative. At the end of 1983, there were thirteen African American ministers in fellowship. In 1988 when a major new effort at affirmative action in settlement of ministers of color was undertaken, there was a total of eighteen ministers either in fellowship or in candidacy status for ministry who were African American. However, the pipeline of new candidates was carrying a thin stream when measured against the aspirations of both active African American UU leaders and the hopes expressed by white UUA leaders at all levels.

In 1988 the UUA Affirmative Action Task Force proposed a pilot program in affirmative action in settlement, asked UUMA members to help identify young people of color who had potential for ministry, and encouraged the UUMA Executive Committee to make a statement to members in support of “equal opportunity”, as follows:

1. That all ministers educate themselves and their congregations in Equal Opportunity

2. That our ministers decline to accept a call to any congregation that refuses to cooperate with a Dept. of Ministry offer of an equal opportunity program or pastoral intervention

3. That the Dept. of Ministry be requested to initiate a training program to enable ministers to acquire skills in overcoming practices of discrimination and ministers so trained may accept calls or appointments to said societies without being in violation of this policy

4. That every chapter address these issues in their 1989 90 programs.

Rev. Dr. William (Bill) Jones was the only African American on the MFC for eight years during the Eighties. He served as an appointee from among the members of the UUA Board. Jones had an opportunity to witness both the successes and the disappointments of the recruitment, fellowshipping, and settlement efforts that happened during this decade. During the work that the MFC did on revising the Grid in the later Eighties, Jones was both a gadfly and an expert consulted on what basic competence ministers should be able to demonstrate around issues described with the euphemisms “urban concerns”, “social justice” and “racial justice”. In August 1988 he offered the MFC its first continuing education experience around these issues. The importance of his presence as a member of the MFC during these years cannot be underestimated.

Jones’ tireless and persistent concern for theological education and ministerial formation continued after he completed his years on the MFC. He immediately concurrently accepted an invitation to serve on the Board of Starr King School for Ministry during his last year of MFC service. The school’s Board minutes of November 1989 describe his encouragement to the SKSM community to continue to not only give a high priority to recruitment of students of color, but also to recognize the difference that faculty of color could make to that possibility.

As the 80’s ended, the UUA’s Black Concerns Working Group (BCWG) sought to specifically engage with the MFC about their role in supporting greater diversity within the UU ministry. Winifred Norman had become the next UUA Board member appointee to the Committee following the conclusion of Bill Jones’ term. Norman was an African American lay woman. She was asked to be the broker of a meeting in September 1990 between the MFC membership and BCWG. Here we see an African Americans who accepted an appointment to what was still a token role being asked to be the convener and leader of the conversations that the white leaders could not seem to have on their own. When Winifred Norman left the Committee in May 1991, there was a brief and final period of two meetings in the fall of 1991 when the MFC was all white, until Rev. Mark Morrison Reed began his term of service in January 1992.

SPECIALIZED MINISTRIES PART 3 (1981 1991)

Between 1977 and 1991, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee gradually moved away from the belief that there was but one form of ministry with a variety of minority specializations. Although the MFC began granting ministerial fellowship to Ministers of Religious Education in 1981, these were still parish ministries in the literal sense, i.e. salaried ministries that took place within congregational settings. By 1991 the MFC’s attitude changed. They brought to the General Assembly for approval a by law change that defined three ministry identities, each equally valid and valued: Parish Ministry, the Ministry of Religious Education, and Community Ministry. This chapter tells the story of how the MFC came to recognize the third of these three identities : Community Ministry.

David Pohl wrote several speeches during these years and later one historical paper about the development of the Community Ministry track by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Kathleen R. Parker’s book Sacred Service in Civic Space: Three Hundred Years of Community Ministry in Unitarian Universalism (Meadville Lombard Press, Chicago 2007) tells the full story of the evolution of our community ministries. These have been principal resources for this chapter.

In Chapter 11 we described the decision made by the MFC in 1974 to end their four year experience with “Specialized Ministry” credentialing. Henceforth, all candidates would be credentialed for fellowship as “parish ministers”, and then, according to the policy, they “could engage with whatever specialty they chose. Looking back twenty eight years later, Pohl wrote that “in retrospect, this action was ill advised and short sighted, prompted more by frustration, however understandable, than patient and creative thinking. Within a few years, we were once again re-visiting and revising our rules and policies to accommodate and validate a number of specialties.”

Starting in 1977, the MFC’s decisions about both policies and candidates signaled and openness to admitting into preliminary fellowship ministers who were clear they did not want or expect to serve in traditional parish setting. The MFC was slowly expanding the definition of parish ministry, rather than acknowledging another ministerial identity. The changes in policy language came into 1982, after lobbying from the Urban Church Coalition. Parish ministry would now include: “pastoral counselors, chaplains, and community ministers (working in) prisons, universities, and hospitals as well as counseling clienteles, urban missions, and ecumenical concerns.” The community ministers coming before the Committee prior to that policy change would have to be able to tell the MFC in what sense their work was a ministry, and how and to whom they were accountable. The Committee also looked to see if and how these candidates understood their accountability to their colleagues, and to the Association. The community ministry candidates the MFC saw during 1977 83, according to Pohl, included twenty nine hospital chaplains or pastoral counselors

and six military, correctional, or campus chaplains. All these candidates had to meet the same requirements as the parish ministry candidates. With the expanded definition of parish ministry formalized, the MFC began to consider requirements equivalencies that would match the career intentions of the candidates. In 1985, the Committee approved a request from Dorothy Emerson for what would be the first “community ministry internship”, i.e. a recognized internship that did not involve any parish setting. Emerson worked jointly at Tufts Medical Center as a chaplain intern and at the UU Legal Ministry in Boston.

In 1978, the year following the informal decision to work within a broader understanding of parish ministry, the Benson Report was under consideration. Their recommendation to credential religious educators as ministers was adopted by the MFC the following year. Having affirmed a “single ministry” in 1974 the MFC now worked on creating two forms of credentialed parish ministry to go into effect by 1981. The community ministers, however, would remain encompassed within the broader definition of parish ministry.

During the process of creating the Ministry of Religious Education, there was a focus on understanding what competencies should be uniquely be expected from MRE candidates. The feedback to the MFC and the discussion within the Committee during the process of creating the Ministry of Religious Education revealed the problems with seeing these ministries as very different. Most MFC members understood that parish ministers needed to have religious education skills, especially when a majority of them would serve in smaller congregations where they would be the only professional staff. There were some parish ministers who wanted the MRE recognition as soon as it was available, including some who had been through the RE credentialing program. Candidates asked whether they could have their Parish Ministry interview and their MRE interview at the same MFC meeting. The Committee said “No”. Within the MFC’s leaders, there remained a feeling that they should continue affirm what was common and singular in ministry rather than emphasize the differences. Pohl quotes a letter from Charles Gaines to Roberta Nelson from 1981: “more and more, the Committee seems to be stressing the word ‘ministry’, rather than the qualifying words that distinguish the two.”

The first interviews for Ministry of Religious Education candidates took place at the September 1980 meeting of the MFC. All the candidates were accredited DRE’s and respected leaders within LREDA: Ann Fields, Beth Ide, Berna Derby, Roberta Nelson, Ellen Nelson, and Marjorie (Midge) Skwire. In shaping the requirements prior to this first set of interviews, the MFC had reserved the right to require Clinical Pastoral Education of any candidate it felt could benefit from the experience. In this first group, one candidate received this requirement.

Despite the awareness that the two forms in ministry had much more in common than they had divergences when it came to skills and competencies, the MFC had told the ministers already in parish ministry fellowship that the new MRE’s could not be candidates for parish ministry positions. A violation of this understanding could result in loss of fellowship. This barrier was tested soon when in 1983 MRE Ellen Brandenburg was asked by the congregation in Marblehead, MA to apply for their interim ministry position. The Settlement office was receptive to the possibility. Ellen was a former UUA staff member, and a respected DRE and MRE. The MFC gave permission for the settlement without penalty. Already the barrier between the two ministries was being understood as more permeable.

Even as this “track system” with three distinct ministries was being constructed during the Eighties, a major headache was already becoming apparent. Ministers aren’t trains. They can’t be compelled to stay put on one career track. No minister can be faulted for having a change of heart or a new opportunity lead them from the ministry they originally expected and intended to a different form of ministry. Ellen Brandenburg did not expect to be encouraged to take an interim parish ministry shortly after her ordination. Having completed the inaugural community ministry internship and received her preliminary fellowship as a community minister, Dorothy Emerson accepted a call to a parish ministry in a congregation that said that it wanted to be involved in supporting community ministries and she stayed there ten years. It would not be long before members of the committee began to realize that their rules did not match the reality of congregation’s needs and ministers’ lives.

The work involved in establishing the Ministry of Religious Education from 1979-82 took up most of the MFC’s business time they could devote to “specialized ministries”. However, even as the MRE category was being finally approved by a vote at the 1981 General Assembly, community ministers were organizing themselves. At that same General Assembly, thirty chaplains, counselors, and other ministers working outside the parish responded to an invitation from Rev. Robert Rafford to meet to get to know one another better and organize around their interests. These meetings continued for three more General Assemblies, and in 1984, the group gave itself a name: Extra Parochial Clergy (EPC). Two years later, the EPC got grant funding to hold their own pre GA conference at the 1986 General Assembly in Rochester NY.

Another thread of community ministry organizing from across the country began to intertwine with EPC at that 1986 pre GA conference. Rev. Jody Shipley, ordained in 1979, and serving in Fresno CA had sustained a community ministry practice along with her parish ministries and had a fierce commitment to greater recognition for community ministry. Shipley attended the 1986 pre GA conference and later that week met with the Commission on Appraisal to encourage their attention towards community ministry in a future study.

Later in the fall of 1986, a Convocation on Community Focused Ministry was planned by the UUA. The Benevolent Fraternity of Unitarian Churches in Boston, the oldest and best funded UU community ministry agency in the country, served as the co host with the UUA’s Extension Department. Thirty ministers met together over four days, finding mutual support and receiving encouragement (and statistics!) from David Pohl. He reported that 100 out of 1150 actively serving ministers in the UUA were serving ministries outside congregations. This group formed a Steering Committee to continue their work, and through their newsletter, Jody Shipley became a prominent voice for this group now known as Community Focused Ministries (CFM).

Now there were two organizations of for those in community focused ministry. The older group, Extra-Parochial Clergy (EPC) had always included and welcomed lay people serving in ministries outside the parish, and this became an issue as the two groups discussed combining forces. At the next General Assembly in Little Rock in 1987, leaders from both groups drafted by laws for a new combined organization, to be called The Society for the Larger Ministry (SLM). The new organization retained the inclusion of lay ministers. Insofar as SLM now became an accountability partner for the MFC in their future conversations about credentialing, this inclusive attitude presented no problems since the MFC was already a group that similarly had lay and ministerial participants. It was somewhat more awkward for the UU Ministers Association as SLM became the voice of community ministry within their ranks.

Continuing GA and fall annual meetings of The Society for the Larger Ministry brought forth an SLM “Proclamation” which attracted more attention and more candidates identifying with community ministry. In 1987 SLM’s potential membership included 140 UUA ministers in fellowship in all of the ministries in which they were recognized. In 1989 a Task Force on Ministerial Fellowship, chaired by Steve Schick, was organized within SLM to begin a dialogue with the MFC and the Department of Ministry on recognition of a new track ministry. SLM was also successful in their lobbying with the Commission on Appraisal to include the concerns of community ministry in their next study, which was to be focused on “Our Professional Ministry”.

David Pohl has described the conversations within the UUA staff and the MFC on how to respond to this push to recognize community ministry as a distinct track of fellowship: “..during the 1988 1989 year, Judith Meyer, then Ministerial Education Director, reviewed current requirements for ministerial fellowship, suggesting that whatever we do about larger ministries, we should not entertain lowering what she called a ‘baseline set of competencies’. An outline for a three track ministry was discussed, revised, and later adopted by the Committee that specified core requirements for all: an M.Div. degree or its equivalent, psychological review/career assessment, CPE, reading list and active membership in a UU society. Internship would continue to be required, but the site would depend on the particular ministry track. CPE would also be site specific: either hospital

based or with a community agency. Finally, it was agreed that any minister wishing to ‘switch tracks’ would need to submit credentials and a retooling proposal for the appropriate track. Critical to the Committee’s decision to recommend that Community Ministry be adopted as a third track of our ministry was its insistence that there be provision for accountability, evaluation, and ongoing review, and a significant involvement in the Unitarian Universalist movement. The specificity of these provisions had been lacking twenty years earlier when we had sought to create a viable structure for validating other than parish based ministries.”

The MFC passed its recommendation on to the UUA Board in the spring of 1990, and they recommended it to the 1990 General Assembly for a first vote. As a C Bylaw amendment, it required a second vote in 1991, and at that time the Community Ministry track became official. The following November the MFC approved the changes in the Grid and in the forms it required, Community Ministry candidates began seeing the Committee in 1991. As with the creation of the Ministry of Religious Education, there was a need to “grandparent” into preliminary or final fellowship as a Community Minister those who already had parish ministry preliminary or final fellowship but who had been in a distant or severed relationship with the UUA because they were working in community ministries. It was especially awkward for those whose positions did not fit into the MFC’s existing requirements for moving through preliminary fellowship or retaining full fellowship. One of the happiest outcomes of the new Community Ministry identity was the re-establishment of right relationship with many ministers who had been pushed to the margins for years. Rev. David Pettee, who began serving in 2002 as the UUA’s Ministerial Credentialing Director and staff support to the MFC, is the best example of such a minister. Pettee graduated from Starr King School with his M.Div. in 1988. He did not seek ministerial fellowship because there was no path yet for him to do that as a community minister. Only in 1991, after community ministry was approved in the UUA by laws, did he enter the fellowshipping process, ultimately interviewing and receiving preliminary fellowship in 1993.

Requirements and Competencies Part 4 (1981

1991)

In 1979, just as the discussion and debate about creating the Ministry of Religious Education was entering its final phase, the MFC implemented its updated chart of requirements, competencies and expectations known as the “Grid”, and began requiring candidates to be accountable for its content. Only two years later, following the vote to create MRE fellowshipping, the Committee had to adjust the Grid for requirements that were unique to those seeking this recognition. The Committee was not yet ready to make identical requirements for both ministerial identities.

The first generation of recognized MRE’s have bristled at the tendency to call the differences in requirements “tracks”. Midge Skwire complained in a 2017 interview that most people think the metaphor of “tracks” came about when the MRE recognition began, but her memory is that this term did not become commonly used until the third “track”, Community Ministry, was approved in 1991. Despite the fact that most of the requirements for Parish and MRE recognition were the same, no one could prepare and apply for fellowship as an MRE and a Parish Minister in the same application and interview. They had to be done separately. Many of the preparation requirements could be completed concurrently, of course. After preliminary fellowship was awarded, however there were two career tracks firmly distinguished. An MRE could not be a candidate for a parish ministry position or vice versa without a dispensation from the MFC, and a person holding one fellowship in either form of ministry had to complete additional requirements and return to the MFC for an interview to be credentialed in both.

The requirement for Clinical Pastoral Education had been a focus for discussion as the tracks were created. Would CPE be required of all candidates for either ministry? The answer was “Yes”, and in 1983 the MFC reaffirmed their belief in the importance and value of CPE by re affirming that it would be a requirement that everyone needed to complete to advance to final fellowship.

Students could experience the reading list and requirements of the MFC as an add on to the requirements of their school’s courses and requirements. The students who wanted to prepare for the Ministry of Religious Education or add the MRE credential to their parish ministry fellowshipping would feel this tension the most. Susan Manker Seale (SKSM ‘86) wanted to be fellowshipped in both tracks. She is quoted in Arliss Ungar’s history of Starr King School regarding this ambition:

“

I resisted the forcing of tracks upon us and got the booklet of requirements for both M.R.E. and Parish. It was interesting and telling that when I compared them, they were exactly the same, except that the MRE’s had to do an additional block of work in Religious Education. The school tried to stay out of this sort of ‘packaging’, but students wanted more direction and advocacy from them.” For ministers who already had their M. Div and had

already been fellowshipped for parish ministry, being recognized as an MRE would require enrolling in additional courses in religious education, re applying for fellowship, and having another interview with the MFC. It was not until 1986 that the Reading List was standardized for all candidates, i.e. candidates for parish ministry and for the MRE would be required to read the same list.

Standardizing the Six-Month Internship

The Committee continued to work on making their standards for the internship requirement more explicit. A Veatch Program grant to the UUA had funded UUA/MFC oversight of all internships, but the grant ran out at the end of the 84-85 fiscal year. The MFC was seeing internship experiences of varying lengths appearing in candidate’s packets, some of them wedged into a summer. In 1983 the MFC made explicit its requirement that six full time months would be the standard minimum time for an acceptable internship, and variations from that would require advance consultation with the MFC’s staff. The variations that were usually acceptable going forward from that time would be for internships arranged through the schools’ field placement programs. Several schools had always encouraged part-time field placement internships while students continued with a course load. The MFC felt a need to accommodate them but wanted to make a full time six month internship the encouraged standard.

The seminary leaders, meeting regularly now as the Joint Schools Committee, were resistant to the MFC adding more limits and requirements to internships without consultation with them. In 1985 a conference for Teaching Churches was gathered in Dallas to bring together all the stakeholders in internships and to standardize practices. There was no funding to make this an annual comprehensive gathering of interns and supervisors, so the schools were left with the task of budgeting for such gatherings for their own students.

With full time internships of six months to a year becoming the standard, the congregations hosting interns would bond with them and the possibility of calling or hiring them to a ministerial vacancy would be raised more often than in the past. In 1983 the MFC had reaffirmed its policy first articulated in 1973 that interns should not become candidate for a congregation they had served within three years of time from the conclusion of that service. The Rules and Policies were updated in 1984 to read: “A person engaged in a ministerial student internship, ministerial student field work placement, student ministry or summer student internship, shall not for a period of three years following the conclusion of any of these placements be eligible in any full or part-time professional position in a church in which he/she has been engaged.” This policy was further amended in 1985 to allow for a waiver based on below-standard compensation, as follows: “Exceptions to this policy may be made by the Committee in those cases where the compensation is less than the minimum required for utilizing the regular settlement procedures of the Association,

but in no case shall such exceptions extend beyond two years without additional Committee approval.”  The unique circumstances of a disciplinary “bad practices” case that inspired this change are further described in Chapter 17.

Revising and Resisting The Grid

At the end of 1984, the leadership and staffing associated with the MFC changed. Charles Gaines completed his term as Chair and moved into a staff position as Ministerial Settlement Director. Rev. Joan Kahn Schneider was the new Director of Ministerial Education. Rev. Nick Cardell became the MFC’s new Chair.

Early in his tenure, Cardell told the Committee that he felt it time to review the Grid and all its associated application and evaluation forms for preliminary fellowship renewal. His initiative was brought about initially by a letter from the Benevolent Fraternity of UU Churches, written on behalf of the Urban Church Coalition, requesting that that Urban Issues be added to the required areas of study. The MFC agreed that a more comprehensive review would be timely and appointed a sub committee to work on it. The timing for this review was also brought about by the continuing challenges from the leadership and students at the theological schools about the adequacy of the current Grid. Ironically, what had early on been a request from students to have more explicit clarity about what was required of them now became a point of contention.

At both Meadville and Starr King, there were changes in the schools’ leadership which held out promise for a better and more cooperative relationship between these identity schools and the UUA’s credentialing body. At Starr King, President Robert Kimball had moved into the role of Dean of Students, and in 1983 the Rev. Dr. Gordon McKeeman had become President of the School. McKeeman had served two terms on the UUA Board and run for President of the UUA. He was a respected minister with a wide circle of relationships within the UUA. He believed that the MFC and the schools should be able to have a cooperative relationship and at the outset of his tenure brought an open mind and heart to that possibility. At Meadville Lombard, Dr. Gene Reeves, a distinguished scholar, had become the President in 1979. Both men were eager to be partners as well as critics of the MFC in considering the way the Grid was understood and enforced. They were each getting to know each other within the meetings of the Joint Schools Committee, and they presented a consistent message to the MFC: the Committee was not taking the concerns of the students about the Grid seriously enough.

The Grid was laid out in a form that was supposed to allow students to use it as a checklist for the courses and requirements they needed to fulfill. At the May, 1985 MFC meeting, the sub committee reported back with recommendations for changes to the layout and the categories in the Grid to make it easier to understand and use. The plan was to re work it over the summer and approve a draft of the new document in September 1985 to circulate to stakeholders.

The new Grid columns would be expanded to include college courses, seminary/institute courses, and life experience, and would also help students keep track of which requirements they had fulfilled taken and which ones were still incomplete. New proposed classifications of competencies required by the MFC in the Grid would expand the areas of competency from fourteen to nineteen categories. Joan Kahn-Schneider was the primary emissary on behalf of the MFC in their conversations with the schools and the students. She was asked to take a third draft of revisions to the Joint Theological Schools Meeting in October 1985 and to ask the schools to include the proposed grid in their newsletters for student feedback and return suggestions and comments by April 1, 1986.  Another subcommittee was appointed to study further changes and to receive the feedback, and with final implementation of the new Grid to be settled at the September 1986 MFC meeting.

Bluntly put, this year set aside for feedback went about as badly as it possibly could. Joan Kahn Schneider’s visit to Starr King in November 1985 was a disaster. The faculty were very critical of the proposal, and felt their educational capacities and judgments were being dismissed. They made demands of the MFC that felt unreasonable, and that Kahn Schneider had no authority to respond to. Kahn Schneider felt ambushed and attacked. The same issues from the old Grid remained problematic for the students and were asserted by the faculty: excessive or redundant categories of academic requirements, and internship requirements that did not match the realities of the school’s educational philosophies and calendars.

Beneath this critique was a foundational suspicion on the part of some faculty and students of the entire premise of centralized credentialing through the MFC. Gordon McKeeman in his April 1986 report to the Starr King Board describing the issues raised at that meeting said that in addition to concerns about the Grid, the faculty questioned “the operations, history, and importance of the Committee, …the personnel and practices of the Committee”, and expressed displeasure with the fact that the Committee would not pay transportation costs for a student representative to sit with the committee at their meeting. One SKSM student in particular (who chose to write his name without capital letters), tom kunesh, had given a great deal of thought to the role of the MFC in a congregational polity association of congregations and had concluded it was an inappropriate usurpation of authority. He also argued that having a requirement for study of Judeo Christian church history was counter to the professed principles of free thought within the Association.  His views attracted supporters, and after the Kahn Schneider meeting a study group of students formed to inform themselves and discuss the MFC’s history, process and premises.

Arliss Ungar’s history of Starr King contains a memoir from Rev. Jaco ten Hove about one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of the MFC, when the committee was greeted by a picket line of students outside the hotel where they were meeting. The Committee was scheduled to meet in Berkeley in early February 1986. The students prepared for the visit with a public session attended by about half the student body, at which they planned to make the traditional wine and cheese hour that the students hosted for the MFC into something more intensive and engaging. Jaco ten Hove picks up the story from there: “A small number of other students, dissatisfied with the idea of such a short and diffused period in which to discuss important issues with the MFC members announced an independent action: a Rally cum vigil to be held each day outside the hotel in which the MFC was staying and seeing candidates. There were extremely mixed feelings about this proposal and the literature that accompanied it. Some wanted to minimize a confrontational atmosphere while others saw the value of witnessing…

The night before the MFC began interviewing, the School held a rare and well attended ‘Faculty Forum’ at which each of the five core faculty gave their distinct angles on seminary education and/or the MFC. The next day, February 3, the first vigil at the MFC hotel went on from 11 AM to 1 PM, followed by the long awaited Student Body MFC meeting which filled the 5-7 PM ‘happy hour’.

Neither event by itself met expectations. Three students held signs in the chilly and rainy shadow of the Hotel Durant, waiting in vain for any chance to talk one on one with an MFC member. Ten Hove recalled later that there were four students at different times Jaco himself, tom kunesh, Florence Wallach, and Kay Jorgenson.)

Jaco ten Hove’s memoir goes on to imply that the Grid was “tabled” at this meeting, but the Committee’s intention and plan had already been to seek feedback through April of 1986, seek further input from the Joint Schools Committee at their spring meeting and make a final decision on the next iteration of the Grid at the September 1986 meeting.

The students at Starr King did not only protest and ask questions. They had several proposals for reform, offered not as a package but as a collection of possibilities that could be pursued together or separately. The most radical proposal came from kunesh abolish the MFC and focus on strengthening seminary M.Div programs and parish internships as trustworthy standards to be completed for ministerial fellowship. Two proposals proved to be prescient of future reforms. One was to “create a trio of regional committees that could have more of a relationship with students and schools along the ministerial approach path as was the model for Universalist fellowship before merger”. Regional SubCommittees of the MFC along these lines would be implemented once again in late Nineties. Another proposal from the students was to have learning contracts between students, faculty, and intern supervisors. By September 1987 the MFC had “Voted, to require a learning agreement between all interns and churches.”

There were more issues that Starr King had with the UUA than those related to credentialing and internships. More financial support for the schools from the Theological Education Endowment Trust was an ongoing issue. A new UUA President, William F. Schulz, took office in the fall of 1985 and tried to take up all these issues himself with Starr King’s leaders McKeeman, former President and Dean Bob Kimball, and Ron Cook. Kimball was consistently adamant in such meetings about bringing up old grievances about funding. Both Schulz and the leaders of the MFC remained frustrated in these conversations. McKeeman summarized the relationship rather minimally in his October 1986 President’s Report: “it is clear that the School, the MFC, and the Department of Ministry have different goals and priorities, and some overlapping concerns.”

MFC Chair Nick Cardell, UUA Vice President Clark Olson, and the next Ministerial Education Director at the UUA, Judith Meyer, made extra efforts to continue to engage personally with McKeeman and with the students. In his March 1987 report to the Board, McKeeman was able to report: “This year’s mood was much different, though some tensions and disagreements remain.”

Work on the Grid continued through 1987-88. Somewhere along the way, the original proposal to the MFC from the urban Concerns Committee that had prompted a broad re-examination of the Grid had been lost in the shuffle. In 1988 the Urban Concerns Committee followed up to ask if and when "Urban Ministry experience" would be added to the Grid. The proposal had been discussed and tabled in 1986, because of the large turn over on the MFC, and never re opened. There was discussion, support and opposition. After discussion, “William Jones moved that the MFC consider adding a broad category (perhaps ‘Social Change’) to the Grid, which would include such things as urban, rural, racism concerns/experience.

Jones was asked to offer some continuing education for the Committee on “racism and urban concerns” to precede any decision about whether to add such a category to the Grid. Jones also wanted some research done on whether the fundamental things which are taught in the seminaries were not reflected in the grid. Ministerial Education Director Judith Meyer was asked to provide for the August 1988 meeting of the Committee a Grid that had been filled out according to Meadville/Lombard’s curriculum offerings.

During the discussion at the August 1988 MFC meeting two different interpretations of the purpose and meaning of the Grid came out. Kenneth Sawyer interpreted the purpose of the grid as offering a challenging overview of all that a minister needed to know that would invite students to demonstrate the breadth of their knowledge and experience. William Jones felt the Grid should be seen as a list of basic competencies needed for credentialing. This tension in how the Grid was understood would persist, even as the Committee voted to accept the revised Grid and have it available in an updated candidates’ manual by November 1988.

Preliminary Fellowship, Continuing Education, and Mentoring

A major focus for reflections and recommendation of the 1974 Scovel Commission Report was continuing education for ministers. Their major recommendation for an oversight body within the UUA to manage continuing education ultimately came and went within a three year period in the form of the Council on Education for Professional Religious Leaders (CEPRL). Despite the end of the funding for this commission in 1979, the interest in encouraging continuing education for religious professionals remained high within the UU Ministers Association and the MFC. Every so often in the MFC’s history the conversation about how to encourage a commitment to continuing education across a minister’s career (a commitment to the “learning ministry” rather than the “learned ministry”) has ventured into the possibility of requirements that could be implemented by the MFC.

At the time of consolidation, the Joint Commission that defined the new UUA MFC specified that a three year period evaluated ministry after preliminary fellowship should be required. The three years of time before final fellowship could be granted had been a requirement in place before consolidation, but a more robust annual evaluation during those three years was new. The MFC had an opportunity during preliminary fellowship to encourage development of good habits in continuing education but had not been very aggressive about taking advantage of that opportunity.

The MFC’s regulatory authority for the UU ministry was understood until recently to end with the granting of final fellowship (as of 2020 referred to as “full” fellowship in recognition of our desire to encourage a learning ministry, in which learned skills are never final.) Unless a minister has been accused of conduct unbecoming a minister or has a pattern of unsuccessful ministries suggesting that they are no longer competent to serve as a minister, the MFC exerted no authority over how a minister continued to advance and upgrade their skills and knowledge. More recently, however, the MFC has moved in the direction of strong encouragement to ministers to participate in a voluntary program of continuing education credits after full fellowship. Looking back to the Eighties, the UUMA played an important role in providing a context for the MFC to encourage continuing education more forcefully.

The Unitarian Universalist Ministers’ Association made a commitment in the Eighties to take their own responsibility for developing more models and opportunities for continuing education. They worked on a proposal to establish a UUMA Commission on Continuing Education. The program they would develop would eventually come to be called CENTER. The charge to this UUMA Commission given in October 1984 was to:

1. Determine the needs for ministers serving parishes in the following continuing education areas spiritual nourishment, academic, therapeutic and techniques of running an institution.

2. Establish a permanent structure to relate to funding sources.

3.  Dialogue with the theological schools about their roles, resources, and recommendations.

4. Identify existing resources.

5. Recommend strategies for meeting continuing education needs - i.e. convocations, regional workshops.

6. Submit a proposal for the institutionalization of continuing education e.g. establish a standing committee of the UUMA with a continuing budget.

7. Submit a final report to the UUMA Board by May 15, 1984.

Rev. Leon Hopper, a former member of the MFC and the UUA staff (as Director of Ministerial Education) and the Executive Secretary for the CEPERL was asked to be chair. Hopper gave more thought and leadership over the course of his career to continuing education for ministers than any other leader of his generation and led the way towards institutionalizing continuing education for ministers within the UUMA’s self understanding of its leadership responsibilities. For the MFC, however, adding another role to their already overwhelmed schedule was out of the question. So preliminary fellowship remained the area where the authority of the MFC could be applied to help create the culture of a learning ministry that the UUMA was striving for. The MFC’s supporting staff members from the Department of Ministry did much of the work on revising the preliminary fellowship evaluation forms to give more guidance to the lay leaders and ministers as to what the MFC wanted to see covered.

In conversations between the UUMA and the MFC that began in 1988, one innovation that was intriguing to both groups was a requirement of mentoring during preliminary fellowship. MFC member Ken Sawyer began talking up the idea as he became aware of the importance of one-to-one mentoring for professionals among his congregants. In 1989, the MFC created a Mentoring Subcommittee composed of Brad Greeley, Nancy Doughty, and Ken Sawyer as chair to explore with the UUMA a mentoring as a means of improving the success of new ministers. In the discussions within this team, it was noted that half of all negotiated terminations in the prior six years were ministers in preliminary fellowship. Was this a reflection of bad decisions on the part of the MFC in granting preliminary fellowship or was it a confirmation of the perils of the early years of a career?

Brad Greeley recalls that “the advent of the mentoring program rested…on our concern at seeing candidates evolving poorly in their ministries… They reported no colleague with whom they sounded out ideas, asked for advice or turned to for emotional support and just plain bitching. “ The value of supervised internships to ministerial formation prior to fellowshipping was well established. Internship evaluations were required from both the congregation’s internship committee and the supervising minister. However, after preliminary fellowship was granted, the MFC would only see an evaluation from the congregation where the minister was employed, along with a self evaluation.

Should there be a continuing support and/or evaluative process involving a colleague in final fellowship during these three years?

In May of 1989 the MFC minutes report that the Mentoring Subcommittee proposed that “Ministers in Preliminary Fellowship obtain a mentor in their field (Parish, MRE, Community) who is a minister in Final Fellowship with the UUA. Ministers [to] be in monthly contact with their mentor, preferably in person. Ministers report the name of their mentor to the MFC. Mentors yearly confirm the existence of this relationship to the MFC. Mentors receive copies of First, Second, and Final Renewal forms evaluating the minister. The names of mentors be listed in the program for the Service of the Living Tradition next to the minister they have mentored. A reception to be held at GA to honor mentors. This proposal be sent as a pre-draft to the UUMA.”

The Minutes continue, “Jean Rickard expressed enthusiasm for the idea, but thought it might be difficult for all ministers to obtain a mentor in their field. She questioned whether this was necessary, since the primary purpose of the mentor was to maintain a denominational connection. Susan Suchocki stated her concern that there may be an element of sexism in the proposal, since the numbers of male and female ministers indicate that most mentoring will be done by males. Brad Greeley felt that the MFC does not need a report from the mentor, since his/her function is guiding ministers, not reporting to the MFC. The Committee voted that the sub committee send a letter to the UUMA.” Ken Sawyer sent the requested letter on June 12, 1989. One sentence in the letter foreshadowed a requirement of the mentorship program imposed a decade later. It had to do with whether the mentor should be from the area of ministerial specialty where the candidate serving. The implication in the letter was that mentors would generally be nearby, and that it would only be likely and possible for a minister who was in a ministry of religious education or a community ministry to search farther afield for an appropriate mentor.

The UU Ministers Association Executive Committee received the letter and the proposal from the MFC with enthusiasm at their October 1989 meeting. Jane Rzepka was added to the MFC subcommittee, and they continued to negotiate the requirement details with the UUMA.

One of the difficult issues in shaping a mentorship requirement was whether it would require a written evaluation from the mentor. Around fifty volunteer mentors would need to be recruited each year. If they were required to submit a written evaluation would that requirement deter people from being willing to accept the role? How would the mentoring relationship be affected by the knowledge that the mentor could write a critical evaluation? The other issue that was hard to resolve was where the responsibility for oversight of the mentorship program should rest: with the UUMA or the MFC? The two agreements with the UUMA that made the program possible were that the mentors would not be required to submit evaluations, but only a confirmation from the mentor that the

relationship had really happened, and that the UUMA would own the program, promoting it and supporting the idea within their annual and chapter meetings to encourage their members to get behind it.

With these understandings, at their November 1989 meeting the MFC voted to add to their requirements: “Every settled minister in Preliminary Fellowship is required to be in a mentor relationship with a Unitarian Universalist minister in Final Fellowship.”  This policy was to become effective one year later in November 1990. However, as the presumed “owner” of the program, the UUMA had much more to talk about.

At their January 1990 meeting the UUMA Executive Committee noted that the CENTER Committee had been discussing a mentorship program for two years and wanted them to develop the guidelines and training for mentors. This slowed down the timetable for final implementation of the mentorship as an MFC requirement. January 1, 1991 now became the start date. Prior to implementation of the mentor program, in March 1991, MFC minutes note that: “It will now be the practice of the Committee to give information to a minister’s mentor about what issues he or she should address, if the Committee feels there are certain areas that need attention. The Committee will communicate in the decision and decision letter that this information will be shared with the mentor. The sub committee is now dissolved.”

The 1989 Plenary on Theological Education

There is one coda to the story of the work done continuing education for ministers as the Eighties was coming to an end. The gathering that closed out several years of self examination of ministerial education by the MFC, the schools, the UUMA, the UUA Board and the UUA staff was a Plenary on Theological Education held in November 1989. All the stakeholder organizations sent representatives. Papers were assigned and delivered. Relationships were enhanced or built. Decisions were made or promoted. This Plenary occurred at the same time as the Commission on Appraisal confirmed that it’s next focus of study and report to the UUA would be “Our Professional Ministry”. As a result of the Plenary, the UUA Board established in 1990 its own Committee on Ministerial Excellence, to study and make recommendations on support and possible requirements for continuing education for ministers in final fellowship. Their work would ultimately have an impact on the MFC, in that a new staff position at the UUA, a Director of Ministerial Development, would be established. This position would responsibility for oversight of the preliminary fellowship process and became an additional staff member working with the MFC.

Psychological Testing Vs. Career Assessments

As the 1980’s concluded, one other significant requirement that changed was the psychological assessment. The AUA and the UUA had been early endorsers and adopters of psychological testing for ministry candidates. For the first thirty years of the MFC’s

existence, candidates were required to make an appointment with a recommended psychologist in person to take the proctored tests, including the Rorschach, the MMPI, and the Strong Inventory. A consulting psychologist was available to the Committee to interpret the test results and would usually offer this consultation in person. The consulting psychologist was not a voting member of the MFC and this independence was considered important by both the psychologist and the Committee. The psychologist’s interpretation of the test results were confidential.

In 1969 in a financially stressful time for the MFC budget, Dr. Robert Wilson, a psychologist who was already a member of the Committee suggested that if there was always a psychologist appointee, that this person could interpret the tests and share any observations relevant to the candidate’s interview, without the necessity of an independent consultant. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, the psychologist on the Committee shouldered this extra burden of reviewing all the test results.

Around this same time, some Protestant denominations began to incorporate “career development” into their models for ministerial formation. In 1972, the New England Career Development Center was established on a foundation originally laid down by the American Baptists to provide services for the personnel of other religious denominations. These career centers could also serve non-church professionals representing a broad range of occupations. A further consolidation with another institution created the Center for Career Development and Ministry in 1982. Unitarian Universalists were employed at this Center and the UUA staff used them for administration of the testing.

William Sutton, the psychologist appointed to the Committee in 1986, brought a critical eye to the testing program. He led a growing skepticism within the Committee about whether the tests alone were giving the MFC an adequate picture of psychological readiness for a career in ministry. The disciplinary cases and negotiated resignations of the mid eighties encouraged this belief. The language in the Grid requirements was changed in 1987 from “psychological examination” to psychological review”, representing an exploration of possible changes that were being discussed and a recognition that testing plus counseling was the preferred standard.

In 1989 a sub committee was appointed to study the Career Center program as an alternative to the psychological review alone. The Career Centers offered a residential three day program that included the most current testing but also test interpretation and counseling with each candidate that went deeper than anything that the candidates had experienced before. The MFC psychologist and members would see the same results that the candidate saw.

The first step was allowing for candidates to choose a career development assessment to be approved as an acceptable alternative to the psychological tests alone. A

big concern was the cost of the multi day and residential programs, which was greater than the price of the tests alone. The added benefit to candidates and the Committee was considered worth the expense. Scholarships were offered to lessen the burden. The Department of Ministry worked out a payment policy where the Department would serve as the liaison between candidates and Career Centers. The Centers would contract with and be paid by the UUA. One problem they had to overcome was that not all Career Center psychologists had agreed to share their data with the MFC psychologist, but they settled that by agreeing that he could call individual psychologists to discuss any potentially problematic candidates.

In November 1990 the MFC devoted a session of continuing education to meeting with Steve Ott and Violet Grennen of the New England Career Center to understand their model for a two and a half day career assessment program for ministerial candidates. Following this session, they voted to make career assessment a requirement for an appointment with the MFC and for preliminary fellowship, beginning in January 1991. The voted included the requirement that candidates would be asked by the Department of Ministry to agree as a matter of course to release upon request their psychological data to the Committee psychologist.

Looking back, David Pohl introduced a first-year evaluation document related to this decision with these thoughts: “Primarily we were hoping that career assessment would be a way for potential candidates to get a realistic picture of their chances for fulfillment and success in the ministry very early in the process. Our goal was to help candidates make well informed choices about their vocational direction and educational program. In addition, we hope to save both the candidates and the UUA unnecessary expenditures of time, energy, and money. The MFC was also looking for a more wholistic and standardized evaluation process, with full reports available to the MFC and Department of Ministry staff. We hoped for reports that would inform department staff as they counseled students and others, and would provide MFC members with reliable information from sources knowledgeable about ministry in general and our expectations in particular.”

The Commission on Appraisal Report on “Our Professional Ministry” 1992

Between 1985 and 1990, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee was subject to scrutiny and critique from a number of different directions from Starr King School’s faculty and students (documented in Chapter 16), from the UU Ministers Association, from prominent individual UU ministers, and finally from the Commission on Appraisal (COA) , which was encouraged by the UUMA to devote their next period of study in 1989 1991 to the workings of the MFC . Because the Committee had felt embattled during the middle Eighties, there was some initial anxiety from some on the MFC regarding a study by the Commission. However, the ultimate form that the study took, and the attitude of the Commissioners towards the MFC and towards their role turned the MFC’s leaders towards full support and cooperation with the COA. When the Commission’s report finally came out, it turned back what had been a rising tide of criticism and left the MFC in a better position to respond to the challenging disciplinary cases that they would encounter in the Nineties.

The Rising Tide of Criticism

The UUMA President during FY 86 and FY 87 was Robert Doss, himself a former chair of the MFC. However, the incoming UUMA President, Jack Mendelsohn, serving initially on the UUMA Executive as President Elect in 1986 87, had never been a member of the MFC and had a less deferential attitude towards the Department of Ministry staff and the power of the Committee. During the winter of 1987 after Mendelsohn assumed the Presidency, the UUMA Executive submitted a list of thirty one questions to the Department of Ministry about ministerial credentialing and assessment, many of them regarding the authority, rules, and policies of the MFC. The DOM answered them in a written response in May 1987.

The questions reflected the fact that many ministers’ impressions of the MFC consisted of their own experience of the credentialing process, but they were not wellversed in the Rules and Policies that governed the MFC’s responses, not only to candidates, but to disciplinary matters. While the anxiety that ministerial students and credentialed ministers experience in dealing with the MFC’s authority will always be present, it seems to rise and fall in intensity over time. This same winter season when the UUMA Exec framed its questions, a member of this Executive Committee, Rev. Carl Thitchener, was undergoing a disciplinary proceeding (described in Chapter 17). Some on this UUMA Executive Committee were defensive about Thitchener and aggressive in questioning what the MFC was doing, especially when the Committee took an aggressive stand on a new policy that would (in its initial proposed form) require all minister to reveal all criminal convictions in their backgrounds as a condition of their fellowship.

During 1986 and 1987, the UUMA Guidelines text that first defined sexual misconduct as inclusive of adulterous behavior were under consideration. The text that the UUMA passed described adulterous behavior in which many prominent ministers had engaged, during a time when it was understand not as misconduct but as ill advised behavior, uncomfortable and possibly damaging to a congregation unless done discreetly. Even as these Guidelines were being discussed and passed the MFC was handling complaints that involved adultery with discretion. However, anxiety about what the MFC might do in the future was high.

Beyond the Thitchener case, the UUMA was also hearing perennial concerns expressed by some of its members, quietly, and in some cases loudly and ultimately publicly. An August 1987 letter from Rev. Carl Scovel, minister of King’s Chapel in Boston, sent to MFC Chair Nick Cardell, and copied to the UUA’s leadership and several of Scovel’s Boston colleagues, is representative of some of the perennial complaints in this rising tide of criticism that the MFC was facing. In and of itself, Scovel’s letter did not have an immediate impact on the MFC’s internal conversations, nor on the conversation within the Commission on Appraisal about the scope of their next study. It was a piece of correspondence with the Chair, and somewhat tardily, the Chair responded to it, and reported the exchange to the full Committee, and that was that. However, looked upon as useful compilation of criticisms of the MFC from this time, the Scovel letter is worthy of attention in this essay.

Rev. Carl Scovel was a former member of the MFC, and the Chair of the Commission on Ministerial Education whose report in 1974 had brought about significant changes in ministerial credentialing and continuing education. In an interview, he said that his misgivings about the MFC went back to his time as a member in the Sixties, but they had increased as he spoke with students he knew, some of them his interns, about their experience with interviews. He was especially distressed when students that he had supervised in internships did not receive the decisions they hoped for. Scovel’s letter urged the MFC to make many changes to allow observers at the meetings, to create and release transcripts of interviews, and to allow candidates to have a right to appeal decisions. Beyond specific reforms, the letter questioned the basic philosophy, process, and power dynamics that had been at the foundation of the UUA’s credentialing process for decades.

A letter responding to Scovel was begun by Nick Cardell on October 16, 1987 following a retreat that the Committee had scheduled in part to reflect on some of the concerns and challenges that the Scovel letter represented. The response letter was not completed and mailed until January 15, 1988 and this response was reported to the MFC meeting of February 1988. Apparently Cardell did not feel any political pressure to make a rapid response even though the letter was copied to UUA executives. The response came at

the end of his tenure as chair and feels like something he meant to get around to wrting, but had trouble finishing up. The UUMA Rep on the MFC, Brad Greeley, did report back to the UUMA Executive Committee on the letter and its contents, and word got around about what Scovel was suggesting.

Scovel’s letter organizes his concerns into three main categories that summarize the major categories of criticism about the MFC from this time :

1. The MFC’s process is “imprecise and often fumbling”.

2. The process is “distinctly unfair to the candidate”.

3. The process “often seems adversarial”.

Under the first category of concerns, Scovel specified five criticisms. He asked whether candidates receive a statement of what the MFC expects of them, and whether any such statement needs scrutiny and review. He believed that an eleven member panel was too large for an effective interview, and that the focus of the interviews is scattered because the MFC members have no training in interview skills. He described the Category III decisions he had seen as “confused, poorly articulated, and general”. Finally, even though he acknowledged the “most helpful” efforts of the Department of Ministry staff to help a candidate interpret the interview and the feedback given, he charged that the candidates receive no guidance about who they can or should talk to (or should not talk to) to process the next steps they should take after a Category III decision.

Under the second category of concerns, the “unfairness” of the process, Scovel articulated the familiar charge that the Committee places too much weight on the performance on the interview and not enough on the candidate’s resume, written essays, and references. He questioned why there could not be transcripts of interviews and an appeal process for candidates who felt that the interview questions and responses had tilted a decision unfairly against a candidate.

Scovel’s third concern was described in a more measured way as he acknowledged the work-load on the members of the MFC and the stress of the condensed time for interviews. Nevertheless, he wondered if supply and demand concerns during a time when we had more candidates than positions was making the MFC feel particularly adversarial in their approach, rather than pastoral.

Scovel’s letter concluded with five specific recommendations. Some of them have since been implemented in some form, although not in response to this particular letter. The first recommendation was not then or since seen as acceptable by the MFC: to allow each candidate to have an observer in the interview. The second recommendation to tape and transcribe each interview was implemented in part by having a Department of Ministry

staff member transcribing the questions asked in an interview so that in the event of a Category III decision a future panel could have the benefit of knowing what those questions were. The third recommendation was for a designated correspondent for each candidate to help interpret Committee decisions. This responsibility fell to the Director of Ministerial Education, but in the case of Category II and sometimes Category III decisions, future MFC’s would sometimes assign a particular member of the panel to provide support and advice to a candidate on completing a contingency.

Scovel’s fourth recommendation was that all recommendations, decisions, and criticisms given to a candidate be as precise as possible. While the committee has shared this concern, then and now, there has also been a feeling that being too precise with a Category III decision makes a candidate feel that there is a specific contingency required before the next interview. Sometimes, the problem with a candidate who was being given a Category III was articulated within the confidential panel discussions as “lacking ministerial presence”. “Ministerial presence”, a phrase that summarizes the minimal sense of self confidence, spiritual maturity and grounding, and personal authority that a competent minister requires, began to turn into the holy grail that students preparing to see the MFC had to find before their interview.

Finally, Scovel’s fifth recommendation may have influenced Jack Mendelsohn to write to the Commission on Appraisal requesting that they undertake a study of the MFC. Scovel wrote:

“…I think that a long term group might study our MFC procedures and the accreditation procedures of other religious bodies, and make recommendations to the UUA administration, and if necessary to the GA, for improvement, attending to such questions as:

• Is the MFC too large to interview effectively?

• Is the work load of the MFC too great?

• How could that work be divided and allocated?

• Should the interview be less important than it is now?

• How could interviews be differently conducted?

• Should the UUA adopt an ‘in care’ attitude towards candidates?

• How can we better articulate what we can expect of candidates?

• What appeal from the MFC process should be instituted?

• What are we to understand of the ‘clerical’ oversupply?

• Is it profitable to discuss what kinds of leaders our churches need?

Nick Cardell’s response to Scovel acknowledged the truths and insights of many of his claims. He was concise, at times defensive, and offered no next steps that the Committee planned to take in response to any of the recommendations. Regarding the first category of Scovel’s concerns on the “imprecise and fumbling” nature of the process, Cardell agreed

that the Committee was probably at its maximum size for effectiveness, and that written guidance and support to candidates could be improved. He challenged Scovel’s descriptions of the interviews as “ill conceived” and dismissed that criticism. He also referred Scovel to the existing statement in the student handbook on what the MFC expects of candidates and indicated that it was something the MFC continued to “refine and clarify”.

Cardell’s strongest retort to Scovel was on the “unfairness” of the process. He defended the MFC’s appreciation of the balance between the paper packet material and the interview, and dismissed the suggestion for any appeals, affirming the value of the second chance interview as a standard for fairness. He also denied that the Committee had an adversarial attitude, although his comments and others from members who served on Cardell’s MFC do indicate that they believe this criticism had been warranted in the past. Referencing his own and Scovel’s experience as Committee members in previous decades, Cardell wrote : “the style of the Committee and its process have changed a great deal since then.”

Although Scovel did not pursue further correspondence with the incoming Chair Burton Johnson, his concerns were not assuaged. In 1991 he asked for a meeting between MFC members, UUA staff and a group of students preparing for ministry to hear about the Committee’s requirements and expectations. He came away unimpressed that anything had changed. In 1993 he undertook more correspondence, this time proposing an entirely different approach to credentialing, a hybrid of a regional in care process with a continental credentialing body. The volunteer requirements and the costs would have greatly exceeded what the UUA at that time was willing to devote to credentialing.

However, some aspects of his proposal do foreshadow the Ministerial Formation Network now operated by the UU Ministers Association.

The Commission on Appraisal Takes Charge

In January 1988, with Jack Mendelsohn now President of the UU Ministers Association, a letter was sent to the UUA’s Commission on Appraisal (COA), to report that the UUMA Executive Committee had unanimously requested a study of the “role, procedures, and policies of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee”. The Commission on Appraisal is a ninemember commission established in the UUA by laws that is asked to report to the UUA General Assembly at least once every four years on either or both of two areas of their charge:

“(a) review any function or activity of the Association which in its judgment will benefit from an independent review…”

(b) study and suggest approaches to issues which may be of concern to the Association…”

At the time of Mendelsohn’s letter, the Commission was completing a report on The Quality of Religious Life in Unitarian Universalist Congregations which would be published in 1989.

According to the Commission’s own summary, that report “recorded a perceived lack of religious depth in many of our ministers that was felt to reflect a poverty of ministerial skills.” In a 2019 interview, the Chair of the Commission on Appraisal at that time, Rev. David Sammons, recalled that one Commission member had advocated strongly for the focus of the 1986-1988 study focus for the COA to be on the capacities of the professional ministry.

Following up on his letter to the COA Mendelsohn requested a meeting with the MFC leadership. They came as a group to meet with him in Boston on August 24, 1988. Representing the MFC was Chair Burton Johnson, Rev. Roberta Nelson, Rev. Ken Sawyer, Executive Secretary Rev. David Pohl and the UUMA’s rep to the MFC Rev. Brad Greeley. The conversation covered many issues besides those mentioned above:

• The lines of authority between the UUMA and the MFC on disciplinary matters

• The presence of a Good Offices Person at disciplinary hearings

• The future of the UUMA’s appointee to the MFC.

• The MFC’s attitude towards what at the time was called “larger ministries” , i.e. community- based ministries.

• The MFC’s authority to set conditions on ministers in final fellowship before they could enter the settlement system.

Two agreements came out of this meeting. The first was that a minister in a disciplinary hearing could have a Good Offices Person of their choosing present for support, provided that all parties understood that confidentiality of the process must be assured. The second agreement was that they would continue to have such meetings and tell the Commission on Appraisal jointly that they did not wish to see any COA study of the credentialing process begin immediately, while they were still talking, and that they would get back to the Commission about this possibility in another year.

The Commission had its own ideas about this. They continued to be concerned about the complaints they had heard about the poor quality of ministers at their regional hearings as they prepared the report they were just about to publish on “The Quality of Our Religious Life”. Some of those complaints had come from lay leaders, and some from interim ministers who had to “clean up” after involuntary resignations. There was also a recently released and widely discussed report from the Department of Ministry about a higher number of involuntary resignations among ministers in the eighties than in previous decades. The Ministerial Fellowship Committee was an easy target to blame. People asked: why are our standards not more strict? And, why don’t we have mandatory continuing education standards after the years of preliminary fellowship?

The Commission on Appraisal members were careful in how they responded to the UUMA’s initial request, and when that request was modified they decided they wanted to

join the conversation going on between the MFC and the UUMA. So did UUA President Bill Schulz. In a December 20, 1988 letter to Commission on Appraisal Chair Rev. David Sammons, signed by President Schulz and MFC Chair Johnson, the two leaders formally requested the Commission to delay their decision on their next focus of study until at least January 1990. The rationale for the joint letter was the concern both leaders shared that the Department of Ministry staff was already engaged in study and evaluation work requested or commissioned by the UUA Board. This work covered many of the same areas the Commission had expressed an interest in. The letter also referenced a planned plenary session on theological education and changing forms of ministry scheduled for November 1989, as a reason to delay the COA’s decision until 1990. The COA was invited to send two representatives to this plenary.

During the next four months, the COA’s members engaged in both formal and informal conversations with MFC members, UUA staff, and UUMA leaders to consider what the scope of their next study might be. Mendelsohn was disconcerted that his desired target for investigation, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, had become just one of several possibilities on a list of topics for study. In a letter dated April 4, 1989, Sammons notified a list of ten leaders from the UUA, UUMA, and MFC that that they had decided to focus their study o the professional ministry as a whole, rather than limiting it to credentialing. Commission member Rev. Josiah Bartlett, the former President of Starr King School, had come up with a format for a broader study, and it had intrigued the rest of the Commission. Bartlett proposed that the study should trace the chronological stages of a minister’s career and the ways that the Association’s resources and agencies influence each of them. Eight areas of study were identified. “Fellowship, Disciplinary Action, and the MFC” would be only one of them.

The Department of Ministry and the UUA Board went ahead with their plans for a “Plenary on Theological Education” for November 11 12, 1989, which brought together leaders within each of the study areas. The MFC sent representatives and cooperated with the Commission as it began its work.

The Impact of the 1992 COA Report

The eventual report that emerged from the Commission on Appraisal in 1992 was titled “Our Professional Ministry: Structure, Support, and Renewal”. The staggered terms of members of the Commission on Appraisal meant that during the years when this report was being considered, researched, and finally written, no less than fifteen Commission members would have their names attached to the final report. Some of those names stand out, because they were past or would be future members of the MFC: Rev. Mark Morrison Reed, Rev. James Hobart, Rev. Dianne Arakawa, Jerry Davidoff, and the Chair of the Commission during most of the time for this study, Rev. David Sammons. Rev. Charles

Howe, Amy Kelly, and Rev. Fred Wooden were also important participants in drafting chapters and shaping the final report.

In the Introduction, the Commission wrote that “while the MFC is central, other factors, not under their control were also important.” They went on to say: “The MFC is the decisive point for determining the status of our ministers. However, other stages, beginning with initial interest and lasting through retirement, all have a bearing on the quality of our professional leadership. A study of the MFC without consideration of these other aspects would do an injustice to the MFC and the ministry it serves.” The Introduction immediately presents the conclusion in bold type that “our ministry is relatively healthy”, followed by an endorsement of the MFC’s performance of its role:

“The MFC is generally effective in its credentialing and evaluating and has refined its standards and procedures regularly to improve its performance”.

Despite the fact that the MFC was not the sole focus of the Commission’s study, the work that was done represented the most thoughtful independent evaluation of our credentialing process since the Merger Commission. During the Spring of 1989, David Sammons undertook what he described as an effort to create a history of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Ultimately, what he had time and energy to achieve was a valuable collection of memoirs and documents that have been very helpful in the creation of this history. He wrote to former chairs and members and candidates to ask them about their recollections about their experiences with the MFC and any reflections they had on the present circumstances that had brought about the Commission’s study on the professional ministry. He also collected rules and reports that could give Commission members a sense of how the MFC had evolved and been influenced by previous studies.

During the two years in which the Commission researched, discussed and wrote its report, they made a commitment to an unprecedented degree of collaboration and transparency compared to earlier Commission studies. They shared both questions and findings in advance of the written report with members of the UUA staff, MFC, and UUMA Executive. A first draft of the report was shared with the MFC in September 1991 eight months before their publication deadline.

All in all, the Commission on Appraisal report dealt gently and respectfully with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee’s problems. The relationship between the MFC and the COA members was never adversarial during the Commission’s research, and the COA expressed both concern and sympathy for the workload of the Committee. In two paragraphs, the Report summarized but did not really address the persistent anxiety among those preparing to see the Committee or the concerns of their faculty advisors: “There is continuing anxiety by seminarians about poor communication regarding MFC requirements, and a widespread feeling among some seminarians that the Department of Ministry, as an agent for the MFC, does not give them sufficient attention.

“Long waiting lists for MFC interviews, and interviews held late in the seminary process, mean that sometimes seminarians are told too late in the process that they do not meet MFC standards. Debt has been incurred and years spent; frustrations are great.”

In stating this last fact, the Commission’s deliberations were part of a conversation already underway within the MFC and the UUA staff about whether an earlier stage of evaluation within the ministerial formation process could reduce the number of candidates surprised and disappointed by receiving Category Three or lower after they had essentially finished most of their time in seminary. Though the Commission’s report did not specifically recommend the re establishment of MFC regional subcommittee’s their study helped move the MFC in that direction.

Noticeably missing from the section of the report on the MFC is any description of the criticisms heard then and since that there is too much emphasis placed on the interview, or that the MFC’s feedback to candidates is too vague. The only critique of the MFC’s requirements as reflected in the Grid is that they may not reflect a high enough standard. They felt that a higher standard of competence should be enforced even after final fellowship through the use of the MFC’s authority to hold back from settlement any ministers with a poor track record. Overall, the Commission members seemed to recognize the value of a central credentialing body, respected the process for awarding fellowship that it has created, and accepted the inevitable subjectivity that is involved when judging a candidate’s overall competency to begin serving.

The Commission recommended only one structural change in the MFC related to expanding the size of the Committee so that it would have the flexibility to operate with two panels if it so desired. Other structural changes were considered. The report mentions that the Commission spent “considerable time reviewing the possibility of regional ministerial fellowship committees…(but) determined that the use of panels would be a better way to distribute the MFC workload and would tend to keep a consistent response to candidates.” The MFC’s disciplinary role and actions received no criticism in the report. The COA reviewed the possibility that disciplinary matters could be handled by a separate body, but in weighing the pros and cons, they felt that the same body should do credentialing and discipline. Finally, they endorsed the status quo regarding appeals, represented in the existing Board of Review. Overall, the conclusions of the Commission on Appraisal were an endorsement of the MFC’s role and approach, with recommendations on how to make a difficult job easier on the volunteer members and more efficient in delivering competent ministers for the Association.

The recommendations that the Commission on Appraisal made specifically to and about the Ministerial Fellowship Committee were:

1. That the MFC be enlarged from eleven members to 14, with one of the clergy being a community minister.

2. That the MFC should have the option with more personnel to act in two panels, in addition to acting as whole.

3. That there be clearer and higher standards for fellowship status.

4. That there be broader use of MFC Rule 23, by which the Executive Secretary of the MFC could hold back a minister whose overall record indicates that they should not be further recommended for placement.

5. That preliminary fellowship evaluations should include evaluative questions about the ministry site, and model mutual standards and expectations for ministers and congregations. The goal the COA articulated for these evaluations was that they should be “designed and promoted as instruments of growth and renewal, not of judgment.”

6. That the MFC should implement a required mentorship program during preliminary fellowship.

The Plenary on Theological Education in November 1989 and the collaborative transparency of the Commission on Appraisal’s study had created an active incubator and forum for new ideas and solutions to the identified problems within the UU ministry. These conversations not only helped shape the final report but resulted in actions being taken while the report was still in process. The result was that well before “Our Professional Ministry” was in print, some of the recommendations that the COA brought forward were already under study, endorsed, or (in the case of the mentor program) already implemented by those who had the power to act upon them.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 4 (1991 1997)

As the Nineties began, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee was meeting four times a year, each meeting lasting four days (five if you served on the Executive Committee), in three different locations that spanned the continent. Two of the four meetings would be held in Boston one in September and one in February, in the intimate meeting and living quarters of Pickett and Eliot Houses on Mt. Vernon Place, where the Committee could eat, sleep, socialize and have smaller meetings together. After 1995, when the Committee enlarged and began to meet in two panels, all the interview sessions could also be held within Pickett Eliot.

The other two meetings would be held in Berkeley in December, and in Chicago in late April or early May, depending on Easter’s date. The chance to begin each work year with the first Boston meeting enabled the Committee to build and sustain close working relationships. One disruption in the congeniality of these Boston meetings during these years is noted in a written report produced by member Jane Rzepka for the UU Ministers Association Executive Committee. She wrote that: “The meeting began on an unusual note with the armed robbery in Pickett House of our Chair, Burton Johnson.  After loaning Burt a watch and a little cash, the Committee began its deliberations.”

During these four day meetings, prior to 1995, the MFC would meet for interviews in the Eliot Chapel at 25 Beacon Street as a full group. They would conduct an average of seventeen interviews per meeting during the early Nineties. For the students, the experience of having their interviews in Eliot Chapel could be daunting, especially if this was their first trip to UUA headquarters. The candidate walking in would be surrounded by the portraits of former UUA Presidents. They would see on the pulpit the brass plate that reminded them that they were preaching today from the pulpit occupied by William Ellery Channing. The Chair of the Committee would usually the chair of the interview panel and had discretion for how long the interview would run.

Beyond the interviews, the Committee would devote the equivalent of one working day of business in full group sessions and/or in small subcommittees or working groups. The business sessions could include complex disciplinary cases and decisions. Over meals, during breaks, and at night, the Committee members would act as second readers for preliminary fellowship renewal documents, to insure that any renewal review that raised questions had been seen by at least two (and sometimes three) readers in addition to a staff member. At the September meeting, the most demanding season for renewals, there could be as many as eighty ministers under review.

Because the pace and stress of the meetings were demanding, the tradition of a closing dinner on the final night of the meeting after the interviews had been concluded became an important part of the MFC’s rituals. The style, the tone, the location, the expense

(and the quantities of alcohol consumed) varied across the decade as the leaders and personalities changed, but the ability to gather for one night of fun as the end of the meeting was in sight and have a good time together became very important to the culture of the Committee.

As the Nineties began, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee was a team of eleven members (plus staff). The membership by 1991 had tilted female six women to five men. The shift reflected the wider and deeper pool of women in final fellowship and the number of female lay leaders involved in denominational service.

This was not the case for potential members of color. It’s been noted that there was a gap of two meetings in 1991 before Rev. Mark Morrison Reed succeeded Winifred Norman as a UUA Board appointee during which time the MFC was all white. Morrison Reed was the only person of color on the committee from 1992 1994, when Tamara Payne Alex joined the MFC overlapping with Morrison Reed. From that point on there would be no less than two persons of color serving on the Committee.

The awareness that the MFC should always have no fewer than two persons of color came about for several intersecting reasons. By 1993, the MFC had digested the recommendations of the Commission on Appraisal (COA) that the Committee be enlarged and begin to meet in two panels. Two panels meeting at the same time would require that the MFC have two members carrying the identities that the Committee and the candidates felt were important to be represented in their interviews. Morrison Reed had been on the Commission on Appraisal that delivered this recommendation and three of the next appointments to the MFC came from the members of that COA Mark Morrison Reed, Jerry Davidoff, and James Hobart.

Equally important within these changes in MFC’s personnel were the attitudes they brought with them about anti racist work. All three of these new members were leaders in their own sphere of influence pushing the UUA to return to a deeper engagement with anti racist work during the Eighties. During the administration of President Eugene Pickett between 1979 and 1985, the staff and Board leadership of the UUA had renewed its commitment to anti-racism work, beginning with an examination of the Association itself. By the Nineties, the UUA’s commitment involved dedicated staff time and resources to this work, in partnership with Crossroads Ministry, a faith based anti racist training company. The UUA Board worked with consultants on their own understandings of systemic racism in the Association, and Board appointees were reflecting on that experience and bringing it into the MFC. In 1993, the UUA mandated anti-racist training for all its committees and began offering it to affiliated professional organizations such as the UUMA and LREDA. More white members of the MFC began joining the Committee with anti racist trainings under their belts. The full MFC participated in its own dedicated anti racist training workshop in 1996.

Learning more about the dynamics of oppression through the lens of anti racist training brought intersectional oppression issues into clearer focus. However, this changing consciousness had not been reflected in any appointments to the MFC that represented the growing number of LGBT ministerial candidates and ministers in fellowship. When Rev. Charles Kast joined the Committee in 1988, his appointment was quietly celebrated as the first appointment of an out gay minister to the MFC. There wouldn’t be an out lesbian minister on the membership list until Marni Harmony’s appointment in 1996. In September 1997, Rev. Keith Kron, director of the UUA’s Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Concerns, arranged with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee to schedule time with him to discuss the Committee’s understanding of and receptivity to candidates who are transgender.

During the early Nineties, the appointment process for the new MFC members was held closely by the UUA Board’s Committee on Committees. The Moderator and President could easily influence selections, and personal relationships with the UUA staff and leaders from across the Association would be influential in appointments. The move to a large committee of fourteen by 1995 and the changes in the UUA staff serving the MFC created a broader more inclusive conversation about these appointments, and more openness to suggestions from the Department of Ministry staff.

In 1996, the Committee formally decided to empower the Executive Secretary to recruit a replacement member to fill out panels if a Committee member could not attend the meeting. They expressed a preference, but not a requirement, for a former member of the Committee. The substitutes could participate in interviews and panel straw votes on candidates, but not vote on business items. This was also true for the Student Liaisons.

Should the MFC Expand its Membership?

During the preparation of their final report, the MFC and the Commission on Appraisal (COA) communicated easily and regularly. At the September 1991 meeting the full committee squeezed in a business session with the members of the COA followed by an evening meal with further discussion of the Commission’s preliminary findings in their study of “Our Professional Ministry”. At the February 1992 meeting of the MFC, COA members James Hobart, Amy Kelly and Jerry Davidoff met with the full committee for an informal discussion of the COA’s final recommendations. The documentation of that conversation reveals an MFC that was divided about the value of adding members and moving to two panels. Despite the intense workload they labored under, Committee members expressed relief that the report would present this as a “core idea” and not a “fixed plan”. The Committee felt that more staffing would be their first goal to deal with their workload and appreciated the COA’s support for that goal.

Noting that the UUA Board has created a “Committee on Excellence in Ministry” the MFC told the Commission that they believed that a wider conversation throughout the

Association about raising our standards for ministry would be necessary, and that they did not feel that this was theirs to create or to lead.

In reflecting with members who served on the MFC in the early Nineties, prior to the expansion of the Committee’s membership, it is clear that the culture of the Committee was built around dedication to their mission, respect for both the staff and the appointed leadership, and continuity in knowledge, practices, and decision making. Despite the intense requirements of serving on the Committee, the members felt like they had a good process and made good decisions. There was congeniality, loyalty, and some defensiveness about the ways that the MFC had been questioned and studied extensively between 1987 and 1992. Perhaps this explains why expansion of the committee and reforms in its structure were ideas that the members were not willing to embrace quickly. This was especially true in the context of the impending leadership changes during 1993: the conclusion of the tenure of Chair Burton Johnson, and the retirement of David Pohl on July 1, 1993. The decision about whether and how to implement the expansion into a two panel MFC would be left to the next leadership team.

That team was led by the new Chair, Rev. Midge Skwire, the first woman and the first Minister of Religious Education to become Chair of the MFC, and by the new Executive Secretary Rev. Diane Miller, the first woman to lead the Department of Ministry. Rev. Ellen Brandenburg had been serving since 1989 as Ministerial Education Director and staff support to the MFC. For the first time, the leaders interacting the most with both candidates and with ministers involved in disciplinary proceedings were all female.

With terms ending every two years and new members rotating in, the Committee was regularly orienting new people and renewing its understanding of its mission and its process. The MFC that considered the substantial reforms in its membership and operating procedures in response to the Commission on Appraisal’s Report was particularly well equipped for this conversation. As Skwire began her tenure as Chair, she had five other experienced members alongside her, with years to go before their terms expired. Three new members who would each become future leaders of the MFC, former UUA President Eugene Pickett, lay leader Milly Mullarky, and psychologist Doug Sprague, all joined the Committee in 1993. Because the MFC ‘s membership had experienced a 60% turnover within eighteen months prior to the February 1994 meeting where the vote to expand the membership took place, the Committee decided to schedule a full day retreat led by former members of the Committee which could include deeper conversations about the emotional process of serving on the Committee, and role plays of the interview process. One of the outcomes of that retreat was to streamline the sub committees, creating an ongoing new one focused on Process, where before unique occasional task forces had been given process related responsibilities. Later in the Nineties, when the Regional Subcommittees were developed, the internal subcommittees of the MFC became known as “working groups”. In September 1994, the Process subcommittee joined subcommittees titled

“Students” (later ,“Candidacy”) and “Settlement” as the third standing subcommittee. This system allowed the business of the MFC to be managed through these teams, with only items requiring votes or being recommended for full committee discussion coming to the full business meeting.

The Consultations on Ministry and Committee Expansion

After the release of the Commission on Appraisal’s report on “Our Professional Ministry” there was some uncertainty among the various major stakeholders and leadership teams (the MFC, the UUMA, the schools, and the UUA Board) about who was supposed to be “on first” and how conversations and proposals would be acted upon. There was no hostility, however. Some of the “turf” issues were genuinely murky. In 1993, the incoming UUMA President, Rev. Wayne Arnason, started advocating a proposal for all the stakeholders to come together in a “Consultation on Ministry” to be held within a year. The proposal gradually began to find acceptance. Ultimately, three Consultations were held. The first of them would be broadly focused on the many recommendations and issues raised by the COA Report and various stakeholders. The second one would be focused exclusively on conduct unbecoming a minister and disciplinary questions. Later, a third consultation on Community Ministry was proposed and implemented. Funding came from the UUA and grant sources. The first Consultation, a three-night, two day forum, held from March 18-20, 1994, involved twenty three participants, with three of them representing the MFC. It allowed many of the variety of issues on the agenda to at least be processed and some to be concluded with clarity about next steps and who would be responsible for them.

In preparing for the Consultation, Louise Robeck and Bill Sutton brought forward a list of the MFC’s concerns which they hoped would be part of the Consultation’s agenda. Their list (paraphrased below) reads like an inventory of the issues that the MFC would be working on for the next two decades:

• Boundaries regarding complaints (i.e. what should belong to the MFC, what should belong to the UUMA?)

• Grid or no Grid? (i.e. how much should the MFC focus on the traditional academic requirement for ministry represented by seminary courses, vs. more broadly understood “competencies” not easily covered in seminary courses.

• What is the right time for a candidate to have their MFC interview?

• Who owns the internship? The Schools, the MFC, the supervising minister, the congregation?

• What are the right things to be evaluating in each year of preliminary fellowship?

• How big should the MFC, should it remain so centralized, and how should it structure its work?

Agreement had already been reached within the MFC at the meeting held prior to the 1994 Consultation on Ministry that they would support an enlarged membership. The original

proposal made by the Commission on Appraisal in 1992 had been for the Committee to be expanded from eleven to fourteen members, half of them lay and half clergy, with the existing appointment process to be continued. The existing appointment process allotted the UU Ministers Association the appointment of one member, the UUA Board an allotment of two of its own members, and the Board’s Committee on Committees nominating the other members with attention to representation for MRE’s, Community Ministers, and diverse identities.

The UUMA Executive Committee argued that the Committee should continue to have a majority of ministers, and that if it was to be enlarged, that the UU Ministers Association should have two more appointments. At its meeting in November 1993, the MFC disagreed formally with that recommendation. It voted to recommend that future MFC ‘s have no more than eight clergy members. This was the number in the agreement finally reached, with two of the eight ministers to be appointed by the UUMA. The MFC’s formal vote on the matter took place in February 1994 and by November, the MFC met for the first time as a Committee of fourteen members, eight ministers and six lay leaders. One of the new appointments in the expanded membership needed to be another psychologist to insure that each panel for the interviews had a psychologist present. That person would at times be a lay person and at times a minister.

Initially, the new UUMA appointees came via the authority of the President of the UUMA, according to previous practice. With the expanded number of UUMA appointees, some UUMA Executive Committee members felt that the full Executive Committee should have more say in these appointments. The conflict was resolved in June 1995 when the UUMA Executive adopted its first formal policy on MFC appointments. The terms for appointees would be two years beginning at the February MFC meeting. The President would bring one or more nominees for appointment to the Executive Committee and the EC would need to endorse any appointment by a majority vote.

Coming out of the Consultation on Ministry, the report in the May 1994 minutes of the MFC is striking in the diversity of models for panels that were actively considered before they settled on two panels of seven. Some of the options were:

• One panel of nine doing interviews with the five other members doing business.

• Up to six MFC meetings, but every member would not need to go to each one.

• Three panels with rotating membership with one panel only doing disciplinary business.

The model they finally settled on, with interviews conducted in two panels meeting simultaneously was tried out at the first meeting of fourteen members, and most people felt the experiment worked better than expected. The MFC had moved away from meeting with candidates around a table by 1992. The physical arrangement of meeting in a semi

circle worked especially well with smaller seven member panels. In addition to the seven MFC members meeting with each panel, each panel would be staffed, one with the Director of Ministerial Education, and one with the Executive Secretary.

In forming the panels, from the very beginning, attention was paid to representation of diverse identities within each panel so that candidates would “see themselves” in whichever group drew their interview. The expanded membership helped in creating this diversity.

The Ways of the MFC

The Ways of the MFC was an orientation packet of documents that would be given to the incoming members of the Committee to help them understand the culture, structure, and commitments that MFC members observed. The packet evolved with updates as the structure and culture changed. In an undated copy of The Ways of the MFC that was likely published late in 1995, we do not see a reference yet to the MFC meeting in two panels or any description of the Chair’s role at each meeting in determining the membership of the panels. As is noted above in the description of the change to two panels, there were several options considered and some experimentation during 1995 to arrive at the best format. However, most of the culture, structure and commitments of the MFC that would be familiar to Committee members serving in the first two decades of the 21st century are there in 1995.

This 1995 version of “Ways” deals with the basic logistics of the Committee’s meetings, the format of interviews, definitions of the categories and stages of ministerial recognition by the UUA, the MFC’s business process, and the role of the student liaisons. There are specific documents on the duties of the First Questioner, and the job descriptions of the Working Groups (which suggests that BY 1996 this was nomenclature that started being used for the internal “subcommittees” of the MFC.) There is a description of the possible courses of action the committee can take when ministerial misconduct is ruled (i.e. admonition, reprimand, or removal from fellowship.) Particularly interesting are two documents: one about confidentiality that describes hypothetical contexts where the commitment to confidentiality about candidate decisions might be tested, and one about pitfalls on “the road to multiculturalism” written by Louise Ramsdell, a member of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. This latter document is a cautionary list of hazards that white people might encounter as they seek to welcome people of color into largely white congregations. The list would likely be critiqued today as reflecting anxieties about people of color from diverse backgrounds not fitting in to UU culture. It’s not clear who would have chosen to insert this document in an MFC orientation packet or why.

Reflections from a Retiring Chair

The minutes of the MFC during the Nineties are written in good prose that often convey the content of discussions. When Chair Midge Skwire concluded her last meeting in May of 1996, she offered closing remarks to the Committee which were summarized in the minutes. Skwire’s term of service had included some of the most difficult disciplinary cases that ever came before the MFC and a major re structuring the Committee. Her advice and reflections, even though not quoted directly here, but summarized in the May 1996 minutes, give us a picture of the culture of the Committee during this time and how serving on it affected the members’ lives: “Never forget that the interviews are your most important business. The interviews are the reason we exist. Pay attention to the integrity of those who come before you….

Disciplinary stuff is important but don’t let it take the time away from those who need your time.

We work and play so well together. You must know that this committee operates on trust and integrity. This has been a learning process for me. I have become clearer on ethical issues and have learned to face my monsters..and do what I dread.

I don’t think we need to be afraid to make mistakes because we do the best we can..do with our humanity. Being on the committee has changed me a lot. I am not sure if it has always made me a better person, because I am more judgmental. It has made me a better minister. I am really glad that I took the risk of being on the committee.”

SPECIALIZED MINISTRIES PART 4 (1991 1997)

As the three tracks of ministry were finalized, and the formal adoption into the UUA By laws of the community ministry credential made its way through two General Assembly votes in 1990 and 1991, the UUA’s Department of Ministry staff and the leaders of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee were working separately and together on writing or clarifying the requirements for the credentialing in each track. Former MFC member Rev. Roberta Nelson chaired a “Categories Task Force” from 1991 94 that worked first on the by law changes required for recognition of community ministry and then on the MFC Rules and Policies changes that would be involved. As this work neared completion, however, there were already doubts about whether the system that had been designed to accommodate three “tracks” of ministry was the right way to go. The 1994 Consultation on Ministry heard presentations pro and con for abandoning the track system, and it became one of the issues taken under consideration in the next Commission on Appraisal study, published in 1997 under the title Interdependence.

Credentialing Challenges in The Tracks System

The UUA’s Independent Study program, which was developed mainly to support the formation of Ministers of Religious Education, needed new guidelines to support the needs of ministers preparing for parish ministry who needed to meet the new competency requirements in religious education for all ministers. By 1989, the limits of the Independent Study Program as an academic outreach of the UUA were well understood. Beyond the limits of staff and financial support within the UUA’s RE Section, the ISP had been unsuccessful in being accredited in Massachusetts and could therefore not offer a degree. Graduates had the initials ISP after their names and not M.Div. A joint Envisioning Committee with Meadville Lombard Theological School began to imagine incorporating the ISP into Meadville Lombard as part of a proposed new Sophia Lyon Fahs Center for Religious Education. This process culminated in the dedication of the Fahs Center at Meadville in January 1993. The ISP became known as the Modified Residency Program and a Meadville Lombard degree was available to those who completed it.

When Community Ministry was first recognized in 1991, the MFC was strong on members with religious education leadership and ministry experience and weak on members with community ministry experience. Even though the by law requirement that gave LREDA an appointee to the MFC was removed in 1989, there were two MRE’s on the committee and a Minister of Religious Education, Ellen Brandenburg, was the Ministerial Education Director and staffed the MFC. On the community ministry side, Chair Burton Johnson had career experience as a parole officer in the criminal justice system and had some knowledge of prison chaplaincy, but all the ordained MFC members in 1991 had served almost entirely in parish based ministries.

An MFC sub committee was created to work on the Grid to incorporate the distinct needs of candidates preparing for fellowship as Community Ministers. They needed to rely on consultation with the leaders of the Society for the Larger Ministry (SLM). Rev.’s Steve Schick and Cheng Im Tan began meeting monthly with David Pohl to give input from the community ministers on a variety of issues. A by-law change approved in 1992 removed the specific requirement to have an MRE on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee with language that required the ministerial members to include “at least one from each category of ministry”. Community Minister Ralph Mero came on as the first fellowshipped community minister to serve on the MFC in February 1994. Leslie Westbrook followed him in this designated role in 1996 when Mero joined the UUA staff. She served until 2003. Leaders of the MFC also stayed connected with the Society for the Larger Ministry both informally and through accepting an invitation to attend the 1994 SLM conferences held in Berkeley, CA .

When community ministry was initially recognized in the UUA by laws, SLM proposed a similar intake process towards final fellowship in this new track as had been implemented for Ministers of Religious Education, i.e. a “fast track” for those who were already in final fellowship but who wanted their fellowshipping identity changed to “community minister”; also, for those ordained ministers who had been working in community ministries for years and had not met the MFC’s parish-oriented requirements for fellowshipping; and for those ministers who had achieved preliminary fellowship identified as a parish minister but who had never completed final fellowship because they had moved into a community ministry where they struggled to meet the MFC’s requirements for assessment of a preliminary fellowship year. The MFC followed these suggestions although not through a blanket policy decision. Each candidate had to present their credentials individually to be approved.

One Rule change that was implemented in 1994 attempted to bring consistency among the three tracks as well as some flexibility in how any minister’s work towards completing the three “years” of evaluation towards final fellowship would be recognized. Community ministries were sometimes not well compensated and did not have formal work schedules, especially entrepreneurial ministries in justice work. There was agreement that for preliminary fellowship renewal a ministry should be “half time”. The language created to accommodate self employed community ministries read that for all three tracks of ministry recognition shall only be for “fifty per cent of a typical work schedule”. A minister’s preliminary fellowship documentation for work not defined by a job description or hours would have to describe their half-time work schedule.

It required five years of continuing conversation and policymaking to establish the precedents and the process to deal with the diversity of community ministries that candidates brought with them to their MFC interviews. Despite the recognition of Community Ministry, the UUA congregations and the MFC continued to see the world of ministry through the dominant parish based paradigm.

Rev. David Pettee, who later worked as staff support for the MFC as Director of Ministerial Education, recalled his own interview in September 1993 : “I was only the second community minister from the West Coast who saw the MFC. It was evident they didn't know what to do with me. I was coming out of a year of CPE with a boot camp supervisor, so I was ready for any hard question about my life, etc. The fact that I had already been hired for hospice ministry seemed to greatly reassure them. I was nervous and got a "1" with the recommendation that I work on my sermons, not the presentation which had most worried me going in but the content! I preached about how I was linked to the history of other UU's who had served community ministries in the past. (Apparently) It was boring! “

The Consultation on Community Ministry

With many issues still to be resolved, the UUA and SLM decided to use the stakeholder consultation model that had been effectively used in 1994 and 1995 to move forward the recommendations of the Commission on Appraisal’s 1992 Report. A Consultation on Community Ministry was proposed and planned jointly by SLM and the UUA Board’s Ministry Working Group to involve twelve different constituencies concerned with community ministry. The MFC was among them. The Consultation was held in March 1996, and brought its recommendations to the UUA Board the following month.

The backlog of issues to be discussed in 1996 had been matters of controversy since the community ministry track was approved. In January 1992, a new policy was passed that required all candidates for ministerial fellowship to obtain formal sponsorship from a congregation before they could have an appointment with the committee. Although this requirement was for all candidates, one of the concerns that brought the idea forward was that candidates for community ministry might become too detached from congregational life as they set their sights towards a career outside the parish. Although the idea was controversial among community ministers, the SLM embraced it and sold it to their membership in part by speculating it could result in some financial sponsorship as well as moral sponsorship of candidates. However, the requirement and the paperwork that the MFC designed explicitly discouraged any requirement for financial sponsorship of the candidate.

Despite now having an equivalent ministry to parish based clergy, four years after that recognition community ministers complained that they had little to no help from the UUA in finding positions. The pool of potential internship sites and mentors to serve the people who felt called to community ministry was a small pool and good matches could not always be made. The UUA staff and MFC had some familiar concerns about how innovative and unique community ministries could be held accountable to MFC standards and evaluated towards final fellowship.

In 1995, a new Rule 18 was proposed for consideration at the 1996 Consultation on Community Ministry. The new text defined the qualities of a community ministry as suitable for evaluation through three years of preliminary fellowship as follows:

“(The position must: )

1. require the use of traditional ministry skills such as pastoral counseling, worship and preaching, religious education, social witness and advocacy, and institutional leadership.

2. have as its central purpose service to persons or the transformation of society.

3. maintain ties with and receive endorsement by one or more of the following:  a UUA member congregation, authorized District body, UUA Associate Member organization, or the UUA.  Endorsement includes pledge of continuing relationship and support, and affirmation that the work is recognized by the endorsing body as a ministry.”

This endorsement shall be reported every three years to the MFC. In addition, the minister must maintain active involvement in a UUA member society.”

This represented an expansion of the congregational sponsorship requirement that existed for all candidates for ministry to include an additional requirement for community ministers: that their sponsorship had to be renewed every three years. The UUMA had endorsed this approach and ultimately the SLM membership accepted it.

Another issue discussed at the Consultation was that the very process of trying to manage the diverse needs and requirements associated with three different tracks of ministry was proving cumbersome for the UUA staff, committees, and professional associations. Within the MFC, the business agenda was being burdened with regular consideration of requests for track-switching and assessment of educational credentials that could meet unique requirements for being fellowshipped in another track. At the May 1994 meeting, the MFC voted changes in the requirements for ministers awarded preliminary fellowship in one track whose career opportunities led them to another track: “A minister who accepts a position whose duties belong primarily to another category of fellowship rather than the one he or she holds must apply within six months for Preliminary Fellowship in the new category. This application shall include a plan of continuing education and the name of a mentor who holds Final Fellowship in the new category. The MFC may request an interview. If Preliminary Fellowship is granted, review and renewal shall proceed in the usual way. Ministers in Preliminary Fellowship may remain in that status indefinitely while serving in another category of ministry.”

Some leaders in the UUA and MFC already could foresee a more fluid market for ministerial positions influencing careers in which achieving final fellowship could take

many more than three years. A composite hypothetical example of this: a minister whose career vision involved an entrepreneurial community ministry might take two years to start up their ministry and only have one year of that time suitable for meeting the evaluation criteria for a first renewal in community ministry, which is granted. Financial pressures then could make a normal salaried position in a parish look more attractive and a two year contracted associate ministry is accepted. The minister then has to choose to submit new paperwork, possibly have another MFC interview, and start Preliminary Fellowship in the parish track or choose not to have those years working in the parish reviewed for renewal at all. If the parish years were reviewed, the minister might have two renewals in parish and one year in community ministry, but if the next position they found was in the community ministry track, they would have to be evaluated for two more years to attain Final Fellowship. MRE’s also found their employment opportunities could include both parish and ministry of religious education opportunities and had to make such a choice.

It’s understandable that by 1995 96 Department of Ministry Director Rev. Diane Miller and the Commission on Appraisal were already each actively engaging in conversations with the UUMA and the UUA Board about whether the track system should be abolished, just four years after the community ministry track was created. (See Chapter 25)

The UUMA was not ready to go there yet however. The two communities of ministers associated with the distinct identities of “Minister of Religious Education” and “Community Minister” thought that their unique concerns would be lost if the track system was revisited or abandoned so quickly. The Consultation on Community Ministry brought forward a series of recommendations that presumed maintaining the community ministry track and supporting it with an enhanced staff structure. They proposed a UUA Commission to create a long term strategy for advancing community ministries. Little in the way of tangible results came out of these recommendations, however. In part this was because of confusion about what the UUA really wanted and because of changing leadership and declining strength within SLM. In the Commission on Appraisal’s 1997 report, Interdependence, the track system was not endorsed. Instead, the COA recommended “abolishing the separate categories of parish, religious education and community ministry.  Ministers should be received into Ministerial Fellowship with the potential for adding areas of specialization.”

Requirements and Competencies Part 5 (1991

1997)

During 1991, anticipating a positive final vote to create the fellowship category of Community Ministry, the MFC staff and members worked on updating the Grid of requirements and the Reading List. A subcommittee was commissioned to focus on whether and how requirements for community ministry candidates should be replaced or offered as options to those required for parish ministry and MRE candidates. Since the last substantial review of the Grid had only occurred three years earlier, this review did not involve a major overhaul.

Affirming the fellowship category of community ministry, and concern about too many difficult first settlements, had brought focused conversation within the Committee on the importance of relationships with congregations and congregational life for all candidates for ministry in all categories of fellowship. In 1991, a rule requiring all candidates to seek and demonstrate sponsorship by a congregation was framed and a subcommittee of MFC members was created to work with Ellen Brandenburg on the implementation of this rule.

More attention was paid to the Reading List in 1990 91. Once again, a small subcommittee was asked to work with staff in reviewing the list and its design. They reported on their progress at the November 1990 meeting and asked for approval of a new model they called the “short list”. It began with eight required books for all candidates and then offered a list of grouped areas reflecting the major areas of academic and professional competencies. Within each group choices could be made from a list of books, with a requirement of two to three books per group. The new Reading List was approved at the February 1991 meeting and candidates became responsible for it at the end of the following year.

The year 1991 also began with MFC Rules changes being approved by the UUA Board. For the first time, the five categories of decisions and the description of their meaning were placed within the Rules that required UUA Board approval. This initiative came in the interests of promoting greater transparency and understanding of the MFC’s decisions, not only by the UUA Board, but by anyone who read the Rules to understand the MFC’s responsibilities and accountability. There were further changes in 1993 to the language describing Decision Categories III and IV, to make it clear that a Category IV decision was one that expressed doubt about a candidate’s fitness and did not involve a prescription of further work in order to see the Committee again. The roles of the Executive Committee were described and approved in the Rules, including clarity about the staff role within the Executive Committee as non voting members. With the Executive Committee now playing an important role in the process of dealing with difficult disciplinary cases, this was another initiative towards greater transparency.

The Excellence in Ministry Committee

Because the Commission on Appraisal (COA) is a creation of the UUA General Assembly and accountable to it, the responsibility for responding to recommendations that are made in reports of the Commission on Appraisal is a moral responsibility rather than a governance responsibility. That ambiguity meant that the UUA Board, the Department of Ministry, the MFC, the identity theological schools, and the UUMA were all alarmed by the concerns expressed by the COA in their 1989 and 1992 reports, namely that the quality of Unitarian Universalist religious life was being adversely affected by a deterioration in the quality of our ministers. Each group felt they needed to respond to this but wanted to be aware of what other bodies were doing, coordinate efforts, and pay attention to staying within its own lane. The depth of these concerns resulted in several independent and co ordinated studies, conversations, and conversations throughout the Nineties under the banner of “Excellence in Ministry”.

For three years leading up to the release of the Commission on Appraisal Report, the Department of Ministry had been involved in its own strategic evaluation and planning process which they titled “Excellence in Ministry”. In 1991 the UUA Board responded to the conversations happening with the Commission with its own “Committee on Excellence in Ministry” (COEM) and appointed recent MFC member Rev. Jean Rickard as chair.

This Board based study was focused narrowly, on continuing education for ministers. The COEM’s initial work and premise was that requirements for continuing evaluations of ministers beyond the three years of preliminary fellowship reviews would help address the problem of quality control over the course of a career. They initially proposed in a preliminary report in 1991 a process by which all ministers in Final Fellowship would complete a self evaluation approximately every five years and plan for continuing education for upcoming years, without requiring any quota of continuing education units. (Readers will recognize this proposal coming around again thirty years later and being implemented without being heavy handed and with wide acceptance within the UUMA.)

Reporting in 1992 that the Committee had concluded its work, Rickard told the MFC that the preliminary report had received significant feedback from colleagues. The minutes of the MFC’s meeting of April 30, 1992 summarized the feedback this way: “Many expressed that they are not willing to put up with more oversight unless granted more benefits; continuing education should be a joint effort with congregations; and there should be a climate of expectations that acknowledges that continuing education is critical.” Apparently, however, there was not much support for anything like a requirement for an evaluation of each minister in final fellowship every five years. The Committee proposed that a voluntary pilot project, a project in what they called “continuing fellowship” might be started with the MFC’s support. The UUA Board responded with a $20,000 grant over a two year period to fund this pilot project in modeling ministerial self evaluation, and the

MFC responded with encouragement to the Board to appoint some long term former MFC members to the new committee managing the pilot project. Ultimately, the consequences of these pilot programs would reverberate in future continuing education programs of the UUMA and in the encouragement, bordering on a requirement, of the MFC to candidates in preliminary fellowship to create a professional development plan during each of their preliminary fellowship evaluations.

The Grid vs. Competencies

When preparing for the 1994 Consultation on Ministry, the MFC identified one of the issues that the Committee hoped would receive some attention from all stakeholders : the relative weight that the Committee should place on the intellectual skills and academic requirements represented by the M. Div degree versus the questions of character, insight, spiritual depth, and personal integrity represented by a word increasingly used during the 90’s: “competencies”.

“Competencies” had come to replace the word often used to talk about the same things throughout most of the 20th century “character” in part because character suggests mostly moral and ethical qualities a person has. “Competencies”, however, suggests that character matters because it has consequences for actions in the world. You do things differently in the world; you do things that are hard to do which require knowledge and insight but also moral discernment and courage.

At the Consultation, some of the stakeholders complained that the MFC was micromanaging the education of students. While recognizing that the large number of students preparing at non UU schools required the existence of a Grid, and that the Grid was originally laid out in the Seventies at the request of the students who wanted clarity about what was expected of them, there were stakeholders who wished that the Grid could go beyond a list of course areas and move more towards descriptive paragraphs about competencies. The students should decide what is the best way for them to become competent in a particular area, and the MFC should seek to discern whether they have, rather than noticing whether they have a course listed on a transcript. “This is already what we do!” the MFC representatives responded.

The management of internships continued to be a concern for the schools, who thought they should have the authority to approve internship plans without the MFC’s oversight.

The reading list was a final area for complaint. Some stakeholders felt that it wasn’t updated frequently enough, and that it didn’t offer enough choices within an area of academic requirement or an area of competency. Overall, people were telling the MFC that candidates for ministry were not rewarded for creativity or initiative or for honoring a cultural identity that influenced them in their vision for ministerial formation. There was

much to discuss coming out of the Consultation, and the working groups, sub committees and task forces got to work.

In September of 1995, the Student Sub Committee came to the full Committee with recommendations that changed the way the MFC thought about their requirements. They recommended that all specified course requirements that were listed on The Grid be dropped, and be replaced instead only with the fourteen areas of competency that the Committee believed all ministers should fulfill. Students would have to demonstrate that they had fulfilled the competency through course listings or through a written account of alternative forms of learning and practice, The other recommendation they brought was to drop all but a few requirements in the reading list. Instead they recommended that a bibliography of readings be made available to students and they be required to document their self directed reading. Both these recommendations were passed at the December 1995 meeting and implemented in 1996.

Can the MFC Assure Quality in Ministry?

This question was the theme of a short paper prepared by Eugene Pickett in 1995, the year he assumed the role of chair of the MFC. The paper was for an internal retreat discussion by the members of the MFC as they engaged with the various Consultations that arose after the Commission on Appraisal Report, and responded to the continuing anxiety from the UUA Board of Trustees about how we can assure “excellence” in ministry.

Pickett took the position in this paper that we can’t assure it: “ …the establishment of requirements and setting of standards by the MFC cannot reliably predict or assure quality or excellence in our ministry; our process can only hope lay the foundation for it. We can assure our congregations that a candidate has achieved a level of preparation on which excellence in ministry can be based.”

Pickett acknowledged that “the judgments we make as ‘ministerial presence’ or ‘calling’ are intensely subjective” and that they “mature over time and probably cannot be demonstrated adequately at the time of the fellowshipping interview.”

Pickett instead urged the MFC to take a closer look at the renewal of preliminary fellowship process rather than agonize at length about making the requirements or the Grid or the interview perfect. He wrote: “Both the competence and quality of one’s ministry are most frequently put to the real test in the first three to five years in the field. The possibility of predicting excellence in ministry is more likely during these early years in a congregation than during the fellowshipping process.”

The MFC went forward under Pickett’s leadership to undertake a comprehensive review of the preliminary fellowship review process and the documents that described and guided it. Pickett mused in this essay about whether the period of preliminary fellowship might even be extended to five years instead of three, but the idea was not seriously

pursued. By mid 1997, the new renewal forms were in use. In addition, working in an advisory capacity to the Director of Ministerial Settlement, the MFC developed a settlement evaluation form in an effort to guide a more robust process of self reflection among ministers in final fellowship.

Associate Fellowship

In 1995 and 1996, the Committee worked on their definitions and requirements for retaining ministerial fellowship while not active in any recognized ministry. They created a definition of active service in ministry within Rule 18, to include any position that used “traditional ministerial skills” (a list of five was offered reflecting areas of competency required by the MFC); any position that had “as its central purpose service to persons or the transformation of society”, and that had an endorsement from a congregation or other UUA governance entity. The endorsement was to include a recognition by the endorsing body that the work that the minister was engaged in was indeed a ministry. The Committee also decided to make active involvement in a UUA member society a requirement for retaining fellowship. Ministers not able to meet these requirements for demonstrating that they were in an active ministry could still retain Associate Fellowship, but would now have to pay an annual fee, proposed initially to be $50. These Rule Changes were sent to the Board in February 1996 and approved that year.

The rationale for the fee was to clear out those ministers for whom their fellowship status had little meaning anymore. Administratively, the fee was believed to be a help in keeping records accurate and paying for administrative expenses. Some ministers greeted this decision with alarm. Some ministers working in non parish professions who did not pay attention to their UUA mail or the obligations imposed to retain fellowship objected strenuously when they found out their fellowship had been removed. However, the change went through and remained in place.

Creating the Regional Sub Committees 1994 1999

The most challenging of the new initiatives that the Ministerial Fellowship Committee undertook during the Nineties was the creation of a new stage in the credentialing process that would be managed by Regional Sub Committees on Candidacy (RSCC’s). As previously discussed, this wasn’t a new idea but an old idea in a new form.

The RSCC’s were an old idea in that there had been regional subcommittees of the MFC once before. During the years of transition from the American Unitarian Association to the Unitarian Universalist Association, the AUA’s MFC had regional sub committees that continued to be active into the late Sixties under the UUA MFC. They were conceived and operated as “franchises” of the MFC, however, and not seen as an early stage in the credentialing process. Because the AUA and UUA’s MFC in the Fifties and Sixties was still dominated by members from New England and east of the Mississippi, it made sense to delegate some credentialing authority regionally. These regional sub-committees were used mostly by the AUA MFC to interview transfer candidates from other denominations in which regional credentialing authority and record keeping was commonplace. There was little anxiety about the UU credentialing process in those decades among candidates who were graduates of UU or other liberal seminaries, because the process was less formal and had as much to do with “who you know” as “what you know”.

The RSCC’s that the MFC reinvented during the Nineties were a new idea in that they evolved into an early gate that each student for ministry had to pass through to achieve “candidacy status” with the UUA’s Ministerial Fellowship Committee. In the early conversations about regional subcommittees, however, there was less emphasis on making a new stage of credentialing and more on creating an in care program for students.

In 1989, just as a period of scrutiny and critique of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee from UUA and UUMA leaders was beginning, Rev. Ellen Brandenburg was appointed as the UUA’s Director of Ministerial Education. During most of the thirteen years she served in this role, the conversation about “Excellence in Ministry” within and among several UUA stakeholder groups was underway, and several significant new elements in the MFC mandated steps towards preliminary fellowship resulted from these conversations.

During the late Eighties, there was worried discussion within the MFC about an increase in candidates who felt unprepared for their interviews. The minutes note concerns expressed about students not completing the reading list, and students who came to their MFC interview after graduation from seminary with requirements incomplete or a sense of entitlement to a positive decision. In the early Nineties, as the Committee evaluated the interviews they had undertaken at each meeting, there was discomfort with the number of 4’s and 5’s being given to candidates. In an evaluative report written in 2015, Rev. David Pettee, Brandenburg’s successor as Director of Ministerial Education looked back at the

period between 1989 and 1999 (when the RSCC Program was fully implemented across the continent) and found that the MFC had given a Category 5, representing a final denial of preliminary fellowship, to 32 candidates. It’s arguable whether this is an acceptable rate for denial of fellowship. Emotionally, however, as these denials added up, they felt like a failure in the system.

During the Eighties, outside criticism also continued to be directed at the MFC around the lack of any appeal process for candidate decisions. This has been a recurring criticism in different decades, and early in the UUA MFC’s history, it resulted in the creation of the only process resembling an appeal that can be invoked, an appeal of disciplinary decisions through the Board of Review. Candidate decisions related to preliminary fellowship that require a return visit to the MFC or a denial of preliminary fellowship have never been subject to appeal, despite attempts to legislate such appeals through the Board of Trustees or the General Assembly. Insofar as this criticism was part of the scrutiny of the MFC in the late Eighties and throughout the Nineties, it prompted a deeper dive by the UUA staff and the leaders serving the MFC into why too many candidates were coming into their MFC interviews unprepared or very late in their formation process.

The Commission on Appraisal had expressed alarm during its research and in both its final reports in 1989 and 1992 about another issue: the number of unsuccessful first ministries in Unitarian Universalism, unsuccessful insofar as both congregations and ministers were unhappy with how the ministry ended.

In response to all this alarm. Brandenburg was asked to oversee three new requirements that were implemented between 1989 and 1992 career assessment, and a congregational sponsorship requirement for candidates, and a mentorship program for ministers in preliminary fellowship. Brandenburg felt that a support network closer to the students than the UUA staff and MFC could be was something else that was needed, above and beyond the support students received through their seminaries. Rev. Jane Rzepka recalls that the students at the schools were themselves asking for more options for being “in care” than their schools or internships could provide. Brandenburg began researching “in care” models for assistance and support for students in the earliest stages of their formation, in order to help insure timely and successful advancement into preliminary fellowship.

Cross denominational studies of ministerial formation and some local and regional experimental in care programs for UU students in the Denver, Boston, and Washington DC areas were showing a path forward. Brandenburg researched and circulated articles to the members of the MFC about early formation in care programs that were based either in congregations or in regions, and the difference they could make in encouraging early career success in ministry. With support from the MFC’s leadership, she brought to the March 1994 Consultation on Ministry her assessment of the problem and sought buy in for a new initiative to address it.

The problem, as Brandenburg saw it, was a mismatch between the UUA staff resources devoted to candidates for ministry, and the growth and complexity of the student body over the previous two decades. The number of candidates preparing for ministry had tripled since 1975, and the candidates were more diverse in gender and ethnicity. There were now students in traditional residency programs in seminaries and students in nonresidential programs that had different experiences and, in some cases, different standards. More students than ever were attending non UU schools and the cost of a theological education had gone up considerably. The personal support and advice that one Director with one support staff person could offer was unable to keep up with the demand, and the stakes for students who received little or bad advice were very high.

Brandenburg described the MFC process in her presentation to the 1994 Consultation as a "backloaded system.” She wrote:

“This means that virtually anyone who secures admittance to an approved program of study and who files the required papers may be considered a candidate for UU ministry.  With the exception of a seldom used process for removing candidate status for serious cause, the only official decision regarding fellowship comes at the end of a person's program when most all requirements have been completed.  The consequence of this is that inappropriate or marginal candidates may spend many years and tens of thousands of dollars preparing for UU ministry only to be told ‘no’ by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.”

The Pilot Program

In a proposal prepared for the MFC in the spring of 1994, Brandenburg suggested that two pilot regional “support committees” be created in the Joseph Priestly District and the Thomas Jefferson District. In Joseph Priestly, the pilot program would be built on an existing successful in care program supported by district staff and clergy called the JPD Committee for Recruitment and Nurture of Ministerial Students.  The program had been serving the needs of about twenty-five students primarily at Wesley Theological School and Lancaster Theological Seminary. The second pilot would be starting from scratch in the Thomas Jefferson District where three non-UU seminaries (Duke, Vanderbilt, and Candler) had enrolled a critical mass of UU students and where ministers reported more potential students in the pipeline. The plan for the Washington area program was based on a pattern that already existed. A committee of up to ten members, drawn from area ministers, lay leaders and district staff, was meeting up to five times a year. Two committee members paid particular attention to recruitment. All the members could have a personal liaison responsibility to a student in the region. The committee proposed for the Southeast was smaller (6 8 people) because there were fewer students, but the model was the same.

These pilot programs would cost around $19,000 and the UUA Board had authorized capital campaign funds designated for “ministerial recruitment and

scholarship” to pay for the experiment. Beyond the pilot programs, Brandenburg envisioned that as many as nine more regional support programs could be created, based on her statistics on the numbers of students in various regions.

While this Pilot Program was receiving funding and starting up, the MFC’s Student Sub Committee undertook a review of requirements and competencies that extended through 1995. Part of their consideration was whether to create an “early gate”, according to Rob Eller Isaacs, chair of the Student Sub Committee. Eller Isaacs recalls a small task force that researched the possibilities through meeting with officials from the United Church of Christ and reviewing other congregational polity ministerial formation processes. Their research led them to believe that a congregationally based in care program would be more desirable than imposing more early requirements or an early interview with the MFC.

The Vision for Regional Sub Committees

Brandenburg outlined seven goals for the RSCC’s in her initial proposal:

1. To provide, on a regional basis, information to and opportunities for persons interested in preparing for UU ministry.

2. To provide support and collegial opportunities for persons studying for UU ministry, both students and persons transferring from other denominations.

3. To identify and recruit promising candidates for UU ministry.

4. To provide information and resources to local congregations and ministers regarding their role in the education of ministers.

5. To act as liaison between the Office of Ministerial Education and non UU theological schools.

6. To communicate with the Ministerial Education Office, the MFC and the UUMA regarding student matters.

7. To act as advocates in all matters relating to an improved process of preparing people to be UU ministers.

These goals focused heavily on recruitment and support for ministerial candidates Brandenburg was especially hopeful that this regional approach to recruitment could attract more candidates of color. The initial vision did not necessarily include making an interview with an RSCC a rite of passage that one had to go through to become a candidate for ministry. There is nothing in this vision about RSCC’s writing a report to the MFC on each candidate.

One part of the vision that did not have funding in the initial grant from UUA capital campaign funds was retreats for students and prospective students. As described in the initial proposal:

“The annual retreat is a significant aspect of the program which could be initiated as "phase II" due to the expense and work involved.  A possible design is a 3 day/2 night stay at a UU retreat center (The Mountain in SE) for students, transfers, committee members, interested ministers and other guests.  There would be a student track focused on spiritual or inspirational renewal and community building, with an informational session as well (not unlike a UUMA retreat.)  There would be a committee track focused on sharing information, programming for possible recruits, getting to know the students, etc.  A great deal could be packed into this retreat.  All students would be welcome to attend but required to attend at least one during the course of their program.  The required retreat would be funded by the committee.  Financial aid would be available. “

In September 1995, Brandenburg convened a think tank meeting of representatives of stakeholders in Nashville TN to discuss the first year experience of these pilot programs and in particular to develop a design for the future retreats. The invitees included the District Executives from JP and TJ Districts, ministers active in the pilot programs, the outgoing President of the UUMA, and a recently graduated student who had been accepted into preliminary fellowship. At the Nashville meeting, the District Executives were enthusiastic about moving into offering annual retreats, and for the next three springs of 1996 98 both district pilot programs had one.

It was clear in both the initial proposal and in the first year’s experience with the pilots that a strong commitment to this program was needed from a District Executive who would be the responsible regional staff person serving the RSCC. Over time, this proved to be a weakness in the program as the demands on the regional staff made management of the RSCC’s a more difficult load than they all wanted to carry. In the MFC’s Student Sub Committee, conversations about moving from the pilots to full implementation of RSCC’s were centered on the kind of people who could be recruited to serve, people who could combine wise counsel to students as well as effective support. During these three years of the pilot program, the organization for a full complement of RSCC’s across the continent was undertaken. In the transition from two pilot projects to ultimately six RSCC’s, this key element of the original vision, a fully funded retreat for prospective and current students in the region, was sacrificed or at least the “fully-funded” part. The possibility was held out, but the funding from the UUA budget was not available. If RSCC’s wanted to stage these retreats, they would have to make them self sustaining.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 5 (1997 2001)

In his first report to the Ministerial Fellowship Committee as the new chair in September of 1996, Rev. Eugene Pickett was explicit in his belief that the Committee should be engaged in routine and continuous self evaluation. He urged “each of you to make notes during our time together, about concerns you may have or ways in which we can improve any aspects of our meetings. I would like you to give me your notes before you leave so that we can present your suggestions for a structured discussion at our next meeting.”

Pickett went on : “In addition, I hope that we can, from time to time, build into our meetings a period when we can have an unstructured discussion of longer term issues whereby the MFC might contribute further to strengthening and enriching the ministry of our liberal faith.”

Pickett’s expectation that substantive unstructured discussions could become a regular part of MFC meetings was testimony to the effectiveness of the two panel system after two years of experience with it. During 1996 97 the MFC was able to interview 86 candidates, a crushing workload which the smaller single-panel committee frequently had to bear before 1995. The eleven member Committee had to have four meetings a year, each of them four days long, with as many as five interviews per day. There would one scheduled business session and everything else the renewals, the working groups, the bonding and social time, would all be in the evenings or the in the cracks between sessions. Two panels doing interviews created an extra half day at each meeting to devote to continuing education, open discussion of difficult issues, or working group time. The first of these continuing education sessions, held in 1996, was an anti-racism training. The following year, a training and conversation on LGBT issues was offered.

As a result of having a little more time for business, the implementation work for the Regional Subcommittees across the continent as a required stage in the formation process was completed. Policy and rule changes were attended to. The Committee was also able to devote time to consult with the Ministerial Settlement Director on the implementation of recommendations from a review panel that he had commissioned. For a time, the Settlement Working Group was asked to be an advisory group to the Ministerial Settlement Director.

The candidate interview load continued to creep higher, however. There were 90 interviews in 97 98 and preliminary fellowship reviews increased by 20 per cent. As the Committee’s capacity increased, the workload rose to match it.

The intensity of the workload made the opportunities for time off during the meetings even more welcome and valuable. Members of the Committee would usually have evenings off to go out for dinner, although most people still had evening “homework” reading

renewals. The last night’s party, usually at a restaurant, became the responsibility of an “Entertainment Committee”. The MFC Assistant who is well remembered as taking this responsibility “seriously” is Robin Bartlett, who later became a fellowshipped minister. Her regular volunteer accomplice in last night party planning was the Committee’s psychologist Doug Sprague. Innovative entertainment ideas for the last night were combined with regular rituals that assumed liturgical proportions in particular certain songs that always had to be sung, most memorably “The Lame Dame Crane”.

The MFC’s worship culture had evolved during the Nineties, with opening worship led each day by one member of the committee. Every member would be asked to take on this responsibility at least once. The fact that the MFC members read so many packets with such detailed biographical reflections naturally led to a tendency for the worship services to tend towards the autobiographical, and there was much enthusiasm for each member of the Committee having the chance to share their personal history through a series of worship services. This gradually became the accepted cultural norm which has prevailed to this day.

PATTERNS OF INCLUSIVITY

By the late Nineties, the two bodies that appointed people to the MFC (the UUA Board’s Committee on Committees and the UUMA) had settled into an informal agreement to maintain standards of representation of various identities on the MFC. As more women entered ministry and achieved final fellowship, especially after the creation of the MRE credential it was not unusual for the MFC to have a majority of female members. Following the enlargement of the Committee in 1995, the committee would often be gender balanced at 7-7. If there was a gender majority, it would be 8-6 female, but never more. There would be two members who were Ministers of Religious Education, although only one of them had to be working in the profession during their appointment. There would be two persons of color among the membership, and at least one and often two people who identified as LGBT (although the T for transgender was not represented distinctly.) Community ministers had to be represented by at least one minister and often two. Of course, it was possible for one member to hold two or more of these identities at any one time, and straight white parish ministers always ended up being the majority among the ministers. Six of the fourteen members needed to be lay people. One of the members needed to be a Canadian. (After 2002, when the Canadian Unitarian Council took over providing services to Canadian congregations, this practice faded away.) These identity categories were achieved by the ways that the two appointing bodies and the constituencies with which they consulted took these issues seriously and talked among themselves and with the Executive Secretary of the MFC about the vacancies and the Committee’s needs.

One thing worth noting about the composition of the Committee during the Pickett years is how the longevity of membership influenced the ways that the Committee functioned. Four members of the MFC who joined the Committee at the same time as Gene Pickett and who served a maximum of four two year terms were all white. Three of these four were men, and three of these four were lay people. Coincident with Pickett’s time of service, no person of color served more than two two year terms. There is no question that the longest serving members, without necessarily trying to, influence the culture of a body like the MFC. It’s also well accepted that the culture of a small group can be changed when there is a larger number of people whose identities diverge from the dominant culture.

The continuity of longevity of service among members who were Ministers of Religious Education changed the ways that the interviews engaged with questions about educational competencies. By the end of Pickett’s term, the deepening commitments within the UUA to understanding cultural and systemic racism started to influence how the white members of the Committee imagined their roles in interviews

INTERVIEWS

One of the questions that had been raised early on in the discussion about whether the MFC should expand its membership and operate with two panels was whether the interview experience would be consistent from one panel to the other. The Chair had always acted as the manager of interviews, and Pickett continued to play that role when the two panels began. He asked his Vice Chair, Milly Mullarky, to chair the other panel. The Chair would have the authority to draw up the panels from one meeting to the next, seeking to rotate the members in such a way that the same people would not consistently serve together or consistently serve with one of the chairs.

As the two panels moved from experimental status to an established culture, the identities of MFC members would necessarily become the building blocks of the two panels for any given meeting. Since there would usually be two psychologists and two MRE’s (or an MRE and a lay religious educator) and sometimes two community ministers, they would never serve together on the same panel, in order to insure that each panel would have a voice from that particular identity or role. This would also be true for the people of color on the committee as well. The challenge for the Panel Chairs would be to avoid a routine alternation that meant that as many as four out of seven panel members were routinely serving together on each panel.

Gender or gender identification could be a consideration of in how a panel was made up and that consideration added into the mix helped avoid a rote alternation of panelists. The minister lay person balance would be another consideration. There would occasionally be substitute panelists if an MFC member was unable to attend the meeting. Often these would be drawn from the membership of the Regional Subcommittees once they were all up and running. The Student Liaisons also brought their identities into the mix.

Each panel would therefore be both unique, working together for only that meeting, and each panel would have some continuity among the members whose identities or roles meant they were together on a panel more often than not. Gene Pickett and Milly Mullarky had quite different personalities and styles, so their panels did feel different. Before 1995, the Chair might structure the single panel’s interview in advance, but questions would emerge in a more spontaneous sequence as members were motivated to ask them. In the two panel format and as different people became panel chairs over time, the pattern of a chair setting up the interview with the order of questions in a planned sequence began to emerge. MFC members were asked to consider in advance questions they might ask the people their panel would be seeing.

In an effort to improve consistency, the people staffing the panels began to keep track of the questions asked and how they would be asked. Ultimately this turned into a document that was released and occasionally updated for the edification of people preparing to meet the MFC, in an effort to create more transparency.

SPECIALIZED MINISTRIES PART 5 (1997 2001)

The Stalemate Regarding Tracks

The recommendation from the Commission on Appraisal in their 1997 report, Interdependence, to abolish the track system was not a result of any consensus among the constituencies of ministers involved. As was so often the case with COA recommendations, it was a vision that the Commission felt should be realized, but they offered no road map through the politics of implementation. Three leadership groups were involved in the conversation: the MFC, the UUA Board and especially its Ministry Working Group, and the UU Ministers Association, which had two internal professional groups lobbying the UUMA Executive Committee: the Society for the Larger Ministry (SLM) representing community ministers, and the MRE Focus Group, an informal network of Ministers of Religious Education within the UUMA, which operated both within the UUMA and in the Liberal Religious Educators Association. A consensus among all these groups was no easy thing to reach. Indeed, leaders in both LREDA and SLM continued to express strong opposition, fearing that their unique ministries would be lost or ignored. Years of stalemate ensured.

One problem for building consensus was the waning institutional strength and continuity within the Society for the Larger Ministry. In the early Nineties, the SLM Steering Committee sustained the conferences and representational voice of SLM, but by 1995 the burden on a small group of leaders was beginning to wear them down. In February of 1996, notes from SLM leaders in the UUMA’s files at Andover Harvard Library describe the Society for the Larger Ministry’s conversation with the MFC and the UUMA “around the issues of track switching and the movement toward one track of ministry (as) projected to be 5 10 years in the future.. “ No one in SLM at that point was expecting to make a change in the track system in the short term. These notes from SLM say further: “ We, along with our MRE colleagues feel the issues have not been adequately dealt with at this point and would be submerged if we move too quickly to one track.”

This time projection ultimately proved to be more accurate than the expectations of those who were ready to move on eliminating tracks immediately. The role that SLM would be playing in any longer term process of transition away from tracks was ambiguous, however. They acknowledged in correspondence with the UUMA that “member participation during the past 2 years continues to be poor at best.” They were expecting that it would no longer be possible to sustain a formal steering committee, annual meeting, or annual conference. With this expectation of declining capacity, SLM put all their eggs into the single basket of a Consultation on Community Ministry, planned by the SLM Steering Committee and hosted by the UUA Board’s Ministry Working Group.

As noted in Chapter 20, the March 1996 Consultation on Community Ministry had a much larger agenda than the conversation about tracks. The MFC was most concerned with

consolidating the community ministry track’s requirements and policies, even as doubts were emerging within the Committee about the value of the track system. The Consultation’s proposal for an ongoing Commission on Community Ministry and an enhanced staff structure never took off. The hope was that these structures would assume the advocacy and interpretation roles that SLM had played, whether SLM continued to survive or not. It was not within the MFC’s power or role to advocate for community ministry and this new proposed staff structure. Since there was much more support for eliminating tracks within the UUA Board’s Ministry Working Group, there wasn’t a strong enough desire to follow through on budgeting for a unique staff position working with community ministry.

During the year after the Consultation on Community Ministry, the Society for the Larger Ministry became inactive. Organizing work and articulation of guidelines for congregations open to affiliating with community ministers was led largely by Rev. Jody Shipley from her base in Pacific Central District. It would not be until 1999 that Shipley’s efforts led to re gathering SLM and until 2001 when a new leadership group and voice headed up by co chairs Jeanne Lloyd and Maddie Sifantus would be empowered and effective.

When the COA recommended “abolishing the separate categories of parish, religious education and community ministry” and that “ministers should be received into Ministerial Fellowship with the potential for adding areas of specialization”, neither the UUMA or the MFC felt confident that they had supportive representative partners within either the community ministry or MRE constituencies of UUMA to move forward quickly. The MFC continued to see itself as the “driver” for the conversation, however, although the Committee became preoccupied in 1997 99 with other issues, with disciplinary cases, and with responding to the questions raised about the MFC’s authority and process within the UUA Board Ministry Working Group. Although a part of the business agenda, the issue of whether to sustain tracks was put on the back burner for the next two years.

During this period from 1997 2001 there were important voices for community ministry within the MFC and the UUA staff. Rev. Ralph Mero had been a strong advocate for the creation of the community ministry track, and he would have continued to participate in the debate about tracks more actively, but his term ended in 1996 and at the same time he was appointed to the UUA staff to be Director of Church Staff Finances. He was succeeded during this important 96 97 year by a minister who had experience and credentials in multiple tracks of ministry, Rev. Leslie Westbrook. Westbrook began her professional religious leadership career with degree in religious education and had worked in parish ministry roles early in her career following ordination. She pursued her PhD in Social Work while serving as part of the UUA’s religious education field staff. When she sought fellowship with the UUA it was as a Community Minister. Most of her ministry career was as a pastoral counselor and pastoral psychotherapist formally affiliated with a congregation. She embodied all the ambiguities and the possibilities of how a minister’s

career could encompass all three tracks. Westbrook would serve eight years on the MFC throughout the time period that the debate about tracks unfolded.

In the spring of 1999, the issue of tracks took center stage as the Committee devoted a half day of study and continuing education to “Tracks and Team Building”. Following up, MFC member Marni Harmony was asked to prepare a paper on Ministry and Tracks to provide a basis for the MFC’s discussion about next steps. Harmony’s paper advocated for credentialing for one ministry, with specialized ministries still possible to be recognized as an additional step of credentialing. The UUMA’s leadership had gone on the record in April 1999 in support of an approach similar to that proposed in Harmony’s paper and were ready to engage with an implementation plan. In response, the Committee voted at the September 1999 meeting that the chair should appoint a Task Force to explore implementation of this idea. Any plan developed by the Task Force would need to be run by the other stakeholders

Starting the 1999, the MFC’s endorsement of a plan to offer preliminary fellowship as a credential for UU ministry, rather than for a track of ministry, had already created a change in the interviews. Informally, the Committee began looking for a flexibility and a variety of competencies in all its candidates, even though they continued to apply for a credential in a track. As if often the case, changing attitudes within the members of the Committee were already ahead of the necessary process to formalize a change.

From January 5 7, 2000 in Orlando FL, the MFC Task Force on Categories assembled. The group consisted of the Chair, Eugene Pickett, MFC member Leslie Westbrook, former member Marni Harmony, UUA Trustee Wayne Arnason, UUMA President Gary Smith and UUMA exec member Betsy Stevens. Together they worked up a proposal presented to the MFC at the February 2000 meeting.

The Debate within the MFC on the Orlando Proposal

Eugene Pickett approached the February 2000 MFC meeting with enthusiasm and optimism about the proposal developed in Orlando. in his advance report to the MFC dated February 9, he described the new proposal as an effort to respond with solutions to at least four problems that the MFC had perceived with the track system, as follows:

1. Students must declare their specialty too early in the formation process. In response, the new proposal eliminated the requirement to have a declared category of ministry to receive Preliminary Fellowship.

2. This forced early focus on a specialty can result in inadequate preparation in some areas of competency that are not as strongly emphasized in particular areas of specialty. Instead, the new proposal would emphasize deepening preparation in all areas of competency for all candidates.

3. Category switching has presented significant administrative challenges for the MFC. The new proposal eliminates the need to administer category switching.

4. Finally, community ministries are not always connected to congregations, and the MFC is an agent of an Association of Congregations. The new proposal described requirements for community ministries to be congregationally based or supported.

In response to those among both the ministers of religious education and the community ministers who would continue to see such a change as diminishing their unique identities and services, the proposal suggested additional resources for internships and supervision, especially for community ministry, and a commitment from the MFC to give equal emphasis to the competencies for religious education and public ministry as they had to the traditional competencies of lead parish ministries.

Each of the MFC’s Working Groups (Candidacy, Settlement, and Process) were to be given assignments to flesh out the processes and policies that would be required to implement the new proposal. Pickett proposed that the UUMA Executive Committee, all ministers and the theological schools be invited to review it and offer their comments before the April 2000 meeting, when a final draft would be created for presentation to the UUA Board.

Pickett’s optimism about this proposal being received enthusiastically by the full MFC would be disappointed, however. Enough reservations about different aspects of the proposal were expressed by members of the committee that it became hard to imagine the full package of reforms going forward in one piece. Some members were not comfortable with the implication in the proposal that there would be a declaration of specialty prior to Final Fellowship. Concerns were expressed about both the implementation of a consistency in competencies for all candidates that would include religious education and public ministries, and about the requirements for a specialized competency declared late in the formation process.

Ultimately, the motion that was passed at the February 2000 MFC meeting was a step forward that did not engage with many of the assumptions and recommendations of the Orlando proposal. It read: “Moved: That the MFC separate the awarding of Preliminary Fellowship and Final Fellowship from the question of whether or not a candidate has declared a category.”

At a special meeting of the MFC Executive Committee, as reported by Pickett in a report dated April 6, 2000, there was an effort to parse the meaning of this motion and what the next steps going forward would entail. Pickett described the questions that were raised:

“What would a non specialty renewal mean? How difficult would it be to develop internships that would include components of parish, religious education, and public ministry?” What would be involved in training supervisors and getting the cooperation of

the theological schools? Would our new renewal process have to be in full operation? Who would develop the criteria for each specialty and who would do the monitoring? How extensive an educational program would be needed for ministers, congregations, and theological schools?”

Given the need for more study of all these questions, and the time being devoted to other ongoing projects of the MFC (such a implementing the RSCC’s, reviewing the competencies, and strengthening the internship program) Pickett accepted the fact that the Orlando proposal would have to be on a back burner for the time being. In his written report to the 2000 UUA General Assembly (which was supplemented for the first time by a verbal report as an agenda item) the proposal and the ongoing conversation about the tracks system for credentialing was not mentioned. This was the General Assembly that included defeat of the proposal to allow appeals from MFC decisions, so the focus of conversation about the MFC was elsewhere. Nevertheless, as a workshop offering, Pickett convened a hearing about the Ministerial Categories which was well attended.

At the 2000 General Assembly, there was another vote taken which clarified a small but important confusion about the kinds of ministries that the MFC would credential. The vote was an unintended side effect to the proposals raised by the Board of Review to give themselves more authority over disciplinary matters, as described in Chapter 27. In reviewing the by law revisions that the BOR had suggested, the Board Working Group on Ministry asked whether the MFC had ever used the authority given to it in Section 11.4 “ to “makes rules pertaining to status of, and recognition by the Association of, lay preachers and granting licenses to them.” The answer was no. Although lay certification programs had been created by the Association (for religious educators’ credentialing) and some districts had developed, with the Association’s blessing, lay certification programs, the MFC had declined to be involved in setting the rules or standards. This by law, reflecting mostly pre consolidation Universalist polity, was removed by the 2000 General Assembly, clarifying that MFC credentialing was only for professional ministries.

Should the UUMA Credential Specialties?

During the 2000-2001 year, the back burner status of the Orlando proposal did not mean that the conversation about the Ministerial Categories had ceased. It was a conversation that was happening in tandem with a review of how the evaluations and requirements for preliminary fellowship renewals should be structured. Ever since the creation of the categories, and especially since 1991 when the community ministry category was created, the competencies and prompting questions that formed the structure of each year of preliminary fellowship review were criticized from opposing perspectives. Some of the members felt that the emphasis for renewals in the two newer categories, ministry of religious education and community ministry, was too narrowly focused on the particular competencies of these career paths and others felt that the evaluations’ focus did not adequately invite reflection on these more specialized competencies. David Hubner,

then serving as Director of Ministerial Development, was asked to lead the work on developing a better preliminary fellowship evaluation instrument. If this work could be completed in a way that would give both the MFC and UUMA leaders confidence that awarding fellowship without a declaration of specialty was viable and would do no harm, it would help clear the way for a new philosophy and administrative approach to be formalized.

All along, the UU Ministers Association had been an important partner in this conversation, and the MFC was committed to having a proposal that the UUMA would endorse. One of the possibilities that had been brought forward by UUMA leaders, represented by President Gary Smith, and that came up in Orlando but that never found its way into the Orlando proposal, had to do with the UUMA taking on the role of credentialing specialties within the preliminary fellowship renewal process.

The argument put forward was that in most professional associations credentialing and quality control of practitioners is regulated by the profession itself. While the UU Ministers Association over time developed its own ethical codes and processes for holding ministers accountable for ethical violations or bad practice, the Unitarians and Universalists, leading up to and since merger had always seen the Association as better equipped and motivated to offer a system of credentialing. If the UUA was moving in the direction of credentialing for ministry, with a comprehensive set of knowledge and competencies required from Preliminary through Final Fellowship, could the UUMA fill a need for continued recognition of the specialties in ministry through its own credentialing recognition program in these specialties during preliminary fellowship?

The precedent model for this kind of cooperation between the UUMA and the MFC was the Mentor Program, which had been “owned” by the UUMA and required by the MFC. However, it had become apparent after ministers were accustomed to the requirement that the expectation that there would need to be a training program for prospective mentors administered by the UUMA was an over reach. Ministers in preliminary fellowship would ask people they knew and respected to be their mentors and any requirement for training to play the non evaluative role expected of mentors would be an obstacle to the relationship rather than a gateway. Ultimately, as is recorded in the UUMA Executive Committee minutes from April of 2003, the leadership of the UUMA had to admit that “no one owns the mentorship program”.

During the 2000 2001 year the MFC was looking ahead to some major changes in the players at the table in the conversation among the three stakeholders. The MFC membership was going to turn over substantially, with five new members joining. Several substitutes, notably David Pettee, attended meetings to cover for members with health issues. Gene Pickett’s six years as chair, and eight years of service, would conclude at the end of 2001. Gary Smith would conclude his term as UUMA President in June 2001. Diane Miller was running for President of the UUA and was planning to leave as Director of

Department of Ministry and Executive Secretary of the MFC regardless of the outcome. There would be a new UUA President and new Trustees on the Board. All these changes suggested it would be important to revise the Orlando proposal into a new consensus during this season of the MFC’s work.

In September 2000, the MFC voted for the second and final time on the motion "...that preliminary fellowship will be granted in ministry without regard to category. “ This motion further said : “The competencies will be reconsidered in order to strengthen and clarify the committee's requirement that all candidates be adequately prepared in religious education, community, and parish ministry. The chair will appoint a task force to consider the further question of how best to confer recognition of expertise in a particular category... This proposal will not be put into practice until details for implementation have been approved by the full committee and the Board of Trustees, if necessary, and the task force will) make a progress report at the February 2001 meeting of the MFC. The task force will continue the dialogue and broad participation in the discussion by stakeholders.”

This new joint task force of the MFC and UUMA was gathered with an entirely different membership than in Orlando a year earlier. It convened for the first time in Denver on January 24 25, 2001. Attending were Kenn Hurto from the UUMA, Margaret Corletti (a UUMA appointee to the MFC and a Minister of Religious Education), David Pettee (a Community Minister), and Ellen Brandenburg representing the UUA staff. This group continued to work on the Orlando proposal, taking into account questions and feedback thus far and going deeper into the implications for changes in the competencies and the process for preliminary fellowship renewals. Over a year of informal reporting on their progress, both the UUMA Executive and the MFC became intrigued and then enthusiastic about what they were hearing. In January 2002 the Joint Draft Proposal to Re Design Fellowship was released as a proposal to the UUA Board, endorsed by both the UUMA and the MFC.

Requirements and Competencies Part 6 (1997 2001)

Implementing the RSCC’s

The Consultation on Appeals in January 1998 and the in depth continuing education session offered to the Board by the MFC in October 1998 marked the last major initiatives by the UUA Board in their own examination of “excellence in ministry” during the years between the 1992 Commission on Appraisal report and the implementation of the RSCC’s in 1998. The Board’s Working Group on Ministry and their focus on how best to move towards greater excellence in ministry ultimately resulted in the funding of the RSCC program for the 1999 2000 budget as the second significant budget investment in the UUA‘s credentialing program during the Nineties, the first being the expansion of the MFC’s membership. Funding the program across the continent at this level was made easier by the successful UUA capital campaign in the early Nineties and a favorable stock market. FY’s 2000 2002 would mark the high point for funding for ministerial credentialing. An economic downturn and a new administration led by William Sinkford after 2001 stabilized the funding until the 2008 2009 recession began.

During 1998, the members for six RSCC’s were recruited in the United States. Later, an additional RSCC was created to serve Canadian students. The six US regions represented in the initial group were the two pilot regions: the Mid Atlantic and the Southeast, followed by New England, the Midwest, Mountain Desert, and the West. An orientation retreat for the new RSCC members was held in February 1999. By May of 1999, the newest RSCC’s were holding their first meetings and interviews. The initial budget was $140,000 a year for the entire program. However, the initial funding would never be enough to replicate the scale and the success of the two pilot programs, particularly around funding an annual retreat for prospects, aspirants, and candidates for ministry.

Within the MFC, the idea that the RSCC’s should become a gateway to candidate status did not emerge right away as Ellen Brandenburg moved from the pilot program towards a full roll out of the continental RSCC program. In essays prepared for discussions with the UUA Board’s “Excellence in Ministry” initiative in 1995, neither Eugene Pickett nor Rob Eller Isaacs mention the idea of the importance of having an early interview experience as they review initiatives that support excellence. Pickett emphasized the preliminary fellowship renewal process as a stage in formation that is more appropriate for cultivating excellence in ministry going forward than any early intervention program. Eller Isaacs recalls differing opinions within the MFC’s membership about whether “weeding out” inappropriate candidates early was the more important priority.

In the September 1997 report of the Chair, Eugene Pickett described the “plan and the timetable for regional sub committees which will have a major impact on our fellowshipping process.” This suggests that the critical year for the emergent idea of RSCC’s

as a required step in the credentialing process was 1996 97. During the pilot program, a face to face meeting was optional. In the spring of 1997, the MFC formally decided that all students should be required to see an RSCC. By then, the view that a report from the RSCC’s on the interview should be part of the candidate’s packet at their MFC interview had prevailed. At the 1997 General Assembly, the MFC’s leadership met with members of the UUMA executive Committee to brief them and get their buy in. They agreed that the requirement for an RSCC interview would be implemented in July 1998, with interview availability consistent for all students by the end of the 98 99 year.

In his written reflections following the Consultation on Appeals in April 1998, Gene Pickett commented that the “MFC regional sub committees, now being formed will provide early opportunities for obtaining advice about success in ministry.” The use of the term “advice” is significant here. Even though in formulating the requirement that every student must submit paperwork and have an interview with an RSCC, the feedback that was to be given to the student was summarized, not by numbered grades, but using the metaphor of a traffic light. A “Green Light” decision meant you are clear to move forward. A “Yellow Light” decision offered advice and counsel in the next steps of formation. A “Red Light” decision was cautionary advice that the MFC hoped the candidate would take seriously. It sent the message that this student was not seen as having promise for ministry in the eyes of this evaluation body.

In the final iteration of the RSCC program and the requirement for an interview, the decision was made to make candidacy status contingent on a Green Light in the interview. Candidacy status carried with it rights and privileges, including eligibility for scholarships and membership in the UUMA. A Yellow Light decision still meant you had candidate status, with cautions and advice. The Red Light required you to come back for another interview with the RSCC, which would probably slow your progress towards an MFC interview, and would delay your eligibility for scholarships and membership in the UUMA. In his report to the 2000 UUA General Assembly looking back at the first year of implementation of the RSCC’s as a mandatory stop on the way to preliminary fellowship, Gene Pickett’s summary of the RSCC’s reflects the changed attitude towards the importance of the RSCC stage of formation: “the purpose of these sub-committees is to provide an opportunity for discernment early in the Fellowshipping process and to counsel out inappropriate applicants for ministry before they have invested their time and money in preparation.”

During this first five year period between the beginning of the pilot project and the full implementation of the RSCC’s, it is evident that the emphasis had shifted from “in care” support for students to early evaluation and to “counsel(ing) out” those who seemed inappropriate. In the final iteration of six RSCC’s, some of them continued to offer retreat experiences for prospects and aspirants for ministry, but some never did. The ones created last, particularly those in regions like the West or Canada, that encompassed vast geographic territory, could not afford to offer retreats or their candidates could not afford to attend them.

With an RSCC interview now a required part of formation, there was a need to ensure that the experience candidates had with scheduling, preparing for, and experiencing their RSCC interviews would be similar regardless of which RSCC you saw. From the beginning, however, there were challenges in creating standardized procedures and similar experiences.

With this requirement in place, the UUA Board of Trustees felt that the appointment process for the RSCC memberships should go through them. The MFC was a committee of the Board, and the RSCC’s were sub committees of the MFC with important authority. Just as they appointed the majority of the MFC’s members, the Board felt they should vote on the members of the RSCC’s. While recruitment was largely delegated to the MFC’s staff and leadership, from the beginning, this decision brought the politics of the Board’s Committee on Committees process into play. People with denominational leadership ambitions or a desire to receive an appointment to the MFC would see an RSCC appointment as an appropriate first step. The new Chairs of each RSCC had some discretion about creating the culture and approach of their team.

Another difficulty as the RSCC’s expanded to six was the enthusiasm of District Executives for taking on the roles that the founding DE’s in the Mid Atlantic and Southeast had created. The DE’s played a critical role in the model and from the beginning this new role received a mixed reception among some of the DE’s who felt their workload was already approaching its limit.

As Gene Pickett concluded his years of leadership on the Committee, his summary of accomplishments reflected satisfaction with the role that the RSCC’s were playing. Anecdotally, members of the MFC during the first five years of the Regional Subcommittees felt that they added important knowledge to the packets on each candidate. Despite this satisfaction with the Regional Subcommittees, the staff and the leadership of the MFC felt that regular evaluations of the RSCC’s process and design, as well as the aspirant’s experiences with the requirements, would be important to undertake. A five year period for evaluations seemed right, and in 2002 the MFC encouraged Rev. David Pettee, the new Director of Ministerial Education succeeding Ellen Brandenburg to undertake the first evaluation.

The UUA Examines Credentialing and Disciplinary Appeals

Movements to implement appeals of MFC decisions have been perennial in the history of the MFC. The issue had been studied by the several commissions, including the Commission on Appraisal and advocated by prominent ministers, as represented by the Carl Scovel communications described in Chapter 16. The next episode in the appeals discussion was brought about by a decision to give John M. Higgins a Category V in his first interview in May of 1995. Mr. Higgins was a Meadville Lombard graduate who had been a lay leader in the St. Lawrence District. After receiving his “5” he asked his home congregation to ordain

him. He served two small congregations with which he connected outside the UUA settlement system. His request for a return appointment was granted. When that return appointment resulted in a second “5”, he was outraged and began a campaign to institute appeals.

Higgins was supported by his UUA Trustee, the Rev. Carl Thitchener, who had a history of previous conflict with the MFC around a disciplinary matter documented in Chapter 17. In 1997 Thitchener, in response to the Higgins decision, had sought to institute an appeal process for MFC decisions through the UUA Board’s Working Group on Ministry, but this effort was turned back by a large majority vote in the Working Group. The discussion within the Board about this issue did result in another Consultation with a broad charge, as reported by Gene Pickett to the MFC in his February 1998 report to the Committee: “ to ascertain whether the structures and processes related to appeals of the MFC are equitable and just and are perceived to be equitable and just and to make recommendations for structural or process changes, if appropriate, to the Board of Trustees.”

Executive Vice President Kay Montgomery was asked to facilitate this one day meeting of a small group of invited representatives of the Board, the MFC and its staff, the Board of Review, the UU identity schools, and the UUMA seven people in all. By the time this Consultation on Appeals happened on January 26, 1998, the focus of the day’s conversation had been narrowed to whether an appeal process for Category IV and Category V candidate decisions should be implemented. Preliminary conversations had made it clear that no one was interested in creating appeals for MFC candidates decisions in Categories II and III, and no one believed that there should be changes in the Board of Review’s ability to refer back or overturn MFC decisions on process grounds.

The representative of the Board of Trustees, Rev. Nannene Gowdy, reported that over the past five years since the Commission on Appraisal report had been published, the Board had received letters of concern about decisions on seven candidate decisions. None of them, however, had been communicated to the Chair of the MFC. These communications represented a small number of complaints, given that Pickett’s tabulation of decisions within this time period suggest approximately forty IV or V decisions. (In later correspondence with Wayne Arnason dated June 17, 1999, Diane Miller reported that during the six years of Gene Pickett’s membership on the MFC, 1993-99 there had been fifteen “5” decisions, representing a little more than 3% of the candidates. Eleven of these received the “5” after their first interview.) Gowdy also reported that the candidates receiving IV’s were automatically granted a return interview, but only one in four of these candidates made the decision to do so and only four of them, half of those in return interviews, received a final No decision a category V from the Committee.

The representative of the theological schools at this meeting, Rev. Jane Rzepka, reported that although there were occasional concerns about particular decisions, the

schools were generally satisfied that that the decision making processes of the MFC were equitable and just. Changes in leadership, in transparency, and in communication with students had clearly made a difference.

While the Consultation on Appeals concluded that no new structural or process changes were required, they did refer a recommendation from the Board of Review back to the Board’s Working Group on Ministry: a recommendation from the BOR that the Board create a new and separate committee to hear matters in which the MFC recommends disciplinary matters against a minister. Other recommendations from this Consultation suggested more communication between Board and MFC leaders, better efforts to publicize the willingness of the Board and the MFC to hear complaints and concerns about decisions, and supplementing oral communications about candidate decisions, especially Category IV and V decisions, with written feedback in the formal letter.

Despite a cordial and productive Consultation, there were those on the Board who were not satisfied that the Board had done enough examination of ministerial credentialing. At the next Board meeting following the Consultation in April 1998, a motion was proposed that read in part: “Moved that we appoint an ad hoc task force to review the mission, bylaws, rules and policies, and procedures of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.” The discussion demonstrated both that there was a lack of knowledge among many Board members of how the MFC actually worked, and that the motion did not have wide support. A motion to table this proposed ad hoc study was carried. Before it could be lifted from the table at a future meeting, Moderator Denny Davidoff suggested that the Board might devote a major piece of continuing education time at their next meeting to understanding the MFC.

Gene Pickett felt that both he and Diane Miller might be perceived as too defensive to create this continuing education experience after defending the MFC in numerous meetings and consultations, so he asked MFC members Rev. Rob Eller Isaacs and Tamara Payne Alex if they would be the presenters. Pickett’s caution was justified. In an extraordinary Report of the Chair to the MFC at their September 1998 meeting, Pickett wrote two pages venting his frustrations about continuing examination by the Board of the MFC : “This is not to say”, he wrote, “that we shouldn’t be sensitive and responsive to the concerns expressed about the policies, procedures, and workings of the committee. We should always be receptive to suggestions and recommendations that will make our work more effective, fair, and just. But I’ve begun to feel that perhaps ‘enough is enough, already’.”

He then proceeded to document all the reports, consultations, and investigations that had occurred since 1992 five of them and how the MFC had responded to the recommendations from each of them. It is a compelling summary.

At the October 1998 Board meeting, Payne Alex and Eller Isaacs led both a didactic and experiential three hour session for the Board of Trustees. With presentations and flow

charts, they made sure that the Board understood the process that candidates for ministry experience, and that ministers charged with misconduct experience. They then invited the Board into a role play experience of an MFC interview, using Board members who had experience on the Committee and a volunteer Board member to act the role of the candidate. (They gave him a Category 3!) This experience further consolidated the feelings within the Board of Trustees that enough was indeed enough. However, it was not enough for Higgins and his supporters.

In the spring of 1999, a journal published by UU Advance, a group often at odds with UUA policies, processes, and decisions published in their journal Voice an article by John M. Higgins entitled “The Ministerial Fellowship Committee and the Democratic Process”. Most of the article was devoted to arguing the unfairness of a process that he characterized as one that could hold people back from fellowship after a one hour interview. Higgins ignored the significant package of evaluations and written reflections by and about the candidate across the person’s seminary and professional career. Higgins’ proposal for a change was that “a system for fellowshipping should be instituted that involves the advisors, supporters, and educators of the aspiring ministers as the major decision makers in fellowshipping.” (P. 11)

During 1999, there were two parallel discussions about how the MFC’s authority might be weakened or delegated. In Chapter 27, there is a description of the Board of Review’s initiatives towards appeal processes or delegation of authority in disciplinary matters, which took place during this same time period. The Higgins article was part of an organized campaign to change the by laws of the Association to allow MFC all fellowshipping decisions to be appealed. In response, a network of MFC alumni did their own organizing in preparation for the 1999 General Assembly. There was little support for this proposal, however, in the elected leaders of the Association. A straw vote of the UUA Board on the by laws amendment resulted in one vote in favor, 18 votes opposed, and four abstentions. At their annual meeting at the General Assembly, the UU Ministers Association also passed a resolution opposing the proposed by-law amendment by a large majority.

In the Board’s statement opposing the proposal during the GA debate, four arguments against a broad appeals process involving the Board of Review (BOR) were made:

• The right of appeal has its origins in judicial process, and credentialing is discernment process that includes an opportunity for review on process grounds.

• The BOR as constituted is not equipped to conduct appeals of any MFC credentialing decisions.

• Second chances for interviews exist, automatically for candidates who receive Category IV decisions, and frequently for those who receive Category V’s.

• Early discernment (via the RSCC’s) is a better place to invest new money in credentialing that increasing funding for appeals.

On the floor of the General Assembly the amendment was overwhelmingly defeated.

The voices hostile to the MFC’s role were quieted. By 2001 the most critical of the UUA Board members had completed their terms. With one exception, involving the continuing conversation with the Board of Review about their role and authority, the Board would now turn to initiatives for changes in the MFC’s process brought to them by the Committee itself, rather than from outside the Committee.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 6 (2002

2007)

It has not been unusual for as many as five seats on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee to turn over within a given year. However, when this transition includes a change of Chairs and a loss of several senior leaders, there is always speculation about whether the new leadership will change the Committee’s culture. Phyllis Daniel assumed the role of Chair in 2002 as only the third lay leader in the Committee’s forty years. Daniel had served on the MFC for two years already as a UUA Board appointee. She had come from a background as an educator and school administrator. She had been a District leader, was married to a minister prior to her service on the UUA and was Chair of the Board’s Committee on Committees. Her experience had prepared her well for this role.

Nevertheless, she recalled in a 2020 interview that her appointment was “not without controversy”, citing other candidates under consideration who were neither female nor laity. Following Gene Pickett as chair was difficult as well. The MFC had endured considerable scrutiny during the “Excellence in Ministry” years. Pickett had emerged from that scrutiny confident in the MFC’s role, and in the roles of the UUMA and of the marketplace as partners in ministerial formation. His authority as the MFC’s voice and leader had been consolidated by his personal stature and the role he asked for and claimed as a Board committee chair who annually reported to the General Assembly.

Phyllis Daniel said she felt the “burden of proof of competence to be heavy”, so she chose her new Executive Committee carefully and prepared thoroughly for each meeting. With the departure of four other senior members of the MFC along with Pickett, and health problems among some continuing members that required substitutions, Daniel’s first year felt like a very new committee. She asked Leslie Westbrook, the remaining member with the most experience in both the disciplinary role of the MFC and the ongoing work on categories of ministry, to be her Vice Chair. She assumed Pickett’s role as a panel leader for the interviews and asked Mark Belletini to chair the second panel. Belletini succeeded Westbrook as Vice Chair when her term ended.

Phyllis Daniel served four years in the Chair’s seat, stepping down in 2006. She was succeeded by Rev. Jory Agate, serving at the time as Minister of Religious Education at First Parish in Cambridge, MA. Agate had been an appointed member of the Committee since 2002. She had been serving on the Executive Committee and had Chaired the Settlement Working Group during the years when the Committee was studying proposals for credentialing for one ministry rather than “tracks”.

Not only had the leadership of the MFC turned over at this time, but the staff turned over as well, as both Diane Miller and Ellen Brandenburg returned to parish ministries. In 2001 Rev. David Hubner moved from his position as Director of Professional Development to Director of the Department of Ministry and Executive Secretary of the MFC. The

Professional Development Director position went to Rev. Michelle Bentley, and Rev. David Pettee became Director of Ministerial Credentialing. During the tenure of these staff members the Department’s name was changed in December 2004 to the Ministerial and Professional Leadership Staff Group, to represent the range of services (and ultimately credentialing processes) that were available to all the professional leadership identities in UU congregations.

In 2007 Michelle Bentley chose to leave the position of Professional Development Director and Rev. Jory Agate was successful in her application to succeed her. This transition happened at the end of the MFC’s year, in June. The UUA Board offered the position of Chair to former member Rev. Wayne Arnason, but previous commitments made it difficult for him to immediately serve. Phyllis Daniel was asked to return to the role as an Interim Chair for six months and the two meetings in the fall of 2007, with Arnason becoming Chair as of January 1, 2008.

Whatever concerns might have existed about Rev. Agate moving from the role of Chair of the MFC to a supporting staff role, she and the Committee members adjusted quickly to her different presence on the panels as staff rather than as a member. She brought continuity with her into her staff role when it came to disciplinary cases, having served for three years on the Executive Committee that heard disciplinary cases. During this period of time, there were fewer sexual misconduct cases, and more cases involving other forms of misconduct that the MFC had not seen before, to be described in Chapter 31. Both David Hubner and Jory Agate were serving in UUA staff positions that involved roles as counselors and supporters of ministers. Both of them brought a more pastoral approach to disciplinary issues for a time, especially when the violations were unfamiliar to the MFC and the ministers were contrite and cooperative.

Implementing Anti-Racist Policies

In the summer of 2001, Rev. William Sinkford was elected to the UUA Presidency as the first African American to serve in that role. Throughout the Nineties, the UUA itself had been slowly working through a series of anti racist trainings that resulted in changes in policies and practices. The Board of Trustees had undertaken their own series of anti-racist trainings and consultations, and a 1994 General Assembly resolution had affirmed the Board’s intention to implement an anti racist agenda throughout the Association. UUA Committees became more diverse and anti racism training for UUA committees was mandated.

The MFC membership had its first experience of anti racist training using the Crossroads Ministry model in 1996, the first year with Pickett as chair. In 1998 the MFC had voted to add a formal competency requirement on Anti Racism and Multi Culturalism, which read: “Candidates are expected to be conversant with concepts of anti racism and to demonstrate a commitment to anti racism and diversity in our Association.” Initially the

engagement with this competency wasn’t very deep. Beyond the documentation of trainings or readings in the paperwork a candidate submitted, it might be represented by a single question in the interview

As a UUA Trustee for eight years during the late Nineties, Phyllis Daniel had substantial experience with their anti racism trainings and engagement. As she became chair, the MFC had three members who self identified as people of color two lay leaders (both African American) and one minister (an Asian American.) The two lay leaders of color, Betty Bobo Seiden, and James Brown, both had deep personal histories of UU involvement. Brown had retired from service on the UUA’s field staff. In his second year of MFC service, had developed some serious health problems which required him to take a leave of absence from the Committee. Dr. James Robinson, another African American lay leader, was willing to take his seat and serve flexibly until Brown could return.

During the years Phyllis Daniel served as a member of the Committee and then as Chair there were no African American ministers who served as members. This is worthy of mention in light of two developments during Daniel’s tenure a UUA focus on the status of ministers of color, and an invitation to the minister of color staffing the MFC, Michelle Bentley, to participate in panel sessions.

Looking back at the focus on ministers of color, Phyllis Daniel recalled in the 2020 interview: “During the summer before I began to serve as chair, Danielle Di Bona called me to talk about the status of ministers of color. This was a subject that greatly interested me and I arranged for the first meeting to add a day.. at the beginning to hear Rev. Di Bona and discuss the materials she brought to us. She was very effective in her presentation. At one General Assembly, maybe the next one, at the request of the members of the MFC, I reported to the Assembly on the status of ministers of color in the Association. The attention to the issue may well have come about at that time without my support, but the work that was done stemming from that attention was significant.”

President William Sinkford convened a full day Diversity of Ministry Team Conference in September 2002, with stakeholders that included the MFC and the UUMA. The message to the MFC out of that conference was clear and was summarized bluntly in later reporting about this conference : “that the ministerial credentialing process is oppressive to students of color.” At the MFC’s meeting that same month, Sinkford was invited to meet with the full MFC to discuss the outcomes. He saw the MFC as a critical gatekeeper whose culture, process, and decisions could keep out or bring in more people of color to our ministry. Congregations, search committees, and professional associations all had their own gatekeeper roles as well. However, the MFC began to see clearly that changes in the Committee’s culture could make a difference.

The MFC decided to engage with its own anti racism audit in 2003. They added a full day to their September 2003 meeting for anti racism anti oppression training with Josh

Pawelek and Paula Cole Jones. In that year, the Committee added an essay of reflection on “How your Anti Racism/Anti Oppression analysis is reflected in your ministry and your world view” to the requirements candidates had to meet before scheduling their MFC interview appointment. The first years of working with this essay requirement would occasionally prompt deeper questions in the interviews based on what people read in the essay, especially if the content suggested a lack of awareness or engagement with any form of anti racist training.

At this same time, Rev. Michelle Bentley was asked by David Hubner to take over the role that the Executive Secretary had always played as a staff member meeting with a panel. Bentley was the first person of color to staff the Department of Ministry and the MFC. Her role as Director of Ministerial Development already included the management of the preliminary fellowship renewal process and support for the MFC’s Settlement Working Group. However, she had not started out in this role as a staff member sitting in with an MFC panel. With two panels needing staffing, Hubner saw many advantages to moving out of regular attendance at panel interviews. He could still attend either panel he wanted, by invitation, or at his own initiative, out of his own concerns about specific candidates or just to take the temperature of a panel. Having Bentley regularly attend the panels instead would give her further insight into what the candidates went through prior to the preliminary fellowship stages of formation, and it would add the voice of an additional person of color to the panel with which she served.

There was an immediate difference in the experiences of the panels that included Michelle Bentley. For one thing, it meant both seven person panels could have at least two people of color in the room, and that made a difference in questions and after interview discussions. Prior to her UUA staff appointment, Bentley had served in parish and community ministries and as Dean of Students at Meadville Lombard Theological School. Her personality and her insights into ministerial formation improved her panels even as she respected the boundaries of a staff role.

In September 2003, Michelle Bentley and MFC member Abbey Tennis presented a set of ten recommendations for how the MFC’s Reading List and informational documents for candidates could be re written to include anti racist literature, policies, and understandings. They urged the MFC to provide anti racist training opportunities for the Regional Subcommittee members. The five-year review of the RSCC system had recommended that an outside team (ultimately the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Team) provide support for an evaluation of the RSCC’s through an anti racist anti oppressive lens.

During 2003, in the course of the anti racism audit, and through working with the essay requirement, in both the MFC’s panel interviews and in discussions with MFC conversation partners such as the UUMA Executive Committee and UUMA Guidelines Committee, there was increasing advocacy from within the Committee for recognizing

multicultural incompetence, insensitivity, or apathy as indicators that a candidate or a fellowshipped minister might lack the basic competence to begin or continue service.

Leading up the MFC’s final meeting of 2003 a report to the Panel on Theological Education was drafted in response to their request for an update on how the MFC viewed continuing education for ministers in formation and after fellowshipping. The report included reflections on encouraging integration of anti racist understandings and commitments, both in the MFC’s reading list and requirements and in the influence these requirements might have on seminary curricula. At the December 2003 meeting, the MFC for the first time voted a formal Inclusivity Policy: “The MFC declares and affirms its special responsibility to value all persons without regard to race, color, gender, disability, affectional or sexual orientation, family structure, age, ethnicity or national origin in making its credentialing decisions.”

The MFC also recognized that changing their policies could play a role in helping new ministers of color find settlements. In December of 2003, the MFC also voted the following decision: “In further support of affirmative action, the MFC moves to waive for two years (January 1, 2004 December 31, 2005) the requirements of the first paragraph of Rule 17 for ministers of color/ historically marginalized groups serving as interim MRE’s, interim associate ministers, and interim assistant ministers.” This suspension was for a rule that prohibited anyone in an interim position from serving that congregation as a called minister for at least three years. After the two year period had passed, and three such suspensions of Rule 17 had been experienced, the Ministerial Settlement Director, Rev. John Weston, suggested to the MFC that it be continued. He wrote a thoughtful essay on the steps a congregation should follow if it wanted to have an interim minister of color transition into a settled minister and the role that the Association staff could play in helping this transition.

Accessibility Issues

Over the years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed into law in 1990, the UUA gradually followed the law by budgeting to make its old headquarters buildings on Beacon Hill in Boston more accessible. The Ministerial Fellowship Committee did not act on its own to make its interviews more accessible to candidates, or its public business meetings more accessible to anyone (under the “Open UUA” rules passed by the Board.) The Committee never considered that this was their responsibility. Issues of economic accessibility for candidates were similarly never considered. Accessibility was presumed to be a physical issue, requiring elevators and wheelchair ramps in buildings.

The inherent inaccessibility issues involved in requiring attendance at in person meetings was presumed to be part of the process of becoming a minister. Having MFC meetings in the three cities closest to the largest concentrations of seminary students was a

nod to economic accessibility and defended as such when the financial difficulties in continuing meetings outside of Boston became a concern for the UUA administration.

After 2010, when all the interviews were required to be held in Boston, the economic difficulties of participating in the required MFC processes were increased for those further away. For anyone requiring a walker or a wheelchair, the environment of Beacon Hill with its steep sidewalks, its limited places for cars or cabs to park, and its cobblestones added further to the challenges of participating in the MFC.

Ultimately, it was the members of the MFC themselves, including those with temporary or permanent disabilities, who began to express concerns about these issues. In 2003 the MFC had passed their formal Inclusivity Policy including the word “disability”. When the occasional candidates in a wheelchair came through, the MFC’s staff sought to make every accommodation. However, it was not until 2005 that the MFC passed a policy for economic accessibility for people with “special” accessibility needs. It reads:

“

If a candidate has special accessibility needs, the MFC will cover any additional expenses necessary for candidate to appear before the Committee. “

The covid 19 pandemic has ultimately forced the MFC to turn to having all MFC interviews on the Zoom platform, which is a further step towards equal access to all candidates regardless of ability or economic status.

The Role of the Student Liaisons

It’s important to offer some reflections here on the role of the student liaisons that have been attending most Ministerial Fellowship Committee meetings and serving on panels since 1972. They have not been listed in the Appendix of Members of the MFC because the sources and time available to write this history did not make it possible to assemble as complete a list as possible. If it had been possible, it would be an impressive list of ministers who have gone on to serve well in every possible ministerial role.

The original purpose of student liaisons was transparency and public relations. The MFC hoped it could reduce the anxiety of students preparing for interviews by having a student sit in and (initially) observe the Committee at work. The student had to be someone who had already seen the Committee and received a “1”. Sometimes the person would still be in school or in internship, and sometimes they would have already received a call to their first settlement or employment position. The report that the student wrote after experiencing a meeting was circulated to all students on the UUA’s list. Most of them were mostly positive about the experience of seeing the MFC from the other side, and offered good insights to people preparing from an interview.

As has been previously noted, during the Seventies before Charles Gaines required interviews to be structured in advance, there was no requirement or expectation for the

student liaison to participate in the interview. When interview questions began to be scripted out over a few minutes prior to inviting the candidate to come in, the student liaison might take a question or might not. Gradually the MFC’s leaders recognized that the questions and opinions from the students were an asset to the Committee in the interview process.

The Director of Ministerial Credentialing was given responsibility for choosing and issuing invitations to students to come to an MFC meeting, and would often consult with the Chair about choices. When the MFC expanded and started working in two panels, there would be two students invited to attend each meeting. They began to receive a more complete orientation around the expectations for their participation. During his long tenure in this role, Rev. David Pettee saw an opportunity to have his student selections have an impact on the culture of an MFC meeting by making sure over the course of a year of meetings that the students invited could bring experiences, identities, and abilities or disabilities that were under represented within the MFC’s membership. If one of the students invited was a person of color, it could mean that both panels of eight (seven plus the student) could have two persons of color, and that’s a different experience than having only one. With his deep knowledge of the candidates, Rev. Pettee often had several well qualified candidates he was considering, and so he felt confident that inviting a person from an under-represented community or identity would be an add-on to the role that person could play. As the candidate pool for UU ministry began to change from the Seventies onwards decade by decade from dominantly white and male to include more identities, the Committee had a chance to not only benefit from the students’ presence in the panels but to also spend time outside of the context of interviews with student liaisons of color and of various LGBTQI identities. Occasionally a liaison with a disability would require some adjustments by the Committee to make their attendance possible. The early liaisons were usually from a nearby seminary during the time when the MFC met in locations around the country. When meetings were centralized in Boston, there was no hesitation about bringing in a student liaison from a farther distance if that person seemed like the best choice.

Insights from all the student liaisons could often influence a conversation about a number after an interview. If the student knew a person previously from within their own seminary and felt that this would unduly influence their judgment, they could recuse themselves. If they felt they could be objective, the liaison would sometimes be asked during interview deliberations if the person they saw in the interview matched the person they knew from seminary. The contributions of the student liaisons to the MFC’s process and culture over the years has been significant, and the members of the Committee have ben grateful for them and to them.

SPECIALIZED MINISTRIES PART 6 (2002 2007)

A Proposal to The UUA Board

From the time of the January 2000 Orlando Proposal for Re Designing Fellowship, UU Ministers’ Association President Gary Smith was a champion of the idea that the UUMA could take responsibility for accrediting specialties in ministry during preliminary fellowship. Creating and administering a specialties recognition program would be an ambitious undertaking for the UUMA. This was a time, however, in UUMA history when speculation about ambitious new possibilities for what the UUMA might do were not unusual. The imaginations of UUMA leaders would have to eventually come to grips with the limitations of an all volunteer organization with a budget based on modest annual dues. It would be a few years later that the proposal to increase dues to allow for paid staff and a policy governance board would release more capacity for the UUMA.

The proposal for UUMA specialty recognition continued to gain traction after the Orlando Proposal was put on the back burner, even as the presidency of the UUMA transitioned from Gary Smith to Kendyl Gibbons. The many details of administrative responsibility for the idea needed to be explored more carefully, but the basic idea needed to have buy-in from all three key stakeholders, and the UUA Board of Trustees had not yet had an opportunity to weigh in. As the MFC completed its work on competencies revisions to accommodate preliminary fellowship for one ministry, having the UUMA become responsible for specialty credentialing looked attractive enough to these two leadership groups that they agreed that the Joint Task Force should put forward a formal proposal to the UUA Board, released in January 2002 as the “Joint Draft Proposal to Re-Design Fellowship”.

The Board’s last deep discussion of moving away from tracks had taken place during 1996 97. Up until now the Board had never been an initiator of proposals. They had only been informally reactive to the recommendation in the 1997 Commission on Appraisal Report, and the MFC’s expressed intent to move away from credentialing in tracks. The Board had been represented in Orlando in January 2000 but was not formally consulted until they received the Join Task Force Report from the UUMA and the MFC . With a UUMA Convocation on the horizon scheduled for March 2002 in Birmingham AL, it looked like a propitious time to put something out, hear feedback and gain support from all stakeholders.

In describing the “three” key stakeholders in this proposal as the Board, the UUMA and the MFC, it is important to note the voices of ministers of religious education and community ministers were not represented in the years from 1999 2001 by their own unique organizations. While Ministers of Education were important leaders and voices in the Liberal Religious Educators Association, LREDA was a professional organization whose

membership was now composed by a majority of lay religious educators. During this period, they were devoting a lot of their energy to helping shape the new credentialing program for lay religious educators, modeled on the MFC’s process for clergy. The MRE’s professional concerns were taken up within their MRE Focus Group within LREDA and their caucus and representation within and through the UUMA. As described earlier in Chapter 25, The Society for Larger Ministry (SLM), the voice for community ministers during the early stages of the discussion about reforming tracks, had been through a leadership lapse and was essentially in hibernation from 1997 1999. Their voices were being heard individually, however, and through the regional leadership of Rev. Jody Shipley in Pacific Central District. In 2001 2002 momentum was building to reconstitute SLM because of successful community ministry workshops at General Assembly and through Shipley’s encouragement. This was also a time when the UUA Department of Ministry under the new leadership of David Hubner, was transforming itself into a Ministry and Professional Leadership Staff group, an initiative intended to recognize the importance of all forms of ministry and professional leadership as worthy of UUA staff support.

Doubts And Re Consideration

Within a few months and after several conversations with both formal and informal stakeholders in reaction to the January 2002 proposal, it became apparent that there was no consensus or a path forward for the MFC and the UUMA to divide up responsibilities for the fellowshipping process. At their January 2002 meeting, the UUA Board ‘s Working Group on Ministry had too many questions that could not yet be answered about how this shared responsibility would work and whether it was appropriate for the UUMA to be directly involved.

Six weeks later at the UU Ministers Association Convocation, the formal workshops and the informal feedback received on the proposal created further doubts. The feedback came in two broad categories: direct feedback on the key proposal to have the MFC and the UUMA share authority for credentialing in specialties, and a wide variety of broader concerns about the meaning of the specialties if the track system was abandoned. Both the MRE’s and the community ministers had concerns about settlement and compensation, and the resources that the new Ministry and Professional Leadership Staff Group would have available to devote to their concerns, concerns that went well beyond the scope of this proposal for credentialing. The community ministers continued to feel misunderstood, minimized, or ignored by congregations, despite the UUA’s and the MFC’s efforts over the past decade to advocate for greater congregational connections with ministers in the community.

The UUMA Executive Committee had newer members who were hesitant about the UUMA taking on the long term role that previous leaders had advocated and some of the continuing members of the Executive Committee were having second thoughts as well. The Executive Committee still believed that there was an appropriate and important role for

the UUMA to play in drafting the standards that should be met for credentialing within a ministry specialty. In order to advance this work, the UUMA Executive Committee commissioned its own UUMA Task Force on Categories, chaired by a member of the Executive Committee, Rev. Roberta Nelson. Nelson had a distinguished record of previous service as a leading MRE, President of LREDA, and a member of the MFC. Asked to serve with her was former UUMA President and current MFC member Rev. Carolyn Owen Towle, and two UUMA members who had seen previous service on the MFC and been part of the group that worked up the January 2002 proposal in Denver: MRE Rev. Marge Corletti and Community Minister Rev. David Pettee. Rounding out the group was UUA staff member Rev. Ken Hurto, who had previously served on the UUMA Executive and also been part of the joint task force that met in Denver. They were asked to begin meeting in June 2002 at the next UUA General Assembly. The timetable that was proposed for their work was expansive a year before they were asked to report back to the UUMA, and no expectation that a final report on their work would be delivered prior to the June 2004 GA. With this initiative by the UUMA and the new timetable it suggested, the MFC at its next meeting following the UUMA Convocation, began to reconsider the wisdom of sharing their credentialing responsibilities with the UUMA.

At the Spring 2002 meeting of the MFC exasperation and uncertainty about what do to next was expressed. One of the members new to the Committee as 2002 began was Rev. Wayne Arnason, serving as a UUA Trustee appointee. He began attending meetings starting with Gene Pickett’s last meeting as Chair in December 2001. Arnason’s roles of leadership within this conversation about changing tracks to specialties had the longest continuity among the members of the MFC. He had been UUMA President in 1993 95 when the conversation began. His service on the UUA Board extended from 1996-2005 and as a member of the Working Group on Ministry he had represented the Board at the Orlando meeting in January 2001, helping draft the Orlando proposal.

Arnason was asked by the UUA Board to draft for them a summary of the history of the conversation about abandoning tracks and an update on where things stood at that point in time in April 2002 mid way between the spring meetings of the MFC and the Board. In this document dated April 20, 2002, Arnason described somewhat differently for the Board than Gene Pickett had done two years earlier (Chapter 25) the problems that fellowshipping for one ministry was intended to solve. Pickett’s description of the problems were the MFC’s problems, issues more internal to the Fellowshipping process. Arnason added two ongoing problems expressed strongly by the UUMA members, especially the MRE’s and Community Ministers:

“ while wanting to claim their distinct identities as Ministers of Religious Education and Community Ministers, these two categories of ministers have continued to feel that Parish Ministers were seen as the norm.

The voice for all ministers’ professional concerns is the UUMA, and yet the UUMA has a minimal role in the development of standards for the three ministerial specialties. “

Arnason described Moderator Diane Olson’s hope for a shorter timetable within which the Board might be presented with a new proposal from the MFC and UUMA. He indicated that the MFC supported the work of the UUMA Task Force on Categories, and that the MFC would be encouraging them to bring forward a report that could inform a Board discussion in one year instead of two, in time for the April 2003 Board meeting. For the time being, however, the January 2002 proposal was what remained on the Board’s table, and most of the changes proposed and still under discussion would require Board action. At their May 2002 meeting, the MFC voted to amend the January 2002 Joint Proposal to move away from UUMA responsibility for preliminary fellowship renewals.

The paragraph that read: The responsibility for recommending approval of all renewals, and for setting the standards for the granting of specialties at the time of final fellowship, would be assumed by a panel appointed by the UU Minister's Association. The UUMA panel would set the standards in consultation with the MFC and appropriate professional organizations. was changed to read:

The UUMA would recommend to the MFC the standards for the granting of specialties which would occur at the time of final fellowship. The MFC would maintain the ultimate responsibility for establishing the standards and for granting renewals and final fellowship.

In the fall of 2002 at a meeting of representatives from the three stakeholders in the conversation the only result was a consensus that none of the elements of the proposal on the table could be implemented at that time. The UUMA recommended that the January 2002 proposal be rescinded, and that the MFC reconsider its September 2001 vote expressing its intent to discontinue awarding preliminary fellowship in categories of ministry. At their next meeting in December 2002 the MFC considered the request but decided it was unwilling to go back. Nevertheless, the MFC recognized that broader issues about the ways UU’s understand and support the three categories of professional ministry needed to be engaged more deeply before any new framework for credentialing them could be built.

After the December 2002 meeting, Wayne Arnason became convinced that one of the problems standing in the way was that the MFC was still understood by all the stakeholders as the driver of the conversation. On December 20, 2002 he sent a four page personal letter to the UUA Board Members, the UUA Administration, the UUMA Executive Committee and its Task force on Categories, and all the other members of the MFC, titled “Next Steps Regarding Categories of Ministry”.

Who’s The “Lead Goose?”

In the letter he argued that it was time “for the MFC to stop being the ‘lead goose’ in this formation, and that either the UUMA Exec or the Board of Trustees needs to move forward with leadership initiatives that all stakeholders could consider to address concerns being raised by MRE’s and Community Ministers about their perceived status within the Association.”

Arnason described the dilemma facing the MFC as it considered any next steps: “…the MFC’s current proposal has become the lightning rod for a variety of legitimate concerns regarding the categories of ministry. Many of these concerns the MFC has no authority, no budget, and no vehicles of communication to address. The argument has been made by the UUMA that it would be inappropriate to shift the focus for credentialing ministry specialties until such time that broader concerns about inequities and injustices are addressed. Whose job is it to do that?”

In response to this letter, UUMA President Kendyl Gibbons wrote back on January 27, 2003, reaffirming the support of the UUMA Executive Committee for the change from tracks to specialties, and for the work of their Task Force on Categories. Gibbons counseled patience: “We.. remain persuaded that implementing (the proposal) effectively will require careful design, and broad education of our constituents, neither of which can happen overnight.”

She described initiatives that the UUMA would be taking, including support and encouragement for the focus group for community ministers within the UUMA, and a listening project to hear stories and invite ideas from community ministers and MRE’s about how they saw the change to a specialization approach supporting their ministerial callings most effectively. Finally, she expressed hope that the work of the UUMA Task Force on Categories would help provide a way forward.

The Task Force on Categories Report

In fact, that is what happened. The UUMA Task Force on Categories Report cut through the Gordian knot of how the UUMA might define the competencies in specialization and oversee final fellowship for a specialty. It cut the knot with the sharp edge of this sentence: “We believe the responsibility for claiming a specialization ought to rest with the minister and the setting in which he or she practices.”

The members of the Task Force had previously concluded that the unresolved issues related to parity and institutional support for ministries of religious education and community made the task of defining and administering the unique competencies for these specialties premature, and impossible to deliver within the time frame preferred by the UUA Board. The MFC had made it clear, however, that it wanted to go forward with awarding preliminary fellowshipping for ministry. Meeting in March 2003, only six weeks

ahead of the April Board meeting, the Task Force added two new members, Ken Sawyer and Parisa Parsa, and decided to take a fresh look at the problem.

From the very beginning of the MFC’s consideration of community ministries, one of the problems that had always existed was the diversity of forms and settings for community ministries. Rather than continue to try to define the unique competencies for each category of ministry, the Task Force thought it should ask first : “What is common to all our ministries, regardless of the setting?” This was well trod ground within both the MFC and the UUMA, and so arriving at what the competencies held in common would not be too difficult a task. Then the Task Force would ask a second question: “How can we include in these common criteria standards unique for a given specialty?” Their answer to that question was: “This could be done easily by letting the setting lift up what constituted the specialized practice.” Their final report was a draft description of the Annual Review Process for Preliminary Fellowship Renewal, intended to be read by anyone involved in the fellowshipping process candidates, ministers in preliminary fellowship, Boards of Trustees, Committees in Ministry, or Supervisors in community settings.

In addition to describing the process, the report outlined five major areas of competence and the specific tasks they involved, some rules about how these competencies should be considered when deciding whether a minister should receive a preliminary fellowship review in a particular specialty, and the kinds of questions that should be asked in order to arrive at a decision about whether the renewal should be given. One of the recommended rules was that a person could pursue recognition for final fellowship in more than one specialty at the same time, especially if they had two half time positions in a parish setting and a community setting, but also if they were moving from one setting to another within the years in which they were submitting their renewal forms.

The five areas of competency described in the UUMA Task Force report was a new and simpler conception of what any minister should know and be able to do, and it has been influential in the ongoing work on competencies. In Chapter 30, there is an in depth description of the proposal for the five competency areas and what happened to this idea.

The Report of the UUMA Task Force on Categories was finalized and released on April 14, 2003. In the short run, it accomplished what Arnason had asked for in his letter, in that it made the UUMA the “lead goose” within the flock of three stakeholders that would have to reach agreement on the final form for preliminary fellowship. The report was received by the UUA Board and MFC, but it was clear that the next steps would be to seek responses and feedback from constituencies of ministers. With the 2003 General Assembly on the horizon, this would be the first opportunity for general feedback.

The leaders of the newly constituted Society for the Larger Ministry put their initial feedback together in a letter to the UUMA Task Force Chair Rev. Roberta Nelson dated June 17, 2003, the week before the General Assembly. The letter, signed by the SLM Co Chairs Rev.’s Jeanne Lloyd and Maddie Sifantus, along with Board member Rev. Kate Bortner, begins with a thoughtful reflection on how differently requirements that look identical for parish based ministers and community ministers can be experienced by the ministers seeking to fulfill those requirements. In one sentence, they summarize the essence of the difference: “Packaged within the Settlement for a parish based minister are all the structures that a community minister (CM) must create separately.” While obtaining or seeking employment in a community based role, a CM must uniquely replicate or demonstrate a relationship with a congregation and a Committee on Ministry that is built into the parish call. The authors wondered how many CM’s have taken longer than parish counterparts to complete final fellowship as a result of the extra work involved.

Going into the body of the report, the SLM leaders raised two significant areas that required more clarity. The first was the composition of a Committee on Ministry for a community minister. They urged consideration of breadth of membership to encompass not only sponsoring congregation members, but also other representatives of other UU institutions and of community agencies or activists within the CM’s field of work. SLM also challenged the Task Force and the MFC to better define the “transitional period” of time required for a minister already credentialed in one specialty or seeking credentialing in two specialties at once to complete requirements.

Two weeks later at the 2003 General Assembly, an open meeting of the UUMA Task Force, MFC, Board and UUMA leaders met with community based ministers and heard a litany of new and old grievances aired that reflected their frustrations dated from 1970’s. Most specific to the proposals being considered at that time were concerns about the burden of work on community ministers to complete preliminary fellowship, the lack of support from parish based colleagues, and confusion about whether specialization is only encouraged late in formation or perhaps only during the three years of preliminary fellowship. For all the ministers attending similar sessions at that General Assembly, there was a broad concern about how you add or change a specialization as your career progresses and how you demonstrate competency to the MFC in a new specialty. Many feared having to repeat the MFC requirements and interview process all over again. Despite all the questions and concerns, the leaders left the meeting feeling encouraged by the level of energy around these issues and the deep reflection that was being done.

The MFC Reaches Consensus and Suggests a New Approach

During the fall of 2003, the MFC’s Settlement Working Group, chaired by Rev. Stephan Papa, took the lead on absorbing the feedback to the UUMA Task Force on Categories

Report, going deeper into the complexities of a preliminary fellowship renewal process that could include specialty recognition. What the Task Force Report had helped clarify was that there was broad consensus among the stakeholders that Preliminary Fellowship could be granted to any candidate for ministry based on fulfilling the five broadly understood competencies that the UUMA leaders had described without regard to a specialty intention. The real challenge now was to describe what could and should happen within preliminary fellowship renewals.

A think piece prepared for the September meeting of the Settlement Working Group found in a member’s archives is evocative of the discussion during these months. Another member has intensely annotated the four page document with yellow marker and handwritten notes and questions all the way through. This think piece tries to describe where consensus has been reached and to go down various paths (and rabbit holes) of outstanding questions to see where there are new areas of consensus or dead ends. Four “case studies” are described of possible complex scenarios where ministers are seeking preliminary fellowship renewals in one specialty and then another over a period longer than three years, seeking renewals in two specialties at the same time, or seeking renewals mostly in one specialty with a switch to another during the third renewal.

What is striking about reading this document is that the case studies sound very familiar to ministers in the 2020’s, i.e. many ministers experience working in various forms of specialization, either in parish settings or in community settings, during the early years or throughout their careers, and many ministers work in multiple staff settings created by a job market that includes many more part time ministries. In the fall of 2003, you could point to examples of these circumstances, but they were not as prevalent as they later became. As the members of the Settlement Working Group contemplated the possible situations the MFC might have to review to decide on a specialty, it started to become apparent that they were running the risk of re creating a new and second layer of MFC credentialing which could involve as much work as the initial recognition of preliminary fellowship. A major question unresolved during the September meeting was whether completed work for recognition in a specialty would be required in most cases for final fellowship.

Notes from the Settlement Working Group (SWG) at the December 2003 MFC meeting indicate that the meeting began on the morning of the December 3rd with the Working Group members (Papa, Arnason, Carolyn Owen Towle, and Betty Bobo Seiden) and Executive Secretary David Hubner present. As other working groups finished their morning work, more MFC members (Sue Stukey, Jory Agate, Abbey Tennis) joined in with the SWG’s discussion. By the time lunch was over Mark Belletini and staff members David Pettee and Michele Bentley were in the discussion as well. What emerged from that day were six affirmations of MFC consensus that the Committee hoped would also be affirmed by all stakeholders:

1. The granting of preliminary fellowship will be for ‘preliminary fellowship in UU ministry” rather than for preliminary fellowship in a category of ministry.

2. The MFC will strive to ensure competence in the five competency areas of ministry (pastoral, prophetic, teaching, practical arts, and worship) for all ministers receiving preliminary fellowship.

3. In any re design, the MFC will retain control of Fellowshipping and the process for recognition of specialization.

4. Just as we plan to award Preliminary Fellowship without requiring declaration of a specialty, we will also award Final Fellowship in UU Ministry separated from specialty recognition.

5. All ministers in preliminary fellowship must develop a self-designed program for achieving competency in a specialty in consultation with a mentor/advisor.

6. The MFC has responsibility for setting parameters for such plans for achieving competency in ministry.

Where this large group went after that was to a recognition that the MFC membership could not possibly add review and recognition of competency in a specialty at various stages of preliminary fellowship to its workload. What would be required would be another layer of this credentialing body, which they began to describe as “review panels” composed of people who were recognized already as skilled in the competencies of the specialties. One of the reasons the group went in that direction was an oft discussed recurring issue when the MFC first began to consider credentialing community ministers during the seventies, and that issue was the diversity of possible community ministries. Two community ministers serving with the MFC at that time had served as a counselor and a hospice chaplain. Would they be seen as bringing special expertise to an MFC panel charged with granting final fellowship in a specialty for a minister teaching in an academic institution or serving as an organizer in a faith based organizing non profit? The solution seemed to be farming out the final step of specialty credentialing to a Review Panel that would recommend to the MFC that the candidate receive recognition in the specialty.

Re-Designing Fellowship Version 2004

Between the December 2003 and March 2004 Meetings of the MFC, a new Re Designing Fellowship Proposal was written for circulation to all stakeholders. The March 2004 version of the Proposal to Re Design Fellowship had the six areas of initial consensus described above and added ten more statements that the MFC had reached agreement on. They are quoted below directly from the 2004 report and reflect their numbering in that report:

7. The process for renewals of preliminary fellowship will remain essentially the same. We envision re designing the paperwork requirements to reflect the five areas of ministerial competence cited above, including a request for an update on the self designed specialty recognition continuing education plan.

8. Recognition in a specialty shall be ascertained (a) through the minister’s completion of a self designed continuing education program, and (b) second renewal of preliminary fellowship as a UU minister and (c) successful completion of an evaluative review of their knowledge, skills, and performance by a Specialties Review Panel

9. We recognize that each of our traditional categories of specialty has possibilities for new more focused specialty definitions (such as campus, youth, chaplaincy. Family, interim, administrative, advocacy/organizing ministries…)

10. We imagine that ministers could be preparing for more than one specialty recognition at the same time, with the consent and support of their mentor and ultimately the Review Panel.

11. Our hope is that ministers would want to add additional specialty recognitions beyond their first one over the course of a ministerial career as part of their lifelong continuing education.

12. The MFC shall recruit a pool of people for each specialty eligible to serve on Specialties Review Panels.

13. The Review Panel shall decide whether the minister should now be recommended for recognition in a specialty. The MFC will receive recommendations from Review Panels regarding ministers who shall be recognized in a specialty. The MFC shall review these recommendations and has the authority to grant the specialty recognition.

14. The MFC could also grant specialty recognitions directly where standards of competence required in certain specialized ministries which have their own professional education and review processes have clearly been attained, or whose previous career work demonstrates competence in the specialty, e.g chaplains recognized by the AAPC. Ministers who have achieved such professional recognition can apply directly to the MFC’s Settlement Working Group for specialty recognition.

15. During Preliminary Fellowship, a minister would be required to prepare a continuing education plan for recognition in a specialty. If such a plan is not prepared, final fellowship may be withheld. If a minister is not recommended for recognition in a specialty within seven years after preliminary fellowship is granted, the minister shall be asked to explain the circumstances that have prevented completion of the specialty requirement of the MFC. The MFC may require an interview, and may review the

Fellowship status of the minister as a consequence of failing to pursue specialty recognition.

16. Ministers who are in preliminary fellowship or who hold final fellowship in a category of ministry at the time this new system is implemented shall be recognized as having achieved that specialty. Candidates for ministerial fellowship at the time this new system is implemented (target date is September 05), regardless of their stage of preparation, may choose whether they wish to proceed towards preliminary fellowship in a track, or under the new system of specialty recognition. Ministers in final fellowship at the beginning of this new system, of preliminary fellowship and specialty recognition will be required to enter the specialty recognition process if they wish to seek recognition in a new one.

Further along in the document, the MFC offered thoughts on what might be required in a continuing education plan for recognition in a specialty. They include five things: a reflective essay, involvement with a professional group, five organized continuing education programs, a supervisor or employer’s reflection, and documentation of independent study and/or life experience. Confident that they were getting close to a consensus that all stakeholders could accept, the MFC voted in January 2004 to set a date for the MFC to begin granting preliminary fellowship in Unitarian Universalist ministry, not in a category of ministry. It would be September 2005.

For the rest of 2004, this latest proposal to redesign fellowship and create specialties was debated throughout the UUMA, within the theological schools, and informally within the UUA Board. The 2004 General Assembly offered an opportunity for workshops on the plan where ministers could hear from MFC members and give feedback face to face. There was much resistance, especially from parish ministers, to making continuing education towards a specialty mandatory for everyone. Many people criticized the proposal to create what was usually described as “a new level of bureaucracy” represented by the proposed review panels. There was concern that another empowered group charged with reviewing and approving specialties would inevitably add to the paperwork and the staff work involved in managing preliminary fellowship renewals. Many ministers propose that specialization recognition be optional, almost like a post doctoral fellowship for an academic.

At the September 2004 meeting of the MFC, members of the UUMA Executive Committee met with members of the Settlement Working Group and agreed to accept the fact that the idea of review panels was a non-starter. No one wanted to change the plan to begin granting fellowship for one ministry in September 2005, however. At the December 2004 meeting, the MFC backed off from implementing the entire 2004 proposal as presented and instead agreed that if a person completed their renewals with at least half time work in one area of specialty they would be granted final fellowship with recognition

in that specialty. Later this would be amended to a requirement for at least two renewals in one consistent specialty for final fellowship to be given.

Looking ahead to the goal of implementation of fellowshipping for one ministry by September 2005, in 2004 2005 the Process Working Group undertook the task of re writing the Policies around Preliminary Fellowship, Fellowship Renewals, and Internships to make them consistent with this approach.

What Happened Next for the Ministry of Religious Education?

What happened over the next ten years is that completing preliminary fellowship renewals became all that most ministers cared about. Parish ministries continued as the majority “specialization”. Because the MFC continued to be concerned that community based ministers have congregation based experience and connections during preliminary fellowship, only the ministers deeply committed to an identity and a career in a particular community based specialty (most often hospital or hospice chaplaincy) were motivated from the beginning of their formation to receive final fellowship in their specialty. For Ministers of Religious Education, the parish based job market was making the MRE identity less relevant to career realities. Even though the UUA’s compensation guidelines recommended higher salaries for people with the MRE specialty, congregations looking to create or sustain multiple ministry staffs would balk at the compensation standard and consider parish ministers for positions that included full or part time oversight of a religious education program. Ministers of Religious Education who had been identified as such during the Eighties and Nineties and well established in their roles and reputations would have a better chance at retaining or being called to a position defined for a Minister of Education or had greater acceptance than ever before as a candidate for a solo parish ministry in a settled or interim capacity. Second minister titles started to change. Even though a job description might include most of what a “Minister of Religious Education” job description, it might not carry that title and include other portfolios. Part time staff hired at much smaller salaries might carry some of the RE administration roles that used to be part of an MRE’s role, with the minister having supervisory responsibility. It became easy enough to demonstrate competency as a potential “Minister of Faith Development” through a resume, rather than a fellowship specialty as an MRE. With the new competency standards encouraging all candidates to prepare to be religious educators as well as preachers and administrators, search committees became more interested in the resume than the specialty credential.

The new ministers just coming in after 2005, looking at this job market, saw little advantage to pursuing a Ministry of Religious Education specialization, even if they had previous career experience as a religious educator, because it limited their options. One vestige of the old system that wasn’t finally eliminated from the MFC Rules in 2007 was a provision to recognize three years of service as fully accredited lay RE Director as a path to recognition as a Minister of Religious Education. The number of positions defined

specifically as a “Minister of Religious Education” position existed mostly in the largest churches. If there were seventy congregations looking for a minister in a given year, there would rarely be more than four or five looking specifically for a “Minister of Religious Education”. If a candidate who chose to seek a final fellowship specialty as an MRE wanted to be considered for both MRE and solo parish positions, there was still a justifiable fear that search committee members might continue to look upon a candidate identified as a Minister of Religious Education as somehow less than one identified a Parish Minister. More Ministers of Religious Education who found themselves in solo parish roles made the effort to seek a dual specialty credential in both Parish Ministry and the Ministry of Religious Education than the other way around.

What Happened to Community Ministers?

In many respects, the move towards fellowshipping for one ministry made the most difference for candidates who wished to specialize in a community ministry, but who could foresee over the course of a career the value or necessity of being able to move flexibly into parish based ministries as well. The Society for the Larger Ministry (SLM) moved into a period of institutional stability and recognition as the recognized professional association for all who identified as community ministers. During 2004 2005, SLM sought incorporation as a 501(c)3 non profit and adopted a new name, “The Society for Community Ministries”. Working closely with the leaders of the Society for Community Ministries, David Pettee listened to the concerns about contradictions and inequities that remained for the path to final fellowship that a community minister had to follow as compared to a parish based minister. In 2003 04, Pettee and Rev. Jeanne Lloyd, Co President of the Society for Community Ministries, co authored and first published a guide for aspirants and candidates to understand clearly “Steps Towards Final Fellowship for Community Ministers”. With regular updates this document would continue to provide a road map for community ministers for years to come.

Much of what was first mapped out in 2003 04 as the path for people who want to be community ministers to become candidates, undertake evaluated internships, meet the MFC, receive preliminary fellowship, and move through to final (now “full”) fellowship remains in place. The one requirement that continued to raise the most concerns for community ministers was the affiliation requirement. Initially it meant that to retain fellowship a community minister must be in a covenanted affiliated minister relationship with a congregation throughout the minister’s entire career. From implementation in 2005 through 2008, the year when the first group of ministers choosing to go through the new system were given final fellowship, this requirement was under discussion. The MFC ultimately decided it was not necessary to enforce career long affiliation as a rule and limited the requirement to the years of preliminary fellowship renewals. In practice, what has happened since is that most community ministers seek or retain affiliated status with a local congregation as a best practice, without the requirement.

The co authorship of the description of the path to fellowship for community ministers by a staff member who was himself a community minister and the president of the Society for Community Ministries symbolized how far community ministers had come since they won their recognition in 1991. In June 2007, in her final letter as Co President to the Society for Community Ministries, Jeanne Lloyd wrote powerfully about her own journey to a new understanding of her ministry in a column she entitled “One Ministry”

“I write this knowing that some will say, “she’s gone over to the other side.” And, I invite you to think more deeply than that about who we are and what our identities as ministers of this movement are or should be.

When I started as an aspirant, and through till recent years, there was never any doubt that my ministry would be in the community. Nevertheless, because it was required, and because I thought it was important, I was deliberate in creating a well rounded seminary experience that would help me develop parish, religious education, and community ministry skills. As early as 1995, I worked with Ellen Brandenberg at the UUA to develop a prototype of what a community ministry curriculum should look like. It included all the normal parish based ministry classes as well as courses in: community building/organizing; conflict management, consensus building, grant writing, etc. If I have any fault to levy at our educational process for UU ministers, it is to point out that these courses, which would also benefit parish based ministers, need to be offered by our seminaries and required by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee…..

And, yet, I wish to say this to you, beloved community, friends, and members: There is but one ministry. I say this from a position of strength and experience, having recently assumed the part-time position of an Interim Minister at one of our congregations, while also continuing a community ministry on behalf of a different congregation. What I am finding is that all my skills, developed and used in collaboration with our congregations and in the larger community, are beautifully and perfectly suited to parish based ministry. And, while I do not claim to be equally competent in all areas of ministry (just as we all have growing edges) I am saying that my skills as a minister in the community, are the same skill set that work well in the parish.

In short, friends, it has become abundantly clear to me, that we are first ministers….

Any of us may move from a community based ministry to a parish based ministry, and back again, at any point in our lives. It is not a dualistic system of being prepared to work in either one place or the other, but a fluid system where we as professional clergy can sow seeds of justice and healing in our congregations, who are, after all, part of the larger community.

To our lay members, I invite you to think similarly… The longer we choose to see our identities in dualistic terms (us vs. them) the longer we will live self imposed lives at

the edges and the margins of our congregations and the movement. And, the longer it will take for others to recognize ministry done in the community as equally capable and competent as other forms of ministry. There is one ministry….You can’t have one without the other. We are each a part of the larger whole.”

Was it All Worth It?

The MFC moved on after 2005 into a world of ministry that had changed during the seven years that they had spent debating different models for recognizing “specialized ministries”. Several grand proposals came and went during those years. What eventually emerged was indeed the “one ministry” everyone wanted to come back to, but in a form that was much simpler than anyone expected at the beginning. In the sense that the final product was endorsed by all stakeholders and has survived, we must say that the effort was worth it and it was a success.

The effort to stay in these conversations over seven years changed the UUA’s attitude towards the professional ministry and religious professionals. A new lay religious education accreditation program was reinvented. UU Administrators and UU Musicians developed their professional organizations learning from the experience of the ministers. The UUA gathered a Professional Leadership Coordinating Council that included the UUMA, LREDA, the Society for Community Ministry [SCM], UU Musicians’ Network and the Association of UU Administrators. The UUA’s Department of Ministry evolved through a few name changes to become a Staff Group for Professional Leadership. All these changes evolved because after the success of the organizing effort to create unique “tracks” of ministry for religious education and community ministers, the ministers themselves realized that they had more in common in their professional roles than they had divisions.

Three years after fellowshipping for one ministry was implemented the MFC Executive Committee and the Executive Secretary, Rev. Beth Miller together settled on a policy for how the Service of the Living Tradition at the UUA General Assembly would formally and publicly recognize the attainment of a ministerial specialty at final fellowship. It read: “Beginning with the 2008 Service of the Living Tradition, ministers will receive final fellowship in UU Ministry. Categories of ministry will no longer be recognized. “

Ministers who received Preliminary Fellowship in a category of ministry will have their successful renewals count towards a specialty in that area of ministry. All ministers receiving Final Fellowship will be listed in the Order of Service alphabetically with a symbol beside their names indicating specialty, if any.

In addition, the Order of Service will have a separate section listing the names of those ministers who have previously been awarded Final Fellowship and have since been granted a specialty. These ministers will not participate in the Service.”

Specialty recognition in this way continued for a time, but as fewer and fewer ministers requested a specialty designation the practice was dropped.

A decade after the time fellowshipping for one ministry was implemented, it was clear that the focus of specialization credentialing had become polar rather than “trinitarian”: i.e. Do you aspire to serve in the parish or in the community? While the three forms of ministry remain defined in the MFC’s Rules, only Community Ministry renewals have a paragraph describing unique requirements. The language under Rule 13 E. “Continuity of Ministry in Preliminary Fellowship” says only that two renewals from the same “congregation or organization” is required. The word “specialty” does not appear in the Rules. More often Rule 13 E. becomes an issue for candidates completing preliminary fellowship in interim ministries or short term half time ministries in parishes.

Because we don’t see think of specialized ministries the same way we did during the years from 1961 to 2005, because of the decision we made to offer fellowship for “one ministry” this will be the last chapter in this history in the thread that was titled “Specialized Ministries”.

Another consistent lasting legacy of the proposals to re-design fellowship and the teams that worked on imagining fellowship for one ministry has been the review of the competencies for ministry that re-designing fellowship required. In the next chapter, continuing the thread on “Requirements and Competencies”, we turn to that review and its results.

Requirements and Competencies Part 7 (2002 2008)120

Having two distinct threads of chapters in this history under the headings “Specialized Ministries” and “Requirements and Competencies” has been an organizing device that we hope readers have found useful. It becomes more complicated during the early 2000’s because there was a chicken and egg relationship between re designing fellowship to eliminate preliminary fellowship in tracks and a deep review of the MFC’s competencies for ministry, supervision in internships, and preliminary fellowship evaluations. Which came first?

From the time that the MRE “specialty” was created in 1981 82, there had been challenges and concerns about whether there had to be extra competencies required for preliminary fellowship in that specialty and whether other competencies emphasized for “parish” ministers might be minimized or overlooked. In practice, the division of competencies was soon challenged. Within the first year after the MRE identity was created, an MRE asked the MFC for permission to take on a lead parish minister role. Before and after the creation of the community minister identity, MRE careers (obviously parish based roles alongside the “parish” ministers) would go in and out of different leadership relationships with congregations and with the parish ministers with whom the MRE’s worked. Similarly, ministers fellowshipped as community ministers would be called to parish roles as their careers unfolded. The MFC puzzled over and implemented responses to several challenging questions about the competencies for the different tracks, apart from and alongside the question of whether and how and how quickly they could begin fellowshipping for one ministry. These included:

how are the Regional Subcommittee interviews helping aspirants discern their path to ministry at an early stage of their careers?

which competencies would be mandated for all ministers, which would be optional or given less emphasis depending on a candidates’ vision for their ministry?

should parish experience should be mandated for all candidates, either through previously documented experience as a lay leader, or through an internship experience, alongside any requirements for internships or practical experience in the community specialty where a minister was seeking to serve?

should community ministers’ preliminary fellowship evaluations include parish based evaluators, if it all? If an evaluation from a Committee on Ministry is required, how should that Committee on Ministry be composed and charged for a community minister?

Work on these issues was ongoing during the late 90’s, in concert with the work of the two task forces that delivered proposals for re-designing fellowship in 2001 and 2002. While

major aspects of the 2002 proposal involving UUMA responsibility for preliminary fellowship were never implemented, many other changes described in that proposal did become new policies and requirements, even before a consensus could be reached on the implementation of fellowshipping for one ministry.

Evaluating and Re-considering the RSCC’s

Apart from becoming familiar with the MFC’s requirements and establishing a congregational sponsorship, the first major encounter with the UUA’s credentialing process for most candidates for UU ministry had now become the preparation for and the interview with one of the MFC’s Regional Subcommittee. As Gene Pickett concluded his years of leadership on the MFC, his summary of accomplishments reflected satisfaction with the role that the RSCC’s were now playing. Anecdotally, members of the MFC during the first five years of the Regional Subcommittees felt that they added important knowledge to the packets on each candidate. Despite this satisfaction with the Regional Subcommittees, the staff and the leadership of the MFC felt that regular evaluations of the RSCC’s process and design, as well as the aspirant’s experiences with the requirements, would be important to undertake. A five year time period for evaluations seemed right, and in 2002 the MFC encouraged Rev. David Pettee, the new Director of Ministerial Education succeeding Ellen Brandenburg to undertake the first evaluation.

Pettee surveyed aspirants, RSCC members, internship supervisors, and District Executives for their reflections on what was working well and what was not. Some of the District Executives who had been drafted into service as regional staff for RSCC intake felt that their workload was approaching its limit and hoped that alternative staffing approaches could be developed, especially for districts where the RSCC’s had a larger number of interviews. This resulted in a recommendation for more centralized administrative and financial control of the RSCC’s through the UUA’s headquarters.

As noted in Chapter 28, there were concerns expressed that the aspirants and candidates of color found the RSCC system uncomfortable because the panels could be allwhite and culturally white supremacist. The aspirants wanted more specificity and consistency in what the panels were looking for. Some panel members saw the interview not so much as a career counseling opportunity but as an occasion for judgment. The candidates expressed a concern about inconsistency among the panels, and the possibility that these differences could be personality driven. Having to preach a sermon made the RSCC interview feel too much like the MFC interview which occurred at a later stage of preparation for ministry, so the decision was made in December 2003 to drop the sermon. The metaphorical ratings using Green Light, Yellow Light and Red Light were not popular. Some felt the terminology demeaning and confusing. As a result of the first five year evaluation, the MFC also decided at its December 2003 meeting that this metaphor needed to be replaced. All RSCC’s would meet with a candidate after the interview and share their decision among three possibilities: Candidate Status granted, Candidate Status

Postponed, and Candidate Status Denied. A decision to Postpone meant that an aspirant would have to come back for another interview. In the case of Candidate Status Denied, an aspirant could appeal this decision to the MFC itself and ask to be granted another interview.

After a review by the UUA Board, the recommendations arising out of the five year evaluations would all be implemented by July 2004. In reflections written for the MFC in 2020 at the time he was forced by illness to retire from his staff position at the UUA, Rev. David Pettee recalled that during these early years of his service…”There were six Regional Sub Committees on Candidacy. Each had their own administrator. The RSCC’s had a working budget of $140,000/year and each met three times a year, which included a retreat. I supervised the Internship Clearinghouse Coordinator who worked half time….. After Jory Agate became chair of the MFC, the internship requirement, which had been 6 months F/T or 12 months P/T, was changed to the current understanding of the 9 months F/T or 18 months P/T…. After the collapse of the economy in 2008, everything changed. The RSCC administrators and the Internship Clearinghouse Coordinator were laid off. The work of the coordinator was permanently embedded in my job description. The MFC stopped traveling to Chicago and Berkeley because it was cheaper to meet in Boston. “

The reductions in funding for the Regional Subcommittees during these years resulted in eliminating by consolidation two RSCC’s and working within a system of four Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and West. The Canadian RSCC didn’t have enough candidates and too many expenses for travel to sustain it. The two original prototype RSCC’s based in the Joseph Priestley and Thomas Jefferson Districts were merged.

The UUA administration of Rev. Peter Morales that came to office in 2009 was actively skeptical of the overall value of the RSCC system and indeed of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee’s credentialing role. Morales particularly lamented the cost of the credentialing system and sought to cut corners wherever he could. Discontinuing MFC meetings near the two identity UUA seminaries, moving to three MFC meetings a year, and reducing the RSCC meetings to twice a year were all cutbacks that narrowed the path to ministry for candidates because they resulted in fewer options for candidates to have their required interviews and increased expenses for many candidates at a time when the cost of seminary education was rising.

The RSCC’s would limp along for seven more years and when the decision came to eliminate them entirely, it was clear that the original vision for the role they would play in credentialing had both been damaged by the funding cuts but also superseded by other models. There was still continuing resistance from the Chair Wayne Arnason and other leaders of the MFC to eliminating the RSCC’s despite their reduced role, and this delayed the decision that the staff had seen coming and probably would have implemented earlier. The end of the line for the RSCC’s is discussed in Chapter 32.

The Competency Amendments Proposed for One Ministry

In the Orlando proposal for 2000 and the subsequent iterations in 2001 and 2002, a series of amendments to the MFC’s statement on “Academic and Professional Preparation” were proposed. The new additions to the list of competencies that were described in unique new paragraphs were “Public Ministry”, “Learning Theory and Teaching”, and “Personal or Spiritual Development”. The first two were obvious additions that would describe a competency to be held in common by all UU ministers who wanted to be recognized as qualified to serve in any ministry, whether it be in a lead parish role, in a teaching ministry, or in a community based ministry. Other changes proposed for the list of competencies were adjustments that expanded on the MFC’s new understandings of how these competencies could be better described or integrated:

• “and Ethics” was added to the Theology competency, and the distinct requirement for academic competence in Social Theory/Social Ethics was eliminated.

• “and Dynamics” was suggested as a catch all phrase to be added to the Human Development Competency, replacing the dated title “Family Life Education”.

• “Organizational Management” was proposed to replace two separately defined competencies in Leadership and Organization and in Administration and Management.

While these proposed amendments were never acted on as the MFC accepted the UUMA’s desire to charge their own 2002 task Force on Categories to work on a new model for the competencies, the proposals reflect some of the new ways of thinking about what kind of knowledge was important to the broad practice of ministry. In the Human Development competency, “sexuality’” was added for the first time to the list of issues involved in human development. The addition of the word “Dynamics” to the competency was amplified by this description: “A working knowledge of group dynamics, interpersonal communication and family systems is expected.” This sentence represented a re assignment of this knowledge from the previous “Leadership” competency to the “Human Development” competency instead. The competency called “Organizational Management” was described is more practical instrumental terms than previously: “Candidates are expected to have good skills in working with committees and boards, and in training, motivating and sustaining volunteers. Additionally, they are expected to have basic competence in methods and theories of administration and fund raising.”

A Professional Development Plan Requirement Emerges

The 2002 Redesign Proposal stated:

“The current renewal process relies heavily on evaluations of the minister by congregational or community boards and ministerial relations committees. The new vision emphasizes the preparation of a professional development plan, including work in areas of specialty done in concert with a peer group, mentor, and congregationally based lay committee.”

Ever since 1978 when the UU Ministers’ Association created the CENTER Program to encourage and support continuing education among ministers, there had been conversation about whether and how the MFC might also encourage or require continuing education. For literally decades, and until recent years, there was resistance to anything that might be similar to the mandated CEU’s (Continuing Education Units) requirements that are common in other professions. Newer ministers felt relieved to be finished the full MFC process and wanted “final” fellowship to be “final” as far as fulfilling requirements; older ministers were hesitant to buy into mid career or late career re tooling requirements; so these proposals languished. The MFC had no desire to add to its workload any ongoing monitoring of continuing education throughout a minister’s career and saw this as the UUMA’s job. What they could do, however, is to try to encourage good habits and best practices in continuing education through a requirement to have a continuing education plan built into each of the three preliminary fellowship reviews.

The champion for professional development plans on the MFC during the 2000’s was Rev. Jim Zacharias, a pioneer community minister in Unitarian Universalism. Zacharias had been fellowshipped and ordained as a parish minister in 1964. In 1969 he founded a Unitarian Universalist Pastoral Counseling with partial funding, office spaces and support from UU congregations in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. He went through the credentialing program for licensing as a counselor and was often consulted on the unique challenges of community ministry competencies and credentialing. Because of his experience in another professional credentialing system that did have continuing education requirements, Zacharias believed strongly that every minister should have an annual plan for their professional development in the year ahead. He advocated strongly through his years of service on the MFC (2003 2009) that the plans should be specific, listing the courses, books, UUA trainings and UUMA collegial gatherings that were planned and scheduled. He would advocate for withholding approval of renewals if a plan was too thin or missing. Joining the MFC as this requirement within preliminary fellowship was first implemented, Zacharias’ dogged insistence that ministers and the MFC must together take the requirement for a professional development plan seriously changed the culture of the MFC and the UUMA’s membership regarding this requirement.

New Internship Requirements Are Part of Fellowship Re-Design

The UUA established an Internship Clearing House with a part time staff member in the Ministerial Credentialing Office to support candidates and congregations in fulfilling the MFC requirements for internships. The 2002 Re Design Proposal suggested that internship requirements should be changed by strengthening the congregational foundation for all internships. The standard internship would be at least six months full time, with on site supervision, or the equivalent (two academic years at approximately 15 hours per week.) Internships would be designed to offer a balance of experience including parish, religious education and community ministry. A Unitarian Universalist minister in final fellowship would be either the primary or associated supervisor. Candidates who choose an internship site that is not congregationally based must either plan for a significant congregational component concurrent with their community based work, or they must complete the equivalent of a one year part time field education experience in a UU congregation. Transfer candidates would be expected to gain experience with UU congregational life through the equivalent of 8 months of part time work in a UU congregation mentored by a UU minister in final fellowship.

All internships would require as of January 2004 a learning/service agreement approved by the staff person in the Internship Clearing House. With staff support from Ken Oliff and then Kim Wilson, learning/service agreements became more thorough and realistic. As a community minister himself, David Pettee brought creativity and flexibility to his role as a counselor to candidates for community ministry in finding internship sites and designing learning service agreements that could fulfill the congregational experience requirements for those whose calling was outside congregational life. As the value of full year internships became more apparent to the MFC through their experience of reading candidates’ packets and having interviews, a consensus emerged that the six month requirement was inadequate, and the internship should be a minimum of nine months full time or twelve months part time. This change was implemented in 2007.

Previously established requirements for congregational sponsorship for all candidates for ministry and for congregational affiliations for all community ministers in preliminary fellowship had helped to make many congregations, especially larger ones, better acquainted with the MFC’s requirements, including those for internships. During the 2004-2005 year when the final iteration of the re-design for preliminary fellowship was being implemented, there were congregations of various sizes that applied to the MFC for waivers of the “three year rule”, i.e.: “A person engaged in a ministerial student internship, ministerial student field work placement, student ministry, contract ministry, or summer ministry, shall not be eligible for settlement in any professional position in the society in which he/she has been engaged for a period of three years following the conclusion of any of those placements or any subsequent employment in that society”.

In one case a large congregation wanted to hire an intern for a newly defined quasi ministerial position. In another a ministerial candidate wished to intern in her husband’s congregation with an eye on possibly creating a co ministry in the future. Each unique situation tested the rule but proved the value of allowing waivers Within these conversations, the issue of whether internships in “home” congregations might become unrestricted was raised, but in April 2005 the MFC voted to reaffirm its position in the form of a rule of “discouragement”: “Candidates are strongly discouraged from undertaking internships in their home congregations or current places of employment and must seek a waiver of this policy from the MFC when considering such an internship.”

The UUMA Task Force and the Five Areas of Competency

In the previous chapter 29, the work of the UUMA ‘s Task Force on Categories was described. This Task Force was commissioned by the UUMA Executive Committee to bring forward proposals when it became clear that the UUMA needed to be the conceptual leader among the stakeholders in re-defining fellowship. A central part of their charge was to do further work on defining the competencies that would be required for fellowshipping for one ministry. Rather than continue to try to define the unique competencies for each category of ministry, the Task Force asked the question: “What is common to all our ministries, regardless of the setting?” In response to this question, they issued as part of their April 2003 report a description of the five broad areas of competency:

“1. Pastoral Work refers to direct service to persons, families, or groups within a congregation or agency. This work includes:

a. Counseling with regard to life issues, relationships, and spiritual growth. The minister needs to be cognizant of his/her abilities and limitations.

b. Small group facilitation and leadership.

c. Care giving to individuals and groups.

d. Tending to the institution’s spirit.

2. Prophetic Outreach refers to those aspects of ministry that extend the Unitarian Universalist commitment to justice, peace, democratic process, and interdependence beyond the congregation or agency setting. This work includes:

a. Public witness or the minister’s personal involvement with regard to community or world issues.

b. Social advocacy, the minister’s engagement with anti racism, anti oppression, and multi cultural initiatives.

c. Promotion of institutional inclusivity and commitment to Unitarian Universalist values.

3. Teaching refers to creating, leading and facilitating educational programs. This work includes:

a. Educational program development.

b. Fostering theological thoughtfulness and depth in individuals and the congregation,

c. The minister’s continuing education plan for personal growth and professional development.

d. Advancing Unitarian Universalism, its heritage, practices, and ideals.

4. Practical Arts refer to the nuts and bolts of everyday congregational or institutional life. This work includes:

a. Program administration and development.

b. Denominational participation.

c. Working with governing boards, committees, and volunteers.

d. Working with peer and support staff.

e. The direct provision of services/s.

5.

Worship

refers to all aspects of corporate worship. This work includes:

a. The art of preaching and leading worship.

b. Worship service development and leadership for all ages.

c. The minister’s personal spiritual life.

d. Administering rites of passage (children’s dedications, coming of age ceremonies, weddings, memorial, and funeral services).”

This new and simpler conception of what any minister should know and be able to do has been influential in all the ongoing work on competencies ever since 2003. These five competency areas remain imbedded in the MFC’s Rules (7.A) as part of the definition of a ministry:

“Require the use of traditional ministerial skills, such as pastoral counseling, worship and preaching, religious education, social witness and advocacy, and institutional leadership”.

The response to the approach suggested by the UUMA Task Force on Competencies within the MFC was immediately very positive. In a “Next Steps” paper prepared for the Settlement Working Group over the summer of 2003, we find: “The UUMA Task Force has given us a solid foundation for the re design of preliminary fellowship”. The leaders of the Society for the Larger Ministry had no comments or arguments with these five areas of competency in their response to the Task Force’s Report, nor were there any critical comments recorded at the hearings held at the 2003 General Assembly. In the 2004 version of their own Re Designing Fellowship proposal, the MFC affirmed that it would “strive to ensure competence in the five competency areas defined by the UUMA Task Force March 2003…for all ministers receiving preliminary fellowship.”

Layers and Groupings of Competencies

When the MFC and the UUMA reached a consensus that the five “areas of competency” provided a framework that could support fellowshipping for one ministry, it was an important step towards the resolution of how “specialties” would be recognized at the time of final fellowship. However, the simplicity of the five areas of competency was not considered as a suitable replacement for the existing list of fifteen (or sixteen, depending on how you count them) competencies that candidates had to be accountable for fulfilling and describing with a written “Statement of Competency” prior to their MFC interview. The five areas did not go into enough detail about some of the identity and institutional competencies that are baked into the broad five areas. These remained within the detailed descriptions provided to candidates in the “Requirements Handbook”, while the five areas became enshrined in a different place, in the Internship Handbook. The five areas were also more suitable framework to use to amend the evaluation forms that were required to be submitted for each preliminary fellowship review. Rather than having Boards, Committees on Ministry, or supervisors wade through the fifteen competencies, asking them to reflect on evaluative questions based on the five areas was a big improvement.

For the next decade these two layers of competency descriptions lived as neighbors in their respective homes. The UUMA/MFC five areas (Pastoral Work, Prophetic Outreach, Teaching, Practical Arts and Worship) lived in the Internship Handbook and the full list of required competencies lived in the Requirements Handbook, using a grouping of three areas: Academic Competencies, Unitarian Universalist Competencies, and Professional Competencies. In 2009, at the urging of new MFC member Rev. Debra Haffner, a new competency area on Sexual Health was added to the list in the Requirements Handbook, bringing the total number of Statements of Competency required prior to an MFC interview to seventeen when UU History and Polity were considered separately.

In a reflective essay on the status of the competencies that he prepared in 2012, MFC chair Wayne Arnason offered this analysis of another way to look at the evolution of the competencies: as a series of “layers”. He described the layers as:

“Layer 1: Identity Competencies The Identity Competencies are the ones that we have always and traditionally expected that a minister in our tradition should have, and that the culture in which we live expects that a minister should have. Having those competencies was once believed to be sufficient to become a Unitarian Universalist minister, and for many people outside our tradition, they may be the only competencies that they expect one of our ministers to have. The identity competencies carry both the identity of “Minister”, and the identity of “Unitarian Universalist”. In our current list of competencies, I suggest that the Identity Competencies are:

• Theology

• Church History

• Unitarian Universalist History and Polity

• Hebrew and Christian Scriptures

• Worship, Music, Aesthetics, and Preaching

• Professional Ethics/ UUMA Guidelines

• Personal and Spiritual Development

Layer 2: Relational Competencies In the 19th and early 20th century, the scholarly and prophetic preaching minister was the model for ministry, and the Identity Competencies reflect that model. The roles of ministry that involve personal pastoral counseling, teaching, family ministry, and religious education all emerged as after the middle of the century through the profession’s self-understanding and practical experiences, and the changing expectations of parishioners. In 1925, Richard Cabot first suggested that ministers should receive clinical pastoral training like medical students. Anton Boisen founded the Clinical Pastoral Education system during the 1930’s. The counseling role of the minister was most often around spiritual questions and the circumstances of the traditional sacraments and rites of passage baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death. So even though we might think that the competencies around Pastoral Counseling are part of the identity of a minister, they weren’t until the mid-20th century. As we added specialties of ministry in Unitarian Universalism, first as distinct identities and then as specialties recognized by competency, we added “Relational Competencies” to the MFC’s list. I suggest that “relational” is the broadest word to describe those competencies that required the minister to broaden face to face contact with parishioners, individually and in small groups, for counseling, teaching, boundary setting, and organizing. In our current list of competencies, I suggest that the Relational Competencies are:

• Pastoral Care and Counseling

• Human Development/Family Life Education/Ministry to Youth and Young Adults

• Religious Education Theory, Method, and Curricula

• Sexual Health

Layer 3: Institutional Competencies Although the most recent competency to be defined (“Sexual Health”) has been in the relational layer, it’s fair to say that the institutional competencies were the most recent of the layers to be formalized. The MFC came to grips with the fact that seminaries were frequently accused of failing to prepare candidates for day to day life in the parish. We made internships mandatory in response to this concern. When we recognized community ministries, we also recognized that there were different kinds of institutions, beyond congregations and schools, that our ministers would be working within. We tried to encourage candidates to be prepared for the variety of institutional leadership challenges they would face. The institutional competencies are the

smallest list but in the contemporary ministry demand much more of the minister’s time. In our current list of competencies, I suggest that the Institutional Competencies are:

• Leadership and Organization

• Administration and Management

• Social Theory/ Social Ethics

• Anti Racism, Anti Oppression, Multiculturalism”

It would not be until 2012 that the MFC took up once again an in depth look at the Competencies, and this essay was a reflection preparing for this new study, During the period of time covered in this chapter, through the conclusion of the Phyllis Daniel’s term as chair, and the brief term of Jory Agate before she was appointed to the staff, the focus was more on arriving at a consensus and a working model for preliminary fellowship reviews and final fellowship for “one ministry”. Fairness and consistency was valued more than any further examination of the competencies beyond what the UUMA Task Force had done. During Daniel’s term as chair, the competencies that got the most attention in modest tweaks to their descriptive texts were the ones that described youth ministry and anti racism skills. Candidates would find out, or be warned, that after all their memorization of historical dates and facts, they might have a complicated question in their interview about youth ministry and anti racism but a softball question about UU history.

The Competencies and the Panels

With sixteen areas of competency available to be considered for panels, members coming on to the MFC from the late nineties onward would receive guidance from their panel chairs about the major areas of competency that always should have questions asked, and the areas that were optional for panel members to consider. The panel chairs from the time that two panels began in 1995 through the beginning of the term of Chair Jesse King in 2015 always included the Chair of the MFC. The Vice Chair usually chaired the second panel. Milly Mullarky, Mark Belletini, and Emily Gage played these roles the longest. Marge Corletti would usually chair the third panel when three panel meetings were scheduled.

The panels would each have a different character because of the leadership style of the chair, but they tried to be consistent in how an interview was set up. The chair would have notes or a prepared chart of the areas of questioning that each interview would cover. In setting up the interview, each panel member would be asked to either volunteer a question that they would like to ask or be assigned a competency question that had not yet been covered. You could have prepared a question in one of the areas that was not mandatory in the interview, of course, and occasionally these questions meant that to cover all the mandatory areas some panel members would ask more than one question.

In 2002 the Committee voted to change the “Human Development/Family Life Education” competency description to be inclusive of “Ministry with Youth and Young

Adults”, and as a result there were more questions about youth ministry than there had been in previous years. Questions about anti racism issues would take different forms depending on how the candidate presented. The “Sexual Health” competency presented a new challenge for the panels when it was first implemented. Debra Haffner prepared a “cheat sheet” of possible questions that could be covered which helped many panelists.

Over time, the mandatory competency areas for interview questions boiled down to six out of the sixteen: Theology, World Religions, UU History, Polity, Anti Racism/Anti Oppression/ Multiculturalism, and Sexual Health. Depending on the candidate, the responses in the Statements of Competency and the Packet, and the length of the answers, as many as five to six more competencies might be covered. The competencies least covered in questions would be Christian History or Scripture and Social Theory/Social Ethics. The reader (and many generations of candidate ministers) will have to be the judge how well the panel interviews reflected the responsibility of the MFC to discern the required competencies for each person they saw.

Expansion of the Three Year Rule and Overlaps with the Settlement System

In 2005, in response to an unusual waiver request of the three-year rule made by the minister of a large church hoping to groom and employ a student from within the congregation to join his staff, the MFC reviewed Policy 4 and Rule 18. Policy 4 would now state: “Candidates are strongly discouraged from undertaking internships in their home congregations or current places of employment and must seek a waiver of this policy from the MFC when considering such an internship. Having served a congregation as an intern, student minister, summer minister, or contract minister, individuals are ineligible for settlement in that congregation under Rule 18.”

The text for Rule 18 would now read: “A person engaged in a ministerial student internship, ministerial student field work placement, student ministry, contract ministry, or summer ministry, shall not be eligible for settlement in any professional position in the society in which he/she has been engaged for a period of three years following the conclusion of any of those placements or any subsequent employment in that society. Waivers may be made in exceptional circumstances. These conditions shall be clearly stated to the church that engages a student. Failure on the part of the student to adhere to this policy shall be grounds for withholding Fellowship by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.”

Later on and currently the language of this Rule would be simplified and the broad prohibition against taking “any professional position” would be removed. The consistency in retaining this rule over fifty years speaks to its importance. The way it has been tweaked and waived over this time reflects the need for responsiveness to the changing market for ministry and the overlapping roles of the staff and the MFC in ensuring that the rule is honored and that waivers are appropriately and consistently given.

Rule 18 has always had a prelude that specifies the rationale for the rule: “to ensure an equitable settlement process for congregations and ministers in transition”. Equity and fairness have suggested since the seventies that the competition for settlement should be a level playing field for all qualified candidates

The current prelude sentences also say:” policies, procedures and restrictions have been developed by the Ministries and Faith Development Staff Group and are administered by the Transitions Director”. In practice, ministers and candidates for ministry have been given the major responsibility for observing these rules that ensure equity and fairness. The Transitions Director describes and interprets the rules but ultimately is not the manager of internships. Starting in the Seventies and continuing into the Two Thousands, the MFC policies and rules were focused on internships because they were a required part of the formation process that the MFC oversaw and evaluated.

However, since 2005, as the policy expanded to include other forms of short term or contracted ministerial services as disqualifying for an application for settlement within three years, the line between what should be a primary responsibility of the Transitions Director and a primary responsibility of the Settlement Working Group of the MFC blurs. The role of “contract ministers” has expanded since 2005 into a career option within a settlement marketplace that can has seen a reduction in the number of congregations that can afford a search and settlement process for a full time minister. Part time positions of various kinds that can be held by clergy or by non ordained people are more common than they were in 2005.

In 2005 when the rule was amended to include other roles of services the concern was that creating non-ministerial jobs for a student (especially one who came from the congregation) would be a back door into starting or continuing an internship or a future staff role. Since then, the number of “exceptional” cases have increased, as we have become more tolerant of interns serving in congregations near to their homes and indeed where they have been lay leaders. Our increasing diversity of opportunities for part time, contract, and transitional ministry roles has also expanded the number of situations where ministers and congregations have made the case for continuing employment where they have previously served within three years. Enforcing the rule by denying he waiver when there does not seem to be a good prospect for full search that would produce a better settled or contract ministry has made waivers more common.

The MFC through its Settlement Working Group continues to study whether the working group and the MFC should be involved in making decisions on all these situations through their waiver granting process, or whether they should only become involved when the Transitions Director, under his own authority, asks for MFC concurrence on a more difficult decision. Beyond that, routine waivers could be granted by the Transitions Director. The question is not yet resolved.

THE CULTURE AND INCLUSIVITY OF THE MFC PART 7 (2008-2015)

This institutional history of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee concludes with three chapters covering the time period 2008 2015 when the author, Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason, was Chair of the Committee. As such, and as noted in the Introduction to this essay, my personal involvement during these years requires me to acknowledge that I don’t claim a historian’s objectivity in these concluding chapters. At times what is described in these chapters will be a combination of what’s in the record of minutes and documents, and personal recollections using the first person. There are some important things that happened and should be described from this period of time, and I trust that whatever objectivity I lack will be taken into account by readers who will correct for it.

There are only three of the previous thematic threads in this essay taken up in the chapters covering these years. As noted at the end of Chapter 29, the process that led up to fellowshipping for one ministry and the work done on revisions to the competencies that will be described in Chapter 33 both made it unnecessary to devote a distinct final chapter to the thread of “Specialized Ministries”. The patterns established after 2005 of individual ministerial careers frequently moving seamlessly from parish based positions in lead ministries, program ministries, or faith development ministries have continued. So has the flexibility to move in and out of or combine a parish role with a role in chaplaincy or an administrative ministry in the UUA or in non profits. “Specialized Ministries” was the old term used by a male hierarchy to describe ministries outside the traditional lead minister role in a church.

I recall at one point late in my role as Chair a respected credentialed Director of Religious Education completed all the requirements for fellowship and ordination and asked to be recognized in the Service of the Living Tradition as entering fellowship with a specialization in the Ministry of Religious Education. My question to a member of the staff was, “We don’t do that any more, do we?” Of course, we did do that (!) and we still do that. The By laws, Rules and Policies still allow for recognition in a preliminary fellowship specialty. However, few people ask for this recognition anymore. My forgetfulness ten years after we began fellowshipping for one ministry was emblematic of both how effective the change had been and also about how the fears about the change, i.e. that it would minimize the hard won recognition of the distinct identities of Ministers of Religious Education and Community Ministers, have indeed come true.

In addition to this chapter in the “Culture and Inclusivity” thread, we will therefore have concluding chapters on “Requirements and Competencies” and “Disciplinary Matters”. The history concludes with a brief Afterword.

Entering a Digital World

In a two and a half year period from mid 2005 to the beginning of 2008, you might not think that the MFC’s culture would change that much. However, consider the three inventions that came out and were beginning to be widely used during those years Facebook, I Phone, and Twitter! These platforms and tools for social media are emblematic of the ways that the world around the MFC was changing. Did we fully appreciate at that time what changes the new media would make possible? We were accustomed to exchanging documents via e mail by then. However, in my first term serving on the MFC during 2001 2005, the members were still receiving our packages of reading material for each meeting in the mail. All the documentation for eight to ten candidate interviews plus the business materials could make for a thousand pages of printed material three inches thick in a padded manilla envelope. By 2008, the Google based MFC Meeting Ground was up and running, and you could receive your candidate packets on paper or digitally, whichever you were most comfortable with.

Through the conclusion of my service in 2015, the Committee never considered face to face digital communication as an option for meetings or interviews. The closest we got to that was conference phone calls. The technology for group video calls existed but was not yet being widely used in the UUA. Since the 2020 pandemic began, that has of course been all that the MFC has used for meetings and interviews.

Turnover Invites a Renewal of the Anti

Oppression Commitments

The two years prior to my being asked to become Chair of the MFC was another one of those transitional times, with considerable churn in the leadership of the Committee. In 2006, Rev. David Hubner retired and Rev. Beth Miller became Director of the Ministry and Professional Leadership Staff Group and Executive Secretary of the MFC. Rev. Jory Agate’s time as Chair only lasted a year and a half from January 2007 to June 2008 when she assumed the staff role vacated by Rev. Michelle Bentley as Director of Professional Development in 2007. Marion Bell began her employment in September 2008 as Assistant to the Director of the MPL Staff Group, beginning continuous service to the MFC through to the time of this essay’s release in 2022, now within a role described as Ministerial Formation Specialist. During this two year period of turnover, Rev. David Pettee was the only staff continuity for the MFC. Recent institutional memory was well preserved during these changes, however, with Agate staying with the MFC as a staff member and Phyllis Daniel returning to the Committee as Interim Chair. I had only been away from the Committee for two and a half years when I was asked to become Chair.

Another aspect of the turnover involved four of the senior members of the MFC concluded their service in the same year as I began, including two long serving lay leaders

of color: Betty Bobo Seiden and Jim Brown. The incoming members besides me included Dr. Tony Stringer of Atlanta as the second psychologist and Karen Eng, a financial advisor and lay leader from the Bay Area. We therefore sustained our minimal commitment to have a person of color serving on each of two panels, but we felt a need to have a full day Orientation and start-up session for this new chapter of MFC work, and we wanted to have it include a substantial focus on our anti racist understandings and commitments.

Each newer member was assigned a senior member as a mentor. The Orientation included reviewing the cultural norms and routine procedures of a regular meeting. Many of these are described in the “Ways of the MFC” document but being together in person prior to starting our first meeting as a new group together was important for asking questions and clarifying our understandings. The middle hours of the day, late morning and early afternoon, were devoted to the MFC’s history of anti racist education, reform and action as part of the UUA. The youngest members, Abbey Tennis and Justice Desiree Waidner, led these sessions. We reviewed the work of the Journey Towards Wholeness Transformation Team of the UUA, and what it meant for us to develop our cultural competency skills as we encountered candidates of different backgrounds in interviews. At the end of this time block, I led a reflection on what it meant to incorporate an anti oppression lens into every part of our meeting, rather than seeing it as a topic for occasional “continuing education”.

Despite that understanding, the Committee did not hesitate to continue ongoing continuing anti-oppression education. In 2011 we devoted a full extra day to a training led by Paula Cole Jones. Later on in my tenure, we asked Deborah Pope Lance to meet with us for a half day to engage more deeply with the impact of sexual misconduct in congregations. We had a training on conducting interviews that brought forward anti oppressive reflections on questioning. We sought advice on developments in queer culture.

One change that happened in disciplinary cases that should be noted here and doesn’t fit easily in the chapter threads on discipline has to do with how receiving reports and adjudicating disciplinary cases that involved queer relationships was discussed within the Committee. I have noted previously that as the number of LGBTQI ministers in fellowship grew, there would be more complaints about sexual misconduct within same sex relationships brought to both the UU Ministers Association and the MFC’s process. These were never married couples at that time because same sex marriage was still illegal. Despite having queer members, the MFC’s culture was majority heterosexual and early on not very clear about whether the standards created by a hetero normative culture should apply equally to queer cultures of dating, hooking up, or committing. A continuing education session we had on polyamorous relationships added to our uncertainties. The ambiguity was resolved when discussions in the Committee about any case involving a queer couple turned to the question of who had the power and authority in the relationship that derives from a ministerial role or office, and whether that power and authority had

been used to seek sexual gratification. Looking back, it seems like this insight should have been obvious, but it wasn’t always how conversation about such cases began.

A New UUA President Is Skeptical about the MFC

The Ministerial Fellowship Committee should function outside the electoral politics of the UUA. However, as a committee of the UUA Board, with appointments from the Board and the UUMA, there will always be politics within the leadership of both institutions regarding appointments. Over the years, there have also regularly been efforts from outside the Committee to implement changes in the MFC’s role and procedures that have made their way to the floor of the General Assembly. Most of the time, however, the MFC and its leaders have not been obviously involved in the politics building up to a UUA Presidential election. In 2007, things were different.

With a Presidential election scheduled for June 2009, the election process of that time informally required that potential candidates be recruited or declare their intentions during the third year before the election. Campaigning would begin informally two General Assemblies out from the election. Quiet fundraising would be underway by then. The formal election process and campaign began twenty months out.

A long story made short is that during 2006, I was actively considering and was being encouraged by some leaders in the Association, both lay and clergy, to make a declaration of candidacy for President and to begin talking to supportive donors. Prior to the 2006 General Assembly in St. Louis I made the decision not to run and to instead encourage Rev. Laurel Hallman, senior minister of First Unitarian Church in Dallas TX to become a candidate. When she decided to run, she asked me to be her campaign manager.

Planning for and recruiting volunteer staff for a campaign for UUA President was at that time not a public process but a necessary process in the third year out from the election. The campaign planning was well underway by the 2007 General Assembly in Portland OR. At that time, there was no other declared candidate. At that 2007 General Assembly, I was asked by members of the UUA Board if I would consider becoming Chair of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee as of January 2008. I discussed with staff leaders, with Laurel Hallman, and with campaign leaders whether there was any conflict of interest in being a campaign leader in a UUA Presidential election and being MFC Chair. We felt that I could avoid any conflict of interest. At that time, it looked like there would be no challenger to Rev. Hallman. However, During the winter of 2007 2008, after I became Chair, Rev. Peter Morales, senior minister in Golden CO, made a decision to become a candidate for President. The campaign was now more demanding and challenging than I had expected.

The Board of Trustees of the UUA was well aware that ministerial formation was a campaign issue and in the year prior to the election took their own initiative to get ahead of

the curve. They called for an “Excellence in Ministry Summit”, which gathered all concerned stakeholders in December 2008 in Seattle six months before the presidential election. Out of that Summit, the Board charged the MFC with coordinating willing partners in addressing the theological education priority of “Ministerial Culture, UU Growth and impact on Credentialing”. When the Ministerial Fellowship Committee met in March 2009 and heard the report from the Summit, the Committee felt that the demands of routine tasks allowed too little time to undertake a comprehensive self evaluation and requested an outside review of the UUA's credentialing process by the UUA Board.

Two months later, Peter Morales won the election and became UUA President in July 2009. Morales’ own experiences as a second career ministerial candidate, a Starr King Student, and person with a business background all contributed to beginning his Presidency with doubts about the MFC’s value and process. He immediately faced significant budget challenges arising from the 2008 financial collapse and the beginning of the Great Recession. Morales took a “value added” approach to analyzing where he would make cuts. How much value was added by the cost to the Association and to candidates for ministry of the credentialing process? Would there be comparable results in terms of successful ministries without it? Were there other ways it could be done that would be less expensive?

These are not inappropriate questions to make in evaluating any program of the Association, and the questions were never raised in such a way that those who knew Morales and his character could argue that he had a personal axe to grind. However, the leaders of the MFC in the first two years of the Morales presidency felt embattled and concerned that there was a chance the UUA President might seek to minimize or even abolish formal credentialing.

At their first Board meeting after Morales’ election, the UUA Board received the response from the MFC requesting an outside review. At this October 2009 meeting, the Board of Trustees voted to “appoint a task force to examine all UUA credentialing processes and to recommend appropriate changes to the Board by April 1, 2011, with a status report including a work plan by June 20, 2010”. The Board appointed former Board and MFC member Tamara Payne Alex as the “project manager” for this review. Tamara visited the MFC at the December 2009 meeting and led a brief conversation on the Board’s work and ownership of this review of ministerial formation on behalf of congregations. She asked the Committee: “How can the credentialing process be a better catalyst for the culture change that we are hoping to have happen?” (Presumably a culture change towards greater efficiency, effectiveness, and anti racist transformation.) She also asked: “What can the MFC let go of?”

On March 4 & 5, 2010, Payne Alex convened a meeting with Jackie Shanti (Vice Moderator of the UUA Board and former MFC member), Rev. Barbara Merritt (Chair of the Panel on Theological Education), Rev. Rob EllerIsaacs (Co Minister, Unity Unitarian, St.

Paul, MN and former MFC member), Rev. Christine Robinson (Senior Minister, Albuquerque, NM), Rev. Linda Olson Peebles (Minister of Religious Education, Arlington, VA and former MFC member) and Rev. Harlan Limpert (UUA staff). Participants of the meeting were not acting as representatives from any group or constituency but rather were drawing on their considerable and impressive years of service and leadership to congregations, ministry and Unitarian Universalism. The purpose of this meeting was to determine the appropriate scope of the work for aligning Credentialing Processes with the mission and focus of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Reporting out to the Board on their work, Payne Alex identified four conversations they wanted to have going forward:

1. Explore a more nuanced understanding and definition of “do no harm” as a minimum goal for what credentialing clergy at the Association level must ensure.

2. Identify what credentialing as a process can and can not do in support of vital, transformative congregational life.

3. Name those spiritual competencies most central to our faith leaders’ role in serving vital, transformative congregations

4. Create a rough sketch of a credentialing process that can be expanded to encompass credentialing paths for clergy, laity, and other church professionals; provide layers of credentialing; and engage congregations as participants.

In 2010, in addition to this Board review, Morales created his own staff based task force to conduct a Strategic Review of UU Professional Ministries. The scope of the assignment was broad, with credentialing only one of six areas of study. The fact that the Task Force was staff-based and not inclusive of other stakeholders added to the unease about where these reviews would coincide and end up. Financial pressures were also quickly defining some of the directions that the staff must take and the limits they had to work within. In the end, the changes in credentialing emerged mostly from the staff based work rather than the Board’s Task Force. The Board struggled during the first two years of the Morales administration with conflict between President Morales and Moderator Gini Courter around policy governance and personal authority. The Board became preoccupied with its own governance role and reducing its size. The outcomes of these two concurrent studies and the MFC’s response to them are taken up in the next Chapter 33.

Budget Cuts Limit the Transparency of the MFC

The MFC’s staff leader, Executive Secretary Rev. Beth Miller, and her successor Rev. Sarah Lammert, bore the brunt of the UUA President’s questions about the cost and value of the MFC. In April, 2010, the year after the election, as the staff Task Force on Professional Ministries was beginning its work, Rev. Miller resigned her role and her staff position at the UUA. Finances were cited as the reasons for proposing immediate changes in the credentialing process, changes which would make a difference in how candidates for

ministry could have a personal knowledge of the process and the members of the Committee who oversaw it.

The first change required the MFC to only meet in Boston. In fairness, this was a policy change that was applied to all Board committees, requiring them to meet in the UUA’s lodging and meeting facilities in Pickett/Eliot House rather than in hotels. The MFC had been operating for some time under a waiver from this policy. For most of the MFC’s existence, it had conducted at least two of its meetings a year outside of Boston, in the two other cities that had UU identity seminaries: Chicago, IL and Berkeley CA. In the course of any two year time period, therefore, the Committee could plan to have an open social time and question and answer session with seminarians in Boston, Chicago, and Berkeley. These meetings would be accessible to about sixty per cent of the people studying for UU ministry. There would also be an additional opportunity to “Meet the MFC” at the annual General Assembly. Having a chance to hear from and meet personally with the MFC members would be especially valuable for those candidates approaching their personal interview. The change to Boston based meetings would mean that General Assembly was the only opportunity for such an encounter. It also meant that seminarians in the Northeast were financially privileged by the decision since those from other parts of the country had to bear more expense to come to their required interview.

The MFC took matters into its own hands in the Fall of 2010 and upped the ante in the conversation with the UUA Administration and Board about how much credentialing should cost. The Committee passed a motion at its October 2010 meeting proposing that there only be two MFC meetings in calendar year 2011 in order to save money. The Committee asked the Board to make temporary appointments to staff three full time MFC panels and interview up to thirty candidates per meeting. As the negotiations continued, the Committee reviewed their decision and thought better of it. At the December 2010 meeting they voted instead to have all their 2011 meetings in Boston, add an extra panel from within the MFC members at the March meeting, and at the September meeting ask the Board Committee on Committees to confirm appointments that would enable an extra panel to meet to accommodate thirty interviews at that meeting. From 2011 until the pandemic of 2020 when the MFC began to meet virtually, all MFC meetings were held only in person in Boston. Over the years since 2011, the Committee and staff have worked hard to use the internet and digital media to address transparency and access to the information candidates require.

Accessibility to Interviews and Appointments to Panels

Money was not the only concern driving this proposal to add panels. In 2009 10, David Pettee reported to the MFC on the backlog of candidates who could not get interviews within a year of their request. As noted above, the MFC Executive Committee responded with an experiment in extra panel time. The first time this was considered was at the December 2009 meeting, and it involved adding an extra panel to convene on the day

preceding the formal first day of this winter MFC meeting. Members of the Executive Committee would be in Boston that day anyway because their meeting would always precede the full committee meeting.

In a message to the Committee proposing this extra panel, I wrote: “I believe we can easily do one afternoon panel that contains the skills and identities that are important for a panel to contain on Wednesday afternoon. That panel would see two candidates. I am suggesting only the afternoon panel because two important identities (community minister and psychologist) are able to arrive for the afternoon but not the morning….One afternoon panel is less risky because we can pull in substitutes from the Exec in the event that flight delays create absences. I am comfortable with one afternoon panel because it does allow us to accommodate the 22 candidates that Chris and I have discussed, and it honors the clearly stated desire of the committee to limit each day to four candidates and each time segment to two candidates.”

It was not only the budget pressures of FY 2011 but the backlog of candidates requesting interviews that made the third panel experiment a part of the 2011 meetings and beyond. The backlog was not only candidates requesting preliminary fellowship interviews. It was augmented by candidates who received “3”’s and who required a second interview. For the March meeting, the MFC added an extra panel from within the Committee’s membership. For the September meeting a third panel conducted interviews for the full meeting to accommodate thirty candidates. This approach did reduce the backlog and it was used on an occasional basis for the duration of the Arnason administration when needed. However, it added to the concern of some members of the Board of Trustees, especially those serving on the Committee on Committees, about the appropriate delegation of authority for appointing people to serve on MFC panels.

When the Regional Subcommittees were created, the authority for appointments to these bodies rested with the Board of Trustees through the Committee on Committees. Most of the MFC members were also appointed through the same process. However, as the turnover for four Regional Subcommittees and turnover on the MFC created more vacancies, the Committee on Committees relied more and more on staff recommendations. Reinforcing this reliance on staff was the fact that when a formally appointed MFC member had to unavoidably miss a meeting, every effort would be made to find a substitute for that meeting. In the period between 2001 and 2012 there were both longer-term substitute appointments lasting more than a year and many short term or single meeting appointments made. Often these substitutes would come from what the MFC liked the call “the bench”, which consisted of both former members of the committee and current members of the RSCC’s. During the Morales administration when money for credentialing was tighter, there would be pressure to invite a substitute who lived near Boston to reduce costs.

The Chair encouraged the Board to formally recognize the authority that actually was being managed by the staff for finding and recommending substitutes, and particularly when that substitute was for one meeting only, to allow that substitution without having it pass through the Committee on Committees. On the occasional time when a single meeting would involve three panels, there could be many single-meeting substitutes. The risk in undertaking the three panel experiments (which after 2011 became a routine option for reducing the backlog) is that it might produce inconsistency in panel attitudes and decisions. The panel chairs had to responsibility for that consistency. Wayne Arnason and Emily Gage were the regular panel chairs during this time and veteran member Marge Corletti usually took the third panel when needed.

The End of the Line for the RSCC’s

One of the austerities that the task force undertaking the Strategic Review of Professional Ministries recommended was limiting the number and the meeting frequency of the Regional Subcommittees on Candidacy (RSCC’s). As noted in Chapter 30, there were now only four RSCC’s and they would be limited to one meeting annually. At the same December 2010 meeting where the Boston based MFC meeting in three panels for 2011 were framed, the MFC asked the Chair to express their alarm about the consequences of these limits on the RSCC’s and their role in the credentialing process.

I wrote to the Moderator and President as follows: “ The reduced number of meetings of the RSCC’s is creating anxiety among aspirants for ministry around their perception of a back up in the lines of candidates making appointments with the RSCC and MFC . With four hundred seventy five candidates for ministry in process, we are making firm appointments for MFC interviews right now for September 2012. With RSCC’s meeting only once a year, candidates are required to travel farther and are waiting longer to get their RSCC appointments in before their internships or MFC appointments. As we consider recruitment strategies for the future, we hope that we don’t lose sight of the fact that perceptions of the length, efficiency, and integrity of the credentialing process influences whether people decide to pursue ministerial fellowship.

With only one meeting a year, the RSCC’s have a more difficult time sustaining their relationships and the culture of their group. These are important parts of their effectiveness in making the important decisions they face regarding aspirants.

The increased burden on the MFC’s Boston based staff in the absence of RSCC administrators makes a difference in the service that aspirants and candidates receive and the coaching they are getting to meet the requirements of the fellowshipping process in a timely and accurate way. The staff members are often the first encounter a person considering ministry has with the UUA’s credentialing process. Without the presence of regional administrators, the time they can give to each seeker and aspirant has understandably been diminished.

The members of the MFC believe in the RSCC’s process and want them to remain a vital part of the fellowshipping process. For some RSCC’s, not necessarily all, meeting at least twice a year will be part of sustaining that vitality. We rely on the RSCC’s advice and recommendations, and they make a difference in the quality of the candidates we see. “

Within a year it was clear that having the four remaining RSCCs meet once annually was detrimental to keeping RSCC members sharp with their interviewing skills. So in their summary report of recommendations in 2011, the staff Task Force recommended that the four RSCCs be folded into two, an Eastern RSCC and a Western RSCC, with an expectation that both RSCCs would meet twice year, in Boston, MA and in Portland, OR respectively. Implementation occurred the next year, 2012.

In 2014, recognizing that five years had elapsed since the last evaluation of the RSCC process, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee requested that staff evaluate the RSCC process for a third time. In January 2015, a survey instrument approved by the Committee was submitted to all aspirants who had their candidacy postponed or denied since 2009; to all those who had received candidate status between 2009 and 2014; to all ministers who had received preliminary fellowship between 2009 and 2014; to selected faculty and staff at the two Unitarian Universalist identity schools; and to past and current members of the RSCC since 2009. Combined, 214 people responded to the surveys, or 37% of total possible responses.

In a March 12, 2015, Executive Summary of the results of the survey, David Pettee wrote: “Despite the removal of the denial of candidacy option two years ago, and the overall excellent outcomes of the RSCC and MFC interview process (if gaining candidacy status or getting a “1” or a “2” are a measurement of success) the survey results suggest that aspirants, candidates and ministers are feeling stressed by the changing economies related to ministerial formation.

There is growing discontent about the financial pressure that has been passed forward to aspirants, who no longer enjoy the benefit of a regional interview, due to retraction of the RSCCs because of budgetary shortfalls. In addition, the difficulty in securing an RSCC interview (and then an MFC interview) in a timely manner is aggravated the anxiety within the RSCC system. We have noticed an increase in the people who are expressing an interest in ministerial fellowship. We are increasingly aware of the impact of closed Facebook groups and the 24/7 world of social media, where anxiety, fear and bad information risk being passed forward at high speed from coast to coast.

Compared to the prior two RSCC evaluations from 2003 and 2008, the level of concern and criticism noted in this evaluation has risen. The results are mixed. Unquestionably, the desire for mentoring and/or an in care system was lifted up by everyone who is touched by the RSCC process. This desire has only grown stronger over

the last five years. The creation of an in care system is currently seen as a priority by the Panel on Theological Education.”

Pettee brought forward seven budget neutral recommendations for changes that could be made to improve the RSCC system. They included use of videoconferencing for interviews, more interviews per meeting for the two panels, MFC members mentoring the panels, and a fast track to the MFC interview for transfers. It was too little too late. The momentum out of the survey and within the UUA’s Leadership Council was towards letting go of the RSCC system and seeking a partnership with the UU Ministers Association towards a new form of in care system. In the 2015 16 budget, the RSCC system was eliminated, and the current Ministerial Formation Network became available as an alternative approach.

The groundwork for this change from RSCC’s to an in care network had been laid eight years earlier in 2008 when the MPL staff had received a grant from the UU Congregation at Shelter Rock requested by the Panel on Theological Education to replicate the Mountain Desert District’s successful In Care Program in other Districts. This initial effort was intended for aspirants and candidates in non UU seminaries rather than being made available to all. It was also a UUA staff based initiative. As the writing was appearing on the wall that the RSCC process was unlikely to survive, the learnings from the grant funded expansion of In Care were brought into conversations with the UU Ministers Association about how they might become largely responsible for a new comprehensive in care program.

The UUMA had embarked by 2010 on an ambitious program of expanding its capacity financed by a substantial increase in dues. Rev. Don Southworth, the first Executive Director of the UUMA, was open to conversations over the years of his service to co-operative ventures with the UUA. By 2016 the Ministerial Formation Network funding had been secured through the Panel on Theological Education, the St. Lawrence Foundation, the Fund for Unitarian Universalism, the Stevens Fund and by a portion of the UUMA budget. The UUMA Executive Director for Ministries of Collegial Care, Rev. Melissa Carvil Ziemer manages the program, and all aspirants and candidates are automatically enrolled in it, with the ability to opt out if desired.

Requirements and Competencies Part 8 (2008 2015)

As of March 1, 2017, all aspirants for Unitarian Universalist ministerial fellowship recognition are held accountable to demonstrate competencies in seven areas of ministerial duty common to all professional contexts of service. This chapter will be devoted entirely to the story of how these seven areas of competency were developed and implemented between 2008 and the end of 2015. Once again, I am using both historical research and my own personal recollections of the process, so my scholarly objectivity can be questioned. I will say from the start that completing this review and revision of the competencies was my major goal when I became chair of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee in 2008, and its accomplishment is the achievement of which I am most proud in my role as Chair. The timetable I originally envisioned for completing the project would coincide with the conclusion of my service in June 2015, but that did not prove to be possible. So I am grateful for the MFC leaders who worked with me and succeeded me for their commitment to seeing this comprehensive competency review through to completion.

Some of the history that led up to the creation of a model for the new competencies is described well in the 2013 UUA publication Fulfilling the Call: a Model for UU Ministry in the 21st Century, and I have no hesitation about quoting from the publication in this chapter. Other sources I have used are my own papers still resident in my computer files, consultations with the colleagues who finished the project after my term concluded, and my own memory.

The Strategic Review of Professional Ministry Recommends Competencies Review

Part 7 (Chapter 30) of the “Requirements and Competencies” thread in this history concluded with a description of the competencies aspirants and candidates had to be accountable for as of 2009. I described them as existing as two “layers” of competency statements living as neighbors in their respective home documents. The UUMA/MFC five areas of competency dating from the recommendations of the UUMA Competencies Task Force in 2003- 2004 (Pastoral Work, Prophetic Outreach, Teaching, Practical Arts and Worship) lived in the Internship Handbook. The full detailed list of MFC required competencies lived in the Requirements Handbook, using a grouping of three areas: Academic Competencies, Unitarian Universalist Competencies, and Professional Competencies. In 2009, at the urging of new MFC member Rev. Debra Haffner, a new competency area on Sexual Health was added to the list in the Requirements Handbook, bringing the total number of Statements of Competency required prior to an MFC interview to seventeen when UU History and Polity were considered separately.

The simplicity of the five areas of competency was not considered as a suitable replacement for the existing detailed list that candidates had to be accountable for fulfilling

and describing with a written “Statement of Competency” prior to their MFC interview. The five areas did not go into enough detail about some of the identity and institutional competencies that are baked into the broad five areas. These remained within the detailed descriptions provided to candidates in the “Requirements Handbook”, while the five areas became enshrined in a different place, in the Internship Handbook. The five areas were also a more suitable framework to use to amend the evaluation forms that were required to be submitted for each preliminary fellowship review. Rather than having Boards, Committees on Ministry, or supervisors wade through the seventeen competencies, asking them to reflect on evaluative questions based on the five areas was a big improvement.

In Chapter 32, the creation in 2010 of a UUA staff based task force to undertake a Strategic Review of Professional Ministries was described, and in particular the consequences of their recommendations for the Regional Sub Committees on Candidacy, which ultimately led to their elimination by 2016. In their April 2011 summary report, the Strategic Review staff members offered a brief recommendation and questions for the MFC related to the competencies: “ …review the 17 competencies currently required by the MFC. Are they the right ones? Do they point to the past or the future?”

As Chair of the MFC, I saw these sentences as a charge to provide leadership to accomplish this review. From the beginning of my term in 2008, I had seen competency review and simplification as an important challenge, but I had not felt fully empowered to provide the leadership to undertake the task until three years into my term of service. The staff support and leadership for the MFC was in transition in 2010. The Board’s review of credentialing was underway as I took office and there was appointed leadership for that review outside the MFC. We were a Board Committee, and the outcomes of this review needed to be absorbed before the MFC could act independently. Tamara Payne Alex delivered her final report on “Credentialing for Excellence in Ministry” to the Board in April 2011. Her report mostly raised questions to consider rather than offering definitive recommendations for the Board or MFC to act upon. Some of her questions foreshadowed imminent or later reforms. Can the RSCC process be replaced with something that involves more coaching towards excellence rather than gate-keeping and grading? Could candidates be accountable for academic knowledge through a test or through trusting grades, rather than through questions in interviews? The competencies themselves were not a focus of this report, however. At this same time, the task force undertaking the Administration’s Strategic Review team was completing their work. Now that both these review processes had run their course, and it was clear to me that the next steps could be in the hands of the MFC leaders and our staff supporters, without any further instruction for how we should begin or with whom we should collaborate.

The Strategic Review task force sought to be candid and prophetic in posing at the end of its report a list of “open questions” that they recognized their work did not offer any

answers for, but that were important and inspirational to hold up. Related to credentialing and competencies, these were the open questions that were posed:

• Is the Masters of Divinity still the best pathway to the ordained ministry? What alternatives might we explore?

• Do the various credentialing programs mold the leaders we need for the future, or are they based on outdated models of ministerial excellence?

Imbedded in these two open questions were two characteristics of competency definition that had been a part of the UUA credentialing process from the beginning. The question about the continuing value of the M.Div. reminded me that we had always relied on the seminaries to frame the ways we thought about the competencies. Initially, they were primarily academic competencies. During the Seventies through the Nineties, the leadership and modeling of other ways to think about competencies for ministry had their roots in seminary innovations. Harvard Divinity School pioneered a world religions emphasis as part of their M. Div program. Meadville Lombard emphasized pastoral care and counseling competency on equal footing with academic skills. Starr King foresaw our future when it required all beginning students to undertake a course in “Education to Counter Oppression”. All of these initiatives from seminaries encouraged additions or deeper reflection by the MFC on the meaning of these competencies for ministers.

In seeking to represent the concerns and the realities of congregational and community ministry, the MFC had always struggled to articulate and judge competencies in practical application contexts. The second open question, however, reminded me that our conversation about a person’s competency would often be backward looking rather than forward looking. By this I mean that the members of the MFC were usually drawn from experienced ministers and lay people who knew a lot about religious leadership as it really is right now, but perhaps not enough about how it might be in the future.

Where could we find some models for thinking about our competencies that might free is from these dual blinders: our academically inclined bias and our tendency to think that the future might be much like the past? During the year preceding the completion of these two review studies by the Board and the staff, my own deliberations about where and how to offer leadership in re considering the competencies had been greatly influenced by a gift from a member of the congregation that I served In Cleveland, the gift of an introduction.

Education Development Center and its Ministerial Assessment Framework

In February of 2010, I made a lunch date with Joe Ippolito. Joe was an old friend of a parishioner of mine, and he worked for a global non profit called Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC). In the Introduction to the 2013 UUA/UUMA publication Fulfilling the Call, EDC is described as follows:

“EDC works to improve education, health promotion and care, workforce preparation, communication technologies, and civic engagement. EDC currently manages projects located in 23 countries. Within its Learning and Teaching Division, EDC senior staff bring more than 20 years of experience developing tools that define new, emerging professions, as well as traditional professions undergoing significant change. “

One of those “traditional professions undergoing significant change” was the Roman Catholic priesthood. A Catholic diocese on the suburban east side of the Cleveland area had commissioned EDC’s staff to work with them on their own project of identifying the competencies and duties of parish priests to clarify for their own formation process the specific roles that required evaluation prior to ordination and throughout a career. This project was completed in 2008 (see J. Ippolito and J.Malyn Sith, In Fulfillment of their Mission: The Duties and Tasks of a Roman Catholic Priest, New York NCEA Publications, 2008). A second study for the Archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh in Scotland followed and would be published in 2011. In 2010, however, Mr. Ippolito was wondering whether the ministerial profiles and the performance based rubrics that they had developed and applied within the seminaries and parishes of Roman Catholicism would be equally applicable and useful to the very different polity and practice of Protestants, and particularly, Protestants that were as unlike Catholics as possible. In conversations with his friend Ippolito learned more about West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church. A light bulb went off for him when my parishioner mentioned that he thought his own minister had something to do with ministerial credentialing.

In our initial lunch, I could only begin to absorb the nature of EDC’s work developing profiles and rubrics for the practice of ministry. We made another date a month later in my office after I studied their 2008 report from the Cleveland area diocese and could begin to ask intelligent questions. As we approached the spring 2010 meeting of the MFC, the news came of Rev. Beth Miller’s resignation and later the appointment of Rev. Sarah Lammert as Director of Ministerial and Professional Leadership and to the position of Executive Secretary of the MFC. As Sarah and I were getting to know each other and began to work together, I shared with her what I had learned about EDC’s work and Joe Ippolito’s interest in having the UUA as a client. This would of course involve some money from our side, but there was a mutual interest in making this consultation workable.

The next step would be to get some buy-in from a broader range of MFC leaders. For the September 2010 meeting, I came out to Boston a day early and a team of leaders went to EDC’s headquarters offices in Waltham, MA to meet with Joe Ippolito and his staff partner, Joyce Malin Smith. Sarah Lammert, David Pettee, UUA VP Harlan Limpert and I asked recent MFC member Rev. Jane Rzepka to join us for an outside the system perspective on the possibilities for working with EDC. The meeting was encouraging, and at that point the staff took over the next step, which involved seeking funding for a contract with EDC to develop with the UUA a framework of duties and performance-based rubrics for UU ministry.

I want to offer thanks and credit here to Rev. Sarah Lammert for picking up this ball and running with it. The scope of the MFC’s routine work was more than enough for our volunteers who mostly had full time jobs outside UU’ism. Without Rev. Lammert’s vision for how this project could proceed it would never have happened.

Developing the Profile and the Rubrics

Once the funding was assured, work began on a multi stage process for developing a UU ministerial profile and the rubrics for assessment of the duties and skills within that profile. In the UUA/UUMA publication Fulfilling the Call, the process is described in detail on Pages 8 15. The publication is available as a PDF on line at https://cdn.ymaws.com/.../Fulfilling_the_Call_ _FINAL_ _in_PDF_format.pdf I therefore offer only a summary here below.

The first step was getting buy in from the leadership of the UUA and the UUMA to share ownership of this project. The EDC staff wanted us to first recruit a team of clergy to provide it with guidance for creating “learning occupation” statements, which could inform what amounted to a mission statement for any Unitarian Universalist minister. A diverse team of eleven UUA / UUMA leaders and working clergy was assembled. Once that learning occupation statement was affirmed, EDC set to work using their tools to identify the major areas of work and the constituent tasks that defined successful job performance for each area. This ultimately involved a two day in person guided dialogue with the UU team. Then the UU team was asked to organize the activities into major areas of ministerial responsibility (duties) and shape them into a profile. This part of the process took much of 2011 during which time the Board and the UUA Administration reviews of ministry and credentialing were completed.

This project required further validation, however, beyond the work of the eleven member team. The next step was to broadly disseminate the profile that had been developed to UU clergy for review and comment. This validation process happened between February 28 and April 9, 2012. The responses that came back were statistically valid and provided a strong affirmation that the UU team had accurately articulated the work of a UU minister as defined by learning occupation. With a few final adjustments the validated profile was now ready to be used in consultation with EDC to develop a performance rubric for each task.

The first step in doing that was to develop “action statements” which provided further concrete definition of what each task involves and looks like in real practice. The action statements were the raw material for the UU team to develop the rubrics for each task. These rubrics appear within a table of Performance Areas that are across the top of the table ascending from Level One Basic Competence” through two levels of Proficiency to a “Level Four _ Expert/Exceptional”. Under each of these performance areas is the list of duties that are involved in one of the broad task areas of a UU minister.

On Page 15 of Fulfilling the Call, there is a list of the variety of ways that the UUA/UUMA team envisioned the value and possible uses of this tool. At the top of the list was: “a resource for a planned ministerial credentialing competency review by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.”

I was very excited about using this tool and getting this review underway.

The Competencies Review Process Within the MFC

My vision and hope was that the Ministerial Fellowship Committee could complete a review and revision of the competencies within a two year period, from December 2012 to December 2014. It actually took a year longer than that to complete most of the work.

The timetable I initially envisioned for the project was presented in the Chair’s Report in December 2012. At that time, the MFC had seen a draft of what became Fulfilling the Call but the UUA and UUMA wanted to limit further circulation of the Ministerial Assessment Framework (MAF) until formal publication on March 2013. I envisioned that the first year of our process would be consultation with stakeholders, to include the professional organizations, the Diverse Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries (DRUUMM), the seminaries, seminarians and the UUA Board. Given the publication date in March and the commitments the MFC had made to blocks of time for continuing education and the press of other business, it was clear that the next major time block we could devote to the feedback we received on the MAF and competencies review would not be until December 2013.

The MAF had settled on nine “Duties” of UU ministry, broken down into as many as a dozen specific “tasks” that are completed within that duty. The “tasks” were the further placed in a second matrix that plot the task against levels of proficiency and describes how the task must be performed at various levels of proficiency. I was very glad to have the MAF, but I told the Committee that “…even at this level of detail, it does not exhaust the possible ways that a particular duty can be described, and we may find ways to disagree with how the levels of proficiency are described.” (Chair’s Report December 2012.) I wrote several pages of reflections about other ways to look at the competencies that was an engaging intellectual exercise for me but probably added more complication than was necessary at the beginning as we began to engage with the MAF. The outcome of the December 2012 meeting was not to follow my suggestion to create and empower a distinct Competencies Review Task Force from within the MFC, but instead to have volunteer MFC members complete liaison assignments with stakeholders for research during this feedback year. The idea of a distinct task force felt uncomfortable because it called for extra duty from people who already had assigned leadership roles in MFC working groups. The full Committee felt that asking for volunteers who were enthusiastic about the work was a better approach and would keep the full committee membership fully in the loop as we proceeded.

The UUA/UUMA had an opportunity at the 2013 UUMA Institute to discuss the cometencies review prior to the release of Fuflfilling the Call, and then offer a workshop at the 2013 UUA General Assembly to present and discuss the MAF. The MFC formally requested study and feedback on the MAF and some key questions for competency review from our identified stakeholders in time for consideration at our December 2013 meeting. We were disappointed by the initial results. Most stakeholder groups did not respond by our suggested deadline, and seemed to be scrambling to come up with something. Eventually we received input from all the stakeholders we approached. The UUA Board asked if they could send two representatives to meet with us instead of offering any written response. It was clear that having invested human resources and attached its name to the research project produced the MAF, the UUMA’s leaders felt that this was the framework we should go with and alternative approaches to the task should not be taken up at this time.

After hearing the feedback from stakeholders, I was comfortable with the competencies review adopting the MAF framework as a foundation. I did feel uncertain about next steps given the hesitation to have officers and current leaders of the MFC constitute a task force. I wrote another lengthy reflection that included five questions that needed to be answered as we considered the next steps in the review. My five questions included some long standing issues that had been debated in earlier decades of MFC history:

• Would the new framework of competencies create an opportunity or a need for defining a different set of competencies to be fulfilled for people seeking credentialing in different specialties of ministry?

• Should the M.Div. degree continue to be the gold standard? Would the MFC accept other degrees that seminaries were currently offering or contemplating as suitable academic degrees for fellowshipping?

• Should knowledge based competencies be assessed in a different way by the MFC than by being included in the interview?

• Should there be a system of CEU’s for continuing education to insure competencies would stay fresh and relevant.

• Would competency review require a major re assessment of the reading list.

In fact, in various ways, in both the MFC and the UUMA, these tasks and issues were taken up in 2016 2021 after the new competencies’ framework was completed and required of candidates. In 2013 as I contemplated the scope of the task, I was trying to see a path forward that could include resolution of all these issues. It was an overly ambitious goal. Wiser leaders on the committee felt like I wanted to pack too much into the process, and that we needed to take up one thing at a time. Whether and how the Ministerial Assessment Framework could become the foundation for compressing the seventeen

competencies we were required to assess into more manageable groupings should be the first task.

Nevertheless as a next step, I proposed that we break into smaller volunteer based groups that would have conference call meetings during January and February 2014 within four areas of work that reflected all of the issues in my five questions. The groups were:

Core Competencies and Specialties this was the discussion about whether the MFC should require a core set of competencies for all candidates seeking ordination, but consider variations on those requirements for candidates wanting ministerial fellowship but not necessarily imagining a ministry requiring ordination.

Degree and Internship Requirements this was the discussion about whether academic degrees in addition to the M.Div. would be recognized as sufficient for preliminary fellowship, and whether some parish exposure through the internship requirement would be required of all candidates.

Assessing Academic Competencies this was the discussion about whether successfully completing course work was adequate for fulfilling ana academic competency or whether further testing should be required.

Fulfilling the Call Competencies Drafting this was the first attempt at drafting MFC competencies out of the framework developed in the MAF.

Settlement Versus Community Competencies

It was a challenging task to try to bring together the conclusions and recommendations from the work that happened in four different conversations during the first two months of 2014, and settle on what would be most important to bring forward to the business meeting time devoted to the competencies at the March 2014 meeting.

One thing that had become clear by March 2014 is that the nine duties that were described in the matrix in Fulfilling the Call should be condensed into seven core competencies:

In my own initial reflections on this summary of core competencies in January 2014 I described the concerns we were considering about what would seem to be left out of this tight a summary of core consequences. I wrote: “Our current Competencies not specified in descriptions in the Core Competencies list above are: Theology, Church History, Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, World Religions, Social Theory/Social Ethics, ARAOMC (Anti-Racist Anti Oppressive Multi cultural Awareness), Sexual Health, Personal and/or Spiritual Development.

These competencies are either specific academic disciplines or more focused areas of skill than the Duties described above. It could be argued that many of them are inherent in the duties described above, and should be “tested” within requirements and questions around the Core Competencies (ARAOMC comes to mind.) It could be argued that many of these Competencies outside the Core could be fulfilled by asking for documentation of formal course work with no expectation that they are the focus of questions in the interview. The two competency areas not susceptible to this approach would be ARAOMC and Personal and/or Spiritual development.

ARAOLM and Sexual Health, as the two most recently developed Competencies, represent particular challenges for us in developing “Core Competencies”. We were aware that there was some tension about the ways that “Fulfilling the Call” presented those areas of competency within the framework; and we can expect some concern from colleagues who invested a lot in developing these two areas of competency as to how they are represented as “core” and what “core” means.”

In our small group conversations, the Committee members became more comfortable with the course work and required documentation of academic competencies being adequate for preliminary fellowship and saw these seven competencies as the best summation of what would be most important to include in interviews. In describing in more detail the tasks under each competency we began to see how ARAOMC especially was a part of all the new competencies in different ways and we saw sexual health as an element of both pastoral concerns and spiritual awareness.

One issue we continued to gnaw at for some months was the question of whether there should be a distinct set of competency requirements for candidates seeking parish settlements and ministers who saw themselves moving towards a career in community ministry. This was hardly a new issue and this discussion has been traced in some of the chapters in this history in the thread on “Specialized Ministries”. Nevertheless, revisiting the competencies brought the discussion up again, and in particular within conversations between Chair Wayne Arnason and MFC member Rev. Maddie Sifantus, who had been a co chair of the UU Society for Community Ministry and a significant leader within the community ministers networks for many years.

Sifantus and Wayne Arnason exchanged correspondence and had several conversations over the winter of 2014 about several possibilities: two sets of competencies; a UU diaconate credentialing process that would be based in the competencies; more extensive use of waivers of competencies. I wrote up a proposal describing how a distinct set of competencies for community ministry candidates could be created.

Ultimately, however, this exploration resolved itself with a recognition by the Committee that in the future we should expect that ministerial careers could go in different directions and include various professional roles. We could already see that an initial intent to pursue a career in parish ministries or community ministries could be re directed by the realities of the marketplace or the development of new interests and skills. The Committee also recognized that as the agents of an association of congregations we continued to want all of our fellowshipped ministers to have basic knowledge of and competency in the life of our congregations. We agreed, however, that we could request that the statements of competency that each candidate submitted to us include reflections on how that competency was applicable to the context of ministry that a candidate was drawn towards. If a particular competency for a particular candidate seemed less significant, the MFC had always could take this into consideration, or make use of its ability to waive requirements of various kinds when the circumstances demanded.

Crossing the Finish Line

In order to take the next steps to complete the revision of the competencies, the full Committee decided at the March 2014 meeting to go back to the structures and process that we routinely used for all our business: The Working Groups. The Process Working Group was willing to take the lead on using the MAF and the proposed seven areas of competency we had derived from it as our framework and to flesh out the tasks that we saw as part of each area of competency. The Candidacy Working Group would look at the competencies through the lens of the Reading List and provided suggested changes and input from that perspective. The Settlement Working Group would look at the issue of progression from one level of competency to another as outlined in the MAF and how that should match up with the three years of preliminary fellowship renewal and the issue of ongoing continuing education, whether required or not.

With our process questions we settled, each Working Group had to figure out how to undertake these tasks within a timetable appropriate for their volume of work. The original timetable that I presented in December 2012 had contemplated a first draft of new competencies by March 2014. That deadline had already come and gone. For me, it meant that a project I had identified as a personal priority would likely not be fully completed implemented during my own term, and that I had to let go of being in charge of the whole process. It was good for me and good for the Committee when I was able to do that. The Working Group Chairs (Shana Lynngood in Process, Jennifer Hamlin Navias in Candidacy,

and Gary Smith in Settlement) all did an excellent job in moving the process forward. We recognized that completing the competency revisions had no deadlines but our own, and that we should move at a pace that was sustainable within all the other business and disciplinary issues with which we had to deal.

The Process Working Group carried the heaviest load in moving the competency revision process to a conclusion. That is because settling on a new list and description of competencies was only a first step towards setting a deadline date after which all candidates could be accountable for these competencies. An important next step that the Process Working Group undertook was changing the way we thought about how a candidate could present their statements of competency. By April 2015, in a document noted as a “5th Draft” the working group had come up with these suggestions, encouragements, and descriptions for what the MFC would be looking for in statements of competency:

§ Do more than list courses and book titles. As much as possible help us to understand how you have applied what you have learned. Don’t attempt to tell us what you know; show us how you plan to apply your learning to the work of ministry. How has your preparatory work shown up in how you minister? (e.g. How did the course in administration impact your skills in time management or other practical aspects of helping the organization or congregation run smoothly?)

§ Don’t try to say it all. Your packet will convey a great deal about the formative experiences you have had in seminary and elsewhere. You have 400 words for each area of competence to summarize the impact of certain jobs, experiences, courses etc. on your understanding of yourself as minister.

§ Tell us more than what knowledge you have gained. How have you integrated knowledge and practice?. Knowledge and information are important; and they serve as critically important tools in the work of ministry. There is also an art to ministry, as well as practical ways to apply your skills that help that art come alive. (e.g. How have you applied theories of pastoral care within your internship opportunities in the parish and/or in community settings?)

§ The competencies should serve as an overview and introduction In reading these statements, the MFC should be able to glean both the course of study you have pursued, and how it has intersected with your emerging ministerial identity. The competencies are meant to show us the overall shape of your path in ministerial formation. The rest of the packet adds detail, color, and depth to the outline the competencies have drawn.

Starting in July 2015, when the new Chair Jesse King asked Shana Lynngood to become his Vice Chair, the leadership of the Process Working Group was assumed by Marge

Corletti. Jan Devor became chair of the Candidacy Working Group and Maddie Sifantus became Chair of the Settlement Working Group. All deserve much credit for leading the last year of work required to complete the competencies revision. Once the Process Working Group had completed most of the initial conceptualizing, the Candidacy and Settlement Working Groups could look at the detailed implications for our description of the MFC’s process, our required and encouraged reading list, the forms we required for submissions of information, and the description given to ministers in preliminary fellowship and their congregations or employers for what we required in a preliminary fellowship annual review. By December of 2015 these last tasks in moving towards announcement of the new competencies were well underway. At the April 2016 meeting of the MFC, the final competency document and revised re3ading list were approved by the full committee.

All changes in requirements for candidates seeking interviews with the MFC have been given a year of lead time before all candidates would become accountable for fulfilling them. The usual policy would be to allow candidates seeing the Committee between the time of the formal announcement and one year after the announcement to be able to choose which set of requirements they would prefer to follow. This would allow candidates well on the way to completing one set of requirements to avoid having to change horses in midstream. At least one candidate who had made their MFC appointment as early as possible in their formation process and who had seen these changes coming did decide to be an early adopter of the new requirements.

With the formal approval of the new competencies, the Committee announced that all candidates would be held accountable to them after March 1, 2017.

AFTERWORD

I concluded my service on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee in June of 2015 and completed the initial draft of this essay in February 2022. During that time all the people whose service began during my time as Chair have concluded their service. The role of Chair has now changed and turned over three times in six and a half years. This is not an unprecedented turnover in leadership. There were three Chairs in six and a half years between 2001 and 2008. In recent years, however, the changes have reflected a desire to innovate with new leadership models that reflect the Unitarian Universalist Association’s commitment to root out white supremacist culture in how we conduct our business.

Jesse King, a lay Unitarian Universalist from Evergreen CO, became the first African American to chair the MFC in 2015. He was succeeded in 2019 by another person who identified as African American, Rev. Shana Lynngood, who was concluding the last year of her eight years serving on the Committee. In 2021 Rev. Rebecca Savage, a minister with a background in both military chaplaincy and current service as a parish minister became Co Chair of the Executive Committee along with Rev. Jackie Clement. Clement began her involvement with ministerial credentialing serving on a Regional Sub-Committee and began serving in 2016. Both co chairs identify as people of color.

The untimely death in 2021 of Rev. David Pettee, the long-time Director of Ministerial Credentialing has meant that the long term institutional staff continuity for the Committee has been ably carried by Rev. Sarah Lammert, as Executive Secretary and Marion Bell, Credentialing Specialist

The MFC has become more transparent than ever since 2015, with the minutes of the non confidential business meetings from April 2016 to the present day available on the MFC’s main page within the UUA’s web site. If you are interested in learning more about the MFC’s history since 2016, especially various policy changes related to the threads within this essay, the UUA’s MFC web site is a good place to start. A summary of important decisions and changes drawn from these minutes follows. The Committee has also published a list of people who have been removed from or resigned fellowship with misconducting cases decided or pending since the MFC began.

A SUMMARY OF MAJOR PROJECTS AND DECISIONS 2016 2020

The Ministerial Fellowship Committee continued to be committed to continuing education and self evaluation. In March 2017 they scheduled a training with venerated educator Marie Fortune, founder of the Faith trust Institute to update their knowledge of sexual misconduct issues across denominations. Chair Jesse King arranged for some inward turning continuing education workshops on members’ work style and the “ladder of

inference” thinking process. In addition, in 2017 self evaluation tools for individual members and for working groups were completed and began to be used.

During 2016 17, the Committee was engaged with the necessary steps to roll out and evaluate the first year of the new competencies. An in depth review of preliminary fellowship requirements and forms was part of that. Working with the UU Society for Community Ministry, the Committee began a review and revision of the process and the requirements for community ministers’ renewals and the affiliation requirements with congregations. This conversation and a series of policy changes extended into 2018. It included elimination of the Rule that required documented half time work as a qualification for a year of preliminary fellowship renewal, in consideration of the realities of entrepreneurial ministries. Instead, the requirements were placed in policies where they could be more easily adjusted as the MFC studied the evolving possibilities for diverse community and start up parish ministries.

By December 2016, David Pettee reported that the loss of the RSCC system, which took some time for candidates, has made it much easier to get candidate status, and resulted in all the interview appointments being filled for 2017 and 2018. Adding a third panel to some meetings during those years became necessary.

As of September 2017, a re-consideration of the equity issues involved in having all meetings in Boston resulted in a change in Policy 9 as follows: “Following the conclusion of their interview, candidates are eligible to request travel equalization funds by submitting receipts to the Ministerial Credentialing Office up to a predetermined figure based upon where the candidate resides at the time of their interview.”

During 2017, the Process Working Group began a reconsideration of the use of the five “categories” as decisions and feedback to candidates after interviews.

In April 2017, a controversy within the UUA Board of Trustees and staff resulted in the resignation of the President and Vice Presidents and an interim period of senior leadership within the UUA. MFC Executive Secretary Sarah Lammert was called into interim service as Executive Vice President of the Association during this period of transition. Across the UUA, a new commitment to examining white supremacy culture was an outcome of this controversy and the MFC was engaged in this examination as well. In the fall of 2018, the UU Ministers Association invited the MFC and the Liberal Religious Educators Association to join with them in considering new initiatives to counter white supremacy. A joint meeting of the leadership was arranged for the spring of 2019.

At the September 2018 Meeting, the Committee voted substantial and important changes to complaint procedures after staff engaged a review of the MFC’s procedures by the Faith Trust Institute. Most notably, the MFC decided to :

• Expand the authority to initiate misconduct complaints to include: (a) UUA Congregational Life staff (b) MFC members who are not members of the Executive Committee (c) Custodial parents of minor children.

• Remove the restriction of “first hand knowledge” and “direct involvement” on parties initiating a complaint and remove the condition that the Intake Person will “not generally advance” complaints from persons not directly involved in the complaints.

• Modify how affected institutions are notified about the complaint with a blanket policy that compels the MFC to notify a single supervisory authority in both congregational and community settings (e.g. Board President, direct supervisor).

• Remove the six year restriction on occurrences of misconduct.

At the December 2018 meeting, the MFC endorsed the recommendations of the staff in the Office of Church Staff Finances to increase the recommended stipends offered to intern for the first time since 2011.

One of the outcomes of the ongoing conversation with the UU Ministers Association voted at the September 2019 meeting was a decision to return to the terminology of “full” fellowship once three years of renewed preliminary fellowship has been completed. This replaced “final” fellowship, a term which the UUMA pointed out implied a ending to ministerial formation and the continuing education process for ministers.

At the close of the March 31, 2019, business session, Chair Jesse King announced his resignation as a member of the MFC effective at the end of the September MFC meeting on Sunday afternoon September 22, 2019. His formal duties as chair of the MFC would conclude at the end of GA on June 23, 2019. The Rev. Shana Lynngood began serving as the interim chair of the MFC starting June 24, 2019 and and served until her term on the MFC concluded on March 29, 2020. Rev. Rebekah Savage and Rev. Jackie Clement were elected through a new sociocracy method as Co Chairs of the Executive Committee of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee at that time. All other leaders for the Executive Committee, the Working Groups and the panels were chosen by the same method which involved an opportunity to self nominate and transparently consider the choices available.

THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE COMMISSION ON INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

The year 2020 brought about tremendous challenges and changes to Unitarian Universalism along and indeed the entire world. The release in February 2020 of “Widening the Circle,” the report of the Commission on Institutional Change that had been charged with an in-depth study of the consequences of and remedies to white supremacy

culture’s influence in the UUA, offered important recommendations to the Ministerial Fellowship Committee and to the entire association.

The Commission’s recommendations to the MFC covered Credentialing and Disciplinary roles.

For credentialing, they wrote:

o “In our investigation of the sources of racism and the perpetuation of white supremacy culture, the Commission on Institutional Change has been led again and again to the credentialing process. Several aspects of that process continue to promote the status quo and to serve as barriers for people of color who wish to enter in as religious professionals.”

o “Our credentialing processes appeared to take longer for people of color who are less likely to have an easy or barrier free journey through them. These processes are long and expensive for everyone but seem to be taking people of color longer to complete.”

o “Our credentialing processes privilege those with economic resources as they are prohibitively expensive and stress formal education rather than other aspects of experiential education or demonstration of religious leadership or faithful living. The skills they reward are centered around a particular, privileged expression of white culture though other expressions of Unitarian Universalist space are possible as has been evidenced by the community and worship spaces of DRUUMM and BLUU.”

o “Emphasis on an interview with a credentialing committee as the pinnacle of credentialing does not adequately test knowledge and is biased towards certain learning styles. It also has the potential to be biased towards the dominant culture in the manner in which the questions are framed and assessed.”

The COIC and the UUA Board have both pointed out the obvious: over the past 100 years the MFC systems and processes for credentialing have evolved to improve efficiency, without making fundamental changes that impact equity and inclusion.

In the adjudication of clergy misconduct, the Commission’s reflections and recommendations include:

o “Disciplinary actions linked to certain aspects of the UU Ministers’ Association Guidelines serve as a deterrent for ministers of color to name racism and white supremacy culture when it is encountered. Ministers of color who experience a “negotiated resignation” are forced to go through a reparative process even if a culture of racism and white supremacy culture was a contributing factor. They do this

in a system which does not recognize the impacts of systemic racism and the trauma which results.”

o “The current credentialing and disciplinary processes are centered around the religious professionals. Congregations which misconduct are not disciplined and can continue to abuse religious professionals of color by hiring additional people since there is no public action taken against the congregations (and often none against white leaders.)”

o “No consistent resources are available to address trauma for religious professionals who have experienced this as part of their professional work. MFC disciplinary processes are not trauma informed and can serve to further harm religious professionals of color who have experienced harm as a result of racist, oppressive or discriminatory treatment.”

The MFC has continued to reflect on and respond to the Commission’s work since 2020.

The report was issued just as the covid 19 pandemic began, and so meetings of the Committee, including all interviews, have been conducted via the Zoom platform ever since.

It is too soon for this author to understand the long-term consequences of all these changes still under study and underway. This brief summary of decisions and changes from 2015 to 2020 is certainly incomplete, but at least it illustrates how quickly important changes can occur within the MFC’s culture and processes.

APPRECIATION

In the Appendix that concludes this essay, I have tried to list all the formal members of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee who have served for more than a single meeting. I haven’t counted each distinct name, but my best guess is that there are about one hundred twenty individuals who have served on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee since 1961. Most of them are not mentioned by name in the body of this essay. In researching this history, I have been moved by the unanimity of the former members in describing the intense demands of the work of the MFC and the gratitude that they feel for the honor given to them in being asked to serve.

In the course of sustaining the credentialing system that welcomes candidate ministers into fellowship, those who have served on the Ministerial Fellowship Committee have created their own bonds of fellowship across the decades. Our Association of Congregations and our ministry is stronger and healthier for their service.

I hope that those who served will be able to read this essay and forgive me if their unique contribution is not specifically named. The role each of has played in our time has

been important to the integrity and stability of the Unitarian Universalist commitment to excellence in ministry.