Harmony UU Podcast

A great look at what could be changing in our 7 UU Principles and Beyond.

The following is a transcript of the sermon written and delivered by Harmony member Susan Wenner Jackson on June 4, 2023.

I have to warn you that this is not my typical sermon. If I get– usually when I give sermons, they’re more from the heart, more personal. This is a little bit more, I guess, academic. But I’ll try to keep it light and so we can all understand. But the– for some of you might know this  some of you this might be complete news to you. So whatever– wherever you come from, we’ll all be on the same page by the end of this. 

But a couple of years ago, the UUA, the organization that is– contains all UU churches commissioned a group of people, of experts and members to come up with totally new wording for basically our constitution, the constitution of UU, which is called Article 2. Article 2 makes it sound like it’s just one little thing but it’s actually like a whole set. 

So when Dale earlier said like the eighth principle, the eighth principle was something that was introduced a couple of years ago and it was part– it was an addition to the Article 2. But this is actually– that sparked kind of a whole thing. I’ll move to the next slide. 

They wanted to totally like revisit, revise the whole thing, not just kind of add an amendment if you will. So just a couple of things. 

This is sort of the language that’s like the foundation of our beliefs or our kind of values as a church, as a faith. And it does include the principles, if you’re familiar with the seven principles and the sources and our purpose. And our bylaws, I didn’t know this, but our bylaws actually require that we revisit it and revise it every 15 years. 

So for some religious institutions, this would be– Article 2 would be regarded as a permanent statement of belief but ours is a living tradition. We commit ourselves to regularly revisiting our principles and purposes to ensure that we’re relevant, that as we grow in understanding, our principles and purposes grow too. 

So since new occasions teach new duties, we must continuously examine our principles and purposes to see what’s missing, what is no longer important, and whether the language communicates our core values to the current times. So that’s kind of like the purpose. That’s what the Article 2 is. 

And so they formed a commission to look at this language and see how we could reflect who we are now and what we want to be. So I mentioned there were some changes like the eighth principle. They did change something. There was some language in there about “women and men” and they changed that to “people” in one of the sources. 

There was also a recommended change to the first principle to change “all people” to “all beings” and that actually failed. That did not get the vote so they didn’t do it. 

So– And the eighth principle was around – strictly around anti-racism, to add a principle around racism. And that– They finally just said let’s just get a group of leaders together to really just redo this whole thing. 

Now, as a personal aside, I am a writer by profession and editor. So I do find– I kind of nerd out on this a little bit. I like– I think that words are very important and they matter and I like to kind of examine words and how the...