THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION MAKES CONTACT

Not long ago I got an automated email from the current head of the Meadville/Lombard Theological School Alumni Association, asking for money and, of course, as one is supposed to do, asking for feedback. So I said, as I do every year, “What about the people who started at M/L but didn’t finish? Who transferred or quit midstream or started in the ministry but then left?” (Like me. I stayed in ministry six years.)

I had just gotten another mail solicitation from the University of Chicago. (In my day UU’s at M/L got a double degree, the U of C tucked into the M/L degree which allowed the U of C Div School to count all Meadville students as their own ministry students, because the truth is that they mostly educate Ph.D. academic students -- or did -- and some of their endowment is dedicated to the creation of ministers.) U of C goes out of their way to claim the people who only attended a short time and never got a degree -- or, as often happens at the U of C, were technically students writing their thesis for decades, but never did really do it. Nevertheless, they are listed as Class of X instead of Class of 1982 or whatever. Often they are people who went on to considerable achievement. Of course, when you’re looking for donations, the wider the base the better.

So I asked, “Is there a list somewhere of M/L students who didn’t finish or who dropped out of the ministry? Why not ask THEM for feedback?” I got back a stiff email reminding me that I’d asked the same thing last year and, really, if they dropped out, they weren’t ALUMNI, were they? Try the UUMA. (That’s the ministers’ association.) He said, “You sound like you’re just looking for old friends.” He sounded like he thought leaving was a kind of betrayal.

Actually, between Google and Facebook, I managed to make contact with just about everyone a year ago. Word must have gotten around. They were not excited about hearing from me. No one has kept in touch. I’m out of the game. Ministry is a contact sport. If you’re off the field, you don’t count and we don’t want to hear from you. But I was curious to know whether there were patterns that might be interesting or even useful in a time when the building is being sold, the school itself is more or less consolidating with a less directly Unitarian Universalist school, and the whole nature of the denomination is changing.

At one time the general idea of what a UU minister was like was what Robert Sapolsky calls a schizotypal, a brilliant young man, introverted, not exactly conventional and deeply serious about religious issues. This was the interpretation of “learned ministry.” But now, judging from the newsletters, the students are on their second career, inclined to be motherly women or beard-and-belly men -- no one has been starving in the previous career -- and gregarious. These folks are congregation builders. Numbers count if you’re going to keep a church or denomination alive. And if these ministers are going to have pulpits, they will have to sell themselves to congregations. There is no shortage of UU ministers.

Steve Beall, one of those who walked off before jumping through the last hoops, used to argue vigorously that a theological seminary was a good place to go if you had questions about life and that there should not be any obligation or pretense of meaning to be a minister. But the school itself, some of whose faculty had taken a pass on Vietnam on grounds that they were engaged in serious social action through ministry, tended to raise funds in terms of creating ministers. The truth was that my class, entering in 1978, included four students, hardly enough to justify the cost of the building.

Which is going to be sold anyway. Gothic stone and marble lavs are out-of-fashion. The humanist cathedral across the intersection doesn’t even have a steeple anymore. In the days when I was there, the point was to show that science could be religious. Now the idea is more like, “make your choice.” No one wants their religion to be out-of-fashion. The whole idea is to be prestigious, cutting-edge -- maybe not so learned that one is out-of-touch. Not uncomfortable.

I guess exit interviews are old hat. Consultants are in. Consultants tell you what you want to hear. So do alumni. I mean, the in-group reports what they know, but the out-group tells you what you don’t know. If the goal is to expand beyond the palings of the fort, it may be more important to hear what they have to say

For instance, the advice now accepted is based on commodification, the strategies of the commercial world, the algorithym, polling, and the prestige of pre-existing platforms. Quotas and target goals are denied but one is told that one in a thousand people is a natural Unitarian and that it takes three hundred people to support a building and minister. We constantly survey ourselves to see “who we are” and are always surprised that we turn out to be us, asking ourselves our favorite questions. We have not thought about the "long tail" in any depth.

Beyond this problem is the refusal to admit that religious denominations constantly morph and last century’s elitist white man head-trip Unitarianism is nothing like today’s mildly do-gooder, diligently narcissistic, upwardly mobile UUist. We seem to have lost the joyful release of the Sixties and Seventies person who was enough of a free-thinker that all the conformists with “good personalities” told him or her they were “just a Unitarian,” which turned out to be true. As a society and probably as a denomination, we’re back to our original Puritan roots, working out, passing safety regulations, checking rumor with Snopes.com, trying to have proportional representation of minorities, hovering over the children.

When I found it in the Seventies, this denomination seemed so much like the home I hadn’t known about that I couldn’t help crying out, “Oh, so THIS is where everyone is! Why didn’t you TELL me??” But now that feeling is gone. Even if it’s my “fault” and I’ve simply changed away from the group, is there another denomination where I fit now? Is one that needs to be formed? Or is it the concept of denominational congregations that is simply “over?” Like elaborate stone seminaries in big cities, attached to major universities?