Guest Blog by Roger Andersen

There has been much online discussion and Letters written to the Board about the possibility of adding a new Principle to the Seven Principles of UUism. Some want QUUF to vote on it; others do not. In a Letter to the Board, member Roger Andersen offered his own thoughts on a possible “Middle Way.”

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Dear Members of the QUUF Board,

Re: Timing for Fellowship Vote on Adopting Proposed 8th Principle

I am writing to express my views about when the Fellowship should be voting on adopting the proposed 8th Principle. I have a great deal of respect for people who have signed group letters to you urging or opposing the view that we should hold a vote in the near future. Because I do not entirely agree with either major letter, this is my attempt to offer an intermediate view.

I think we should hold off on voting until we have a better chance to get to know each other again. But even without having adopted the 8^th Principle formally we should proceed with careful examination of – and action upon – the issues the 8th Principle raises. Basically, I believe we should work from the bottom up, rather than top down.

Despite being members of the same Fellowship – some of us for a long time – we to some extent have become strangers. We have new members we don’t yet know and long-time friends with whom we have lost touch. We need to feel “together” before we can act together.

Moreover, Covid’s imposed isolation makes us unusually more on edge. We’re more likely to jump to conclusions about what someone means when they attempt to express views that are still evolving. We need some real in-person time together, seeing faces, catching up, identifying people we don’t know, sharing undeveloped ideas. However, we should not let delay of a vote become a denial of a vote.

We need to be taking steps forward. We should leave it to you to work out a system that gives plenty of notice and opportunity to be heard.

But all that should come after we’ve had a chance to work with these issues in person at the ground level. We need to see how the 8th Principle would work here, in our community, in our Fellowship. We need to avoid treating the 8^th Principle at such an abstract level that we can imagine endless hypothetical problems.

I believe that the general approach suggested in Widening the Circle offers a helpful template for us: what practices, habits, and ignorances keep us from reaching and welcoming the broadest group of people? I encourage you to put into motion the sorts of audits at the operational level that would help us discover what change might look like. For example, are there things – in the order of service or the music or how we invest the endowment or how art is hung in the foyer – that may put people off without our even knowing it? The question applies to all that we do.

We can shift the focus to specific questions and discuss them in smaller groups who have special interest and experience in particular areas. We’d get more people focused on 8th Principle issues because they’d see how those issues fit into an area they care about. We would be able take advantage of the expertise of folks who are familiar with how a particular mission works in practice. They would be in a good position to identify whether and how best to reform our practices in identifiable contexts.

With that collective knowledge we’d be better able to decide how well the 8th Principle fits with the overall mission we’d like to pursue.

In love and hope,
Roger Andersen