Shift happens, effectively and with sustainable results, as long as we stay relevant AND reverent.
For the past 15 years I have traveled the country working with churches, and engaging in interfaith work with people from all walks of life. My work requires me to stay current with what is happening in the world of religion, faith, and church. This means keeping myself educated through data, as well as stories of what people believe, especially the evolving beliefs emerging in every generation around church and spirituality.
Most people recognize that church and its Sunday service, in its current form, are dying in many ways. Many religious communities across denominations are shrinking in numbers and donations. Even the megachurches, which from the outside appear to be thriving, carry the same struggles when you look within. This doesn’t mean Sunday service is going away altogether, but it does mean that our world has changed, and church is no longer just a Sunday proposition. “Church” is and needs to be an all week long activity, oftentimes without four walls.
We hear stories about how Unity co-founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, never wanted churches, and yet, ordained hundreds of people, essentially making Unity a sacramental organization. The Fillmores wrote very little about what they intended for Unity and its future, but Charles Fillmore is quoted in a 1939 issue of Unity Magazine saying, “The present turbulence in the world is the dissolution of the age of materialism. There will be a terrific struggle to preserve the old civilization with its thousand and one shortcomings, but it will disappear, and out of the wreckage will rise a civilization… a worldwide brotherhood based upon trust in God and understanding of God’s law… It has no external social or religious organization, but its members are ruled by the principles universally understood…”
This doesn’t mean Sunday service is going away altogether, but it does mean that our world has changed, and church is no longer just a Sunday proposition.
These universal principles were repeated over and over by the Fillmores, in every lesson Charles spoke and every prayer Myrtle wrote: to go inside, discern Truth for ourselves, and demonstrate it by doing the work needed in our world. This is another way of inviting us to stay relevant, while holding gently our core of what is most sacred.
Relevance: Being in Our Preferred Future Now
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t noticed how life keeps getting busier, and we feel it’s almost impossible to keep up with anything. Between the myriad of news and social media outlets reporting every second of every day, constantly behind the technology 8-ball, innovations in science and medicine, cultural shifts, nonstop challenges concerning human rights, unending emergencies with natural disasters, and a $12 billion a year self-help industry reminding us to “change and grow,” is it any wonder we live our lives with some measure of anxiety running through us like an underground river? Yet we try to keep up, we think we can and must if we are stay relevant.
When we look at the beginning of Unity, we see a similar fast-paced world. Unity may have begun more than 130 years ago, but in the first 25 years of its founding there was the invention of the airplane, x-ray machine, automobile, incandescent lamp and motion pictures, to name a few things. Add to that cultural changes, like the women’s movement, prohibition, and the influx of eastern religions plus an expanded world economy, and I’m sure it felt as busy then as we feel now.
To be relevant means to be “pertinent to the matter at hand.” I believe the Fillmores, understood this, which is why their focus was on principle, and the daily practice with current issues of the day. They encouraged people to take the next step beyond prayer and demonstrate truth in all their actions. Myrtle Fillmore makes this clear in her letters. Each person who writes to her is talking about the current challenges, and in her responses Myrtle addresses not only the individual’s needs, but the chaos of their era: disease, poverty, alcoholism, marital challenges, child-rearing practices, unemployment, women’s rights, environmental issues, and social justice causes.
Being relevant begins with the understanding that everything changes – yes everything. While the rate of change increases, we don’t need to speed up to hang on.
Ironically, the root of the word “relevant” is to “lessen, or lighten.” While the world is moving ever-faster, we need to remember that to be relevant we must lighten our load, and remind ourselves that our basic needs never change. Herein lies the challenge for each spiritual community when we focus on the basic needs, not the form, we will be led to our next steps in shifting a centuries-old paradigm of church. We may not have any idea what our spiritual community will look like, but we will begin living our preferred future now.
Being relevant begins with the understanding that everything changes – yes everything. While the rate of change increases, we don’t need to speed up to hang on. We need to lighten our load, to believe the truth we can demonstrate – not in spite of the world around us, – but because of the world around us.
Reverence: Standing in Awe, We Don’t Go Back
I believe Unity churches began to emerge because the Unity message had been traveling the entire country and people naturally wanted to gather to learn and experience the teachings. This was already happening in Kansas City, Missouri, so a Sunday morning service, and eventually a church, made sense and was easily replicated anywhere elsewhere. While it has worked for a very long time, change is needed. We know this, but we fear if church no longer looks as it always has we will lose what we believe is the “heart” of Unity. Many have expressed to me their fear that what is most sacred will be lost forever, and the church we know and love will be gone, and this can invoke great sadness and uncertainty.
Often with change comes great upheaval, discomfort, and a loss of direction and grounding. We long for more stability, calmer waters, the “good ole days.” Yet, whenever I hear someone say, “We need to go back to_____,” I feel a little nervous. Go back to what? I’m not sure we need to “go back to” anything. I do believe in focusing some attention on bringing forward pieces of our roots and our heritage. We transcend, move beyond what no longer serves – this is relevance – and we include, or bring forward, that which continues to serve – this is reverence.
In any religious organizations there are facets we cling to rigidly. We call these “sacred cows.” They are ideas or customs tightly held (often to an unreasonable degree), especially unreasonably. Often they are given undue respect to the point they cannot be changed. In fact, they have most likely lost their sacredness, and represent something concretized into church life. For instance, in many churches the thought of not singing the “Peace Song” at the end of the service causes major anxiety rippling throughout.
Other sacred cows may be the arrangement of chairs, the order of service, the time of the Sunday service, even meeting on Sunday at all, the decorations in the entryway, the altar up front… there is a never-ending supply of things being clutched so rigidly. We must discern which beliefs are deeply held and which are rigidly held. The latter are almost always louder, often angrier, and they separate us. Whereas deeply held beliefs serve to join us and are always tempered by the power of love.
If there is crystalized fear emerging at the idea of a ‘sacred cow’ disappearing, then how much reverence do we really hold for it?
The word reverence means to stand in awe, respect, or to honor something. I invite us to look at that which we hold so dearly. If there is fear emerging at the idea of a sacred cow disappearing, then how much reverence do we really hold for it? We can stand in awe, respect, and honor for something without having to see the thing itself.
Beyond Church
Many also have concerns about the future of the Unity movement as a whole.? In the mid-1980s, while speaking at an event at Unity Village and asked about the future of Unity, Rev. Eric Butterworth said Unity was “on its way out, and well it should be.” He added that he thought the Fillmores never intended for Unity to be a church or religious movement. While I can never know what the founders envisioned for Unity, or even how long it might last, it’s clear from lessons and letters over the years their focus was on the practical understanding and demonstration of principle, not the structure and organization itself.
Myrtle Fillmore wrote in Healing Letters, “I want to add something to what you said of the past and the future. The ‘past is what it is,’ but we do not often understand it and see it as it really is. The past recedes from us if we do not hug it to us, and the light that the changing perspective throws upon it makes it a pleasing background for present activities!”
As for Butterworth’s comment, I can only guess at its true meaning, but I wonder if he looked around and saw many spiritual teachers sharing the same, or similar, foundational Unity teachings – as they had for decades. It often appears as though the Unity principles we hold so dearly have truly become universal, mainstream in some ways – relevant you might say.
Principles such as: one presence and one power, or that we are each divine, sacred manifestations of life, as well as the well-known practice that our thoughts and feelings create our world. Even science has embraced this last one, demonstrating, more often than not, that our feelings create our thoughts. I think if Charles Fillmore were alive today, he would be wondering the same thing about Unity – does it have a half-life? I imagine he would be taking a deep dive into the relationship of science and spirituality, practicing reverence by letting go of what has been, and embracing what is new and different.
Unity needs to be a place where we can become vulnerable to profoundly different ways of seeing without being threatened. It’s not about teaching a new ideology or theology, but about investigating all perspectives. Unity can be such a place where core ideas and beliefs can be fundamentally challenged with safety and support. Charles Fillmore challenged us when he said in 1923, “God only does what man says he shall do. God is our servant. Did you ever think of that, that this wonderful Spirit of God, out of which everything is made, is here at all times, is always present with us, and we are using that God?”
We have long since passed the time of focusing on how to get people into the building. Now is the time to get people off their affirmations and out of the building. When we understand our planet, the human condition, and the species we share the planet with, we are taking a step into proving Truth. By returning to the basics, by lightening our load, and releasing the outer trappings that are irrelevant – no matter how difficult – we are doing the great work of Unity, “working out the Great Problem of Life” as Myrtle Fillmore said. We are being relevant, living into our preferred future now.
Unity becomes more sacred as we question all that we believe to be sacred. Ironically, we are more reverent because of our willingness to be irreverent. It is holy in its commitment to that which is whole. So when someone is afraid of losing their church, or the future of Unity, I gently remind them that church and demonstration of universal principle can happen any day of the week, at any time of the day, wherever you are.
Originally published in January/February 2020 Unity magazine.
Before the shut-down due to COVID-19, I was fed up of being a ‘church-goer’ with the rest of my week being so secular than the time I spend in church on Sunday morning. Since then, I turned inwards to God and discovered God is everywhere and within me, any day of the week, not just on Sunday mornings. Now, with the shut-downs lasting months into Advent and Christmas, instead of just Lent, I now long to go back to church. But it’s different now, instead of just going through the motions of ‘meet and greet’, I don’t think I am going to be the only one who will now deeply appreciate the ‘meet and greet’ and the handshakes and hugs. And to be in the presence, together at church, listening to a message from my Pastor will have a more personal meaning.
I hope ‘church’ will never be the same, we will never take for granted the community of those longing to be in oneness with Spirit and in oneness with one another. But now, it won’t matter if we meet in church on Sunday morning, or meet for a Saturday BBQ lunch at a city park, or go for a walk together in nature, or give each other a handshake at our grocery stores, or even meet virtually online on Thursday evening or gather together on Tuesday mornings for meditation at the library, or volunteer at our local food bank, etc. God has always been and always will be, that’s our past and our future.
Rev. Kelly, thank you for thinking outside the box. Have we boxed in God? Trying to keep Spirit within the walls of the church? Maybe like Jericho, those walls need to come tumbling down? What would that look like, and how then would the spiritual community connect to share ideas and grow?
Kelly, thank you so much for writing and sharing this article. It really spoke to things I’ve been feeling for so long. There are many take aways here for me. Again, thank you! ?