From Safety Net, a Social Justice sub-committee of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville

Dear Members of the UUMA,

We have some suggested revisions for your guidelines, but before we get to those, we want you to know how deeply we value you and your association. You are at the heart of our beloved faith, nurturing the ministry and offering much-needed support to each other. Unitarian Universalism could not be without you. Yours is truly a calling, and we are deeply grateful for your dedication.

For those among you who are not familiar with our congregation, like many UU congregations, we have suffered from clergy sexual misconduct. In 1993, the minister of our congregation was found guilty of conduct unbecoming by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Over the next few years, our church devolved into a battleground and we came close to bankruptcy.

Seventeen years later, we are a thriving congregation, bursting at the seams, larger and healthier than ever. Not only are we surviving the economic crisis, not to mention Nashville’s horrific recent floods, but we are proud to say that we have not had to cut any staff salaries.

What’s different about us, though, is not that we suffered from misconduct, nor is it that we recovered. It’s two other things. First, to this day we do not pretend that we have fully healed. To do so would be yet another form of the silencing that is the centerpiece of abuse. Second, year after year we work hard on healing — typically having to blaze a trail by ourselves through uncharted territory. In the early days, it was a “Listening Process.” Then we overhauled our mission, covenant and bylaws. We have since built a very active Safe Congregations Panel, and make discussion of our history part of all “New UU” classes. In other words, we have built a strong lay leadership, and found strong ministers and staff to partner with. To quote one of our lay members in a sermon about our recent history, “If ever there were truth to power, [our history] was it. It was not easy to speak our truth. But not only did many of us do just that, even more of us managed to stand by our faith. We did not give up, we did not dismiss UUism as one more religious sham – we did not simply leave. We saw something more in our principles and our community. And we prevailed.”

The most recent manifestation of this work is Safety Net. We are a sub-committee of Social Justice. All of our members have substantial experience related to clergy sexual misconduct. The Rev. Gail Seavey, our senior minister, is a member of Safety Net. Other members have had formal training in this area, have served on our Safe Congregations Panel, are therapists, psychologists and survivors. Our goal is to work in a positive way to effect much-needed change in the policies, procedures and attitudes surrounding clergy sexual misconduct in Unitarian Universalist congregations. Some ways we hope to do this are to develop a certification program for UU Congregations that are “safe” (similar to the Welcoming Congregation Program), to raise awareness that clergy sexual misconduct is an issue of social justice, to increase accountability and transparency from our ministers in terms of their professional standards, and to raise awareness around power differentials. In essence, we do not want other congregations to have to suffer as we have; we want to share what we have learned.

The UUMA came to our attention early on when formulating our direction. Frequently in those discussions, Rev. Seavey would mention the UUMA guidelines. Eventually we asked a lawyer in our congregation, who has some background in employment law and experience with clergy misconduct, to review the guidelines. Using his recommendations as a framework, we have some suggested revisions, both for the current UUMA Guidelines and for the draft revision.

• Suggested Revisions to the Current UUMA Guidelines
• Suggested Revisions to the Proposed UUMA Guidelines

As we have worked on this, Rev. Seavey has been pleasantly surprised by our perspective. She has some experience with working on the UUMA guidelines, and found our thinking on this to be a helpful and needed perspective. We hope you will too.

We are interested in finding ways to partner with the UUMA, and hope this letter and our suggested revisions to your guidelines are the first step in an ongoing dialogue.

In faith,

Anna Belle Leiserson (Chair)
Doug Pasto-Crosby
The Rev. Gail Seavey
Nancy Stott
Tedra Walden

This report by the Religious Institute is focused on sexuality, rather than abuse and misconduct, but some of it is germane.  For example,  “Clergy sexual misconduct has embroiled not only the Roman Catholic Church, but at least 16 other Christian denominations and Jewish movements as well.”

Governance Working Group:
The minutes will reflect that there are items in the Governance Policy Manual, including the committee structure and delegation of responsibility for dealing with clergy misconduct, which are still under discussion.

“In cases of conduct unbecoming a minister, there is often a call for the offending minister toformally apologize to their colleague(s) and/or congregation.  The Committee would like the Board to consider a policy regarding the nature and creation of institutional apology in cases of misconduct.  In the short term, the MFC will continue to include expressions of regret in their correspondence with complainants. “

If you learn of relevant news that we should include, please let us know.