No good deed goes unpunished

My husband and I are somewhat active in our church. Oddly enough, considering his initial reticence, he is the more active one. I have purposely avoided the more prominent committees, and staunchly avoided any committee that had to made reports to the Board of Directors.

My husband has whined about the Committee Chairs meetings he has had to attended. However, he really enjoys the work of keeping our church building in working order, and has made great strides into improving its overall condition.

Today, the BoD and the Committee Chairs hosted our memebership's annual meeting. Here, the more active volunteers (those involved in committees) go over the issues of the past year, present next year's budget, and make recommendations for the upcoming year.

Our congregation has been plagued by a number of issues this year. Since last summer, we have gone through three office administrators. The first one went back to school last summer. The second one was a complete disappointment. And the third one was left trying to pick up the pieces of her mess.

In addition, this was the year that our minister was slated to go on sabbatical for several months. Even though we knew it was coming, we did not prepare ourselves for her absence. Attendance and pledge achievement have both been down. Due to scheduling issues, one of our larger fund raisers, our service auction, was pushed back from February until May. We had far less attendance and a far smaller catalog of offerings subequently.

Last year. a movement rose to look into expanding our Sunday services from one to two. Our traditional 10 a.m. service is rarely full. However, some postulated that we would appeal to more people if we offered a second, later, service.

First off, we cannot seem to inspire the membership we have. Secondly, our minister and staff are already woefully underpaid, and now we expect them to double their efforts and commitment?

The UU Church really is my spiritual home. However, I avoided church for most of my life because I couldn't handle spiritual hypocrisy. Now I see another dark side of organized religion, which I knew was there. However, I thought since the UU's were different spiritually that they would be different regarding internal politics. Here I was more than wrong. From what I can gather, the UU's are actually worse. Since, while trying to be all inclusive and democratic, leadership takes a back seat to inclusiveness, lack of direction, and poor productivity.

I think I finally understand why so many leaders in our congregation have disappeared from active church life within a year of the end of the term of service.

May those who were subjected to today's debacle here my prayer. Namaste. Blessed be.