...higher the stakes, the deeper the disagreements, and the longer the discussion, the happier they are. Some people really love process, debate, and watching how the sausage gets made. I can only assume this is why people still run for public office.

But for me, being stuck in a room with a dozen people or in a windowless convention center with hundreds of people, slogging through agendas and hashing out compromises, makes me antsy. I would so much rather be out alone in the woods walking than stuck to an uncomfortable chair listening as someone makes an amendment to the amendment on the resolution to table the motion… or some such.

I realize this is not a great thing to admit before a congregational meeting, and in truth, once I get over my initial anxiety I’m often delighted by what we can do together and how good and creative and productive people can be when they work together and even how God can show up in the midst of it all and help us make better decisions together than we would ever make alone.

But all that being said, I’m still not a meeting person.

So I have to tell you, I was not looking forward to the annual meeting of the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ last weekend.

I wanted to hear Rev. Warnock speak, but I did not want to sit all day inside the DCU Center in Worcester, in large part because I knew there was controversy a’brewing, things were already getting ugly on-line, and there was no way on God’s green earth that that meeting was not gonna go long.

Now what I am about to share with you is my best take on what happened. I’m sure other people would tell the story differently. But from what I can tell, the business portion of our meeting was slated to be as perfunctory as possible.

It really should have been nothing more than a victory lap for the board because we had already voted seven years ago to formally merge the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island Conferences into the Southern New England Conference.

The only votes we needed to take this year were simply the very last step in that process, the legal dissolution of the old State corporations so we could get on with what we are already doing. Nothing controversial about that.

But the board had also made a controversial decision this past year to close the Silver Lake campground in Connecticut after one last summer of programming. Now you need to know that their decision didn’t come out of nowhere. Attendance at the camp was way down post covid, insurance and maintenance costs were way up, and the camp was running a $250,000 deficit.

However, as obvious as that makes the decision to close down the camp sound, you could easily say the same thing about most of our churches and we wouldn’t take kindly to being shut down either. People were still being served by this beloved ministry and, for many people, Silver Lake remains a spiritually formative place.

Honestly, a whole lot of folks - even amongst our conference leadership - were heartbroken by the decision to close the camp. Many had made their objections known and hundreds had even come together to form a corporation - Friends of Silver Lake - to try and buy the camp from the conference and chart a path forward. But in spite of all the angst, effort, and petitioning, people felt like their cries were falling on deaf ears.  So they did what people do when they have no other choice. They found leverage where they could and came up with a plan to hold up the final vote on the merger so their voices could be heard.

And here is the things: once you open the door to one form of complaint the flood starts. Soon the discontent brewing wasn’t just about the camp, but began to snowball into an overall feeling that everything was moving too fast, including this merger we’ve been living into for 7 years! People began to express dissatisfaction with the priorities of those in leadership. Turns out they felt disconnected and ill served in other ways too…and all of a sudden, this conference that was supposed to be celebrating our glorious and innovative 3 way covenant felt like a conference that could very easily come apart at the seams.

Not only that, there were other dynamics at work as well. You may have noticed that the composition of our leadership has changed over these last 7 years. We have many more women, queer folks, and people of color at the helm, including our Executive Conference Minister, Darrell Goodwin, who I deeply respect. This diversity is a gift and a godsend, but it exists alongside an unfortunate reality.

There is something deeply unjust about the fact that we have finally allowed people into leadership who were formally underrepresented just in time to inherit institutions that are flailing. We expect them to either perform miracles of resurrection or shoulder the blame for failures that were coming long before they came on scene. We turn on the very people who are doing everything in their power to save us in the midst of an impossible situation, and our critiques re-open wounds of disrespect and mistrust that people on the margins have carried for far too long.

Friends, I think you know that this is already an incredibly hard time to be a leader. We are living in an age when trust in institutions is at an all time low. There is a huge amount of ambient anxiety in the system exacerbated by polarization, conflict, mistrust, and grief as things change and are lost.

Churches, especially, are desperately trying to maintain what we have or do more with less: less money, fewer members, aging infrastructures, and rising costs.  Which adds even more grief and anxiety into an already overloaded system. Mix in a little homophobia and a healthy dash of white privilege, and you’ve got a recipe for hurt feelings and misunderstanding across the board.

The grief people were expressing on the floor of the conference was real and justified, but the temptation to weaponize that grief was also hanging heavy in the air. As one person of color posted publicly during the meeting, “I am so tired, bone tired, soul weary of having to deal with white nostalgia. A nostalgia that uses privilege to dismantle the possibility of a different future.

Just so damned tired.”

He wasn’t wrong….but right or wrong, before we could move on, we needed to address the hurt…a hurt that by that point was being experienced on all sides.

I have to tell you, it was rough. The atmosphere at the conference was tense. And spoiler alert, the vote to dissolve the former corporations came nowhere near a 2/3 majority.

The vote failed.

But the Southern New England Conference did not.

And I have some thoughts about why, thoughts that connect back to this passage in Philippians that we have before us today.

I can’t imagine this will come as a surprise to you, but Paul was also writing to a church in conflict because, let’s be honest, Paul was always writing to churches in conflict. Why? because conflict is a natural and normal part of church. It always has been. It always will be. It’s not a sign that we are doing church wrong. It’s a sign that we are doing church at all.

Humans have an inexhaustible capacity to disagree with one another about pretty much everything. So a lot of Paul’s writing centers on how we can maintain unity even in the midst of disagreement. When Paul urges the people of the church in Philippi to “be of the same mind,” he is not urging them to simply agree with one another or make nice. I know it sounds like that at first, but if you keep reading you’ll see that what he is really asking them to do is be of the same mind - not with each other - but with Jesus. Jesus

who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself…humbled himself…

gave himself up and over, even to the point of death, for the sake of us all.

Paul is asking us to be of the same mind as Jesus, to imitate Jesus, to pour out our power and leverage our privilege for the sake of all, rather than simply to serve ourselves alone.  Jesus could have taken his toys and gone home at any point in his sojourn here on earth; especially toward the end when we turned on him. But Jesus hung in there with us even though it cost him everything and Paul wants us to hang in there with each other even when it costs us too.

To paraphrase the Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers, “Jesus had the privilege of divinity, which meant he could (have) remain(ed) separate from humanity…(but) he surrendered (his) superiority and separateness in order to become human… he consciously chose (to live among us even though it meant dying like one of us, the better to love us.) “God,” she says, “is the love that gives itself away for the sake of more love.”

It turns out you cannot love, or at least love like Jesus, at a remove. To love like Jesus you must come close, take a risk, give of yourself with no guarantee that you will be loved in kind.

This pouring out of ourselves and letting go of our own agenda for the sake of love is what theologians call kenosis, literally the act of emptying ourselves for the sake of each other. This passage in Philippians is actually called the Kenotic hymn.

“When you take something you possess - (be it) your bread (or your) power, your abilities (or) identities, your comfort (or) control, your treasured structures (or) even life itself - release your attachment to it and (allow it to be made useful for the sake of) God’s movement, you are practicing kenosis,” says Spellers.

You are of the same mind as Jesus because you are giving of yourself the way Jesus did.

“In Jesus,” she says, “God shows us what it looks like to (pour ourselves out for the sake of one another) to be vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In (Jesus) we see one who did not run from the things (or the people) that broke his heart… (but) sought instead to give away his life, so that he and others might flourish…God invites us to (do the same) to (let go of the things we cling to and) allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces - (the pieces of) - our lives, our goods, our love, our privileges - and share it all (with one another) like a broken loaf of communion bread”(p 91 -94 “The Church Cracked Open).

Friends, we can claim our privilege and exercise our power to remain safe and separate from one another and ensure that what we personally care about most is prioritized and preserved. We can look to our own needs and concerns first, everyone else be damned. And all too often, even here in the church, that is exactly what we do.

But that is not the way of Jesus. And the more we act like that the smaller the church becomes until it just holds the people who agree with us and want to do things our way, which in the end is not church at all but a small club that will die out with us if it doesn’t die out sooner.

Real church, on the other hand, good church, healthy church…. requires us to be open to one another, to hear one another out, to hash it out while prioritizing the needs of the whole over our own, to pour ourselves out for the sake of one another over and over again. And that’s not just hard, it’s also tricky, right?

By which I mean that there is a very fine line between compromise and coercion, between being humble and being taken advantage of, between healthy community and unholy coercion. It is very easy, especially for leaders, to impose humility and sacrifice on others without practicing it ourselves, which is why Paul says to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

It is why Paul tells us to keep checking ourselves and asking ourselves if we are of the same mind as Jesus or just stuck in our own heads. And honestly, it is not always easy to know. It requires an on-going dance of discernment and the wise and loving guidance of the Holy Spirit that we, as Congregationalists, believe is best discerned together. Which brings me back to the meeting and why I think we held together in spite of our differences.

As people rose to speak on behalf of or against the motions, as they raised concerns and held others to account, there was very real pain and grief expressed in that room. There was some snark and eye rolling and - Lord have mercy - there was definitely some tone. There were words that cut deep and wounds exposed that may take a long time to heal.

But, to everyone’s credit, there was also deep listening and powerful prayer accompanied by expressions of humility, encouragement, gratitude, and grace. It got messy…really messy…but we didn’t give up on each other. We didn’t walk out on each other. No one took their toys and went home.

Even the people who came determined to block the vote wore stickers that said not just “No!” Like “vote no on 1! But “No…not yet.” No, I’m not ready…but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. No, I’m not ready….but I’m still in covenant with you. Hear me, meet me, listen to me in my pain and my need…and hopefully, in time, we can still move forward together.

And to their credit, after the votes were counted, the board responded and said, “We hear you. And we are sorry it took this long to make that clear. We’re obviously not ready to move forward and we won’t move forward until we can move forward together. This merger is going to take longer than we thought…and that’s ok. We are not in agreement but we are still in this together.”

Toward the end of the debate, a pastor was called up to pray and he acknowledged the irony of the theme of the meeting which was “The Ties that Bind” based on the verse in Ecclesiastes 4 that reads: “A threefold cord is not easily broken.”

“You know,” he said, “when these words in Ecclesiastes were written, they were not written about the Southern New England Conference. We didn’t fail to fulfill some biblical prophecy today….”And yet we all knew in our hearts that those words are still true. We are stronger together and the threat of division is real.” And so he prayed for us and we prayed for each other.

In prayer and song, as we broke bread in communion and gathered to listen to Rev. Warnock, we hung in there with each other. We didn’t let our own needs derail the higher need for us all to stay in communion with one another. We allowed God to call us back to our overarching mission, which is to make God’s love and justice real.

How the SNEUCC will fulfill that mission is and always will be up for debate, and we may seriously disagree at times. But the call to live into the mission, to keep pouring ourselves out for the sake of our neighbors and one another, is not. In spite of all the controversy, I’m glad I went to the meeting. In truth, I actually left encouraged.

We are not giving up on each other because we know we are better able to make God’s love and justice real if we work together then if we break apart. And so we’re going to keep working out our salvation as a conference, just as we will keep working it out here as a congregation, being of the same mind, not as each other, but as the one who gave up everything for the sake of all.  Amen.