Skip to main content

3,672

In one of the early episodes of Batttlestar Galactica (2000s series) the President carefully writes down the number of surviving humans on the band of surviving spaceships on a whiteboard. She adjusts the number with each news report of loss of life.

That reminds me of the situation we're in now in British Unitarianism. We passed a resolution in 2006 calling for growth, and it's taken five years before we have publically published what our actual membership numbers are. So here it is: 3,672.

Even that number has not been officially published, but added up by someone in America. If any British Unitarians are not paying attention to what Scott Wells is writing, particularly here, then you should be. We all should be.

And we should realise that our situation is exactly that of Battlestar Galactica. We are a surviving band. There is much too much complacency still. The next ten years will be vital.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is actually far worse than anyone will admit to. There is a demographic time bomb waiting to explode under these figures.

My guess is a critical factor is how many people are there in the smaller groups under 65-70.

If there are only one or two then start writing the group's obituary. There will be no-one left to do the basic grunt work to keep going, never mind grow.

There are one or two groups out there who will cease to be viable during the next few years. Once they've gone,that's a local presence wiped out.

However, as many of the 75-80s have done nothing to pass their legacy on and kept it as their own safe/comfort zone, what could be expected?

Their groups die out with them.
I am very tempted to say "Tough"!
1:59 pm
Scott Wells said…
Thanks for noting my blogging. I do want to help.

You should insist on having Jamie Bamber play out in the televised Unitarian series.
3:00 pm
Robertson said…
'Anonymous' is correct in much of his/her analysis ; had I been at Swansea as an 'outsider', I might have believed from all the talk of 'strategic priorities' that I was attending the annual meetings of a denomination ten times the size. The bright spot was the admission of Bangor Fellowship; I would suggest every church with more than 30 quota members ought to be 'planting' a new fellowship in its locality on the Bangor model-which if I remember correctly, began with 4 people!Even if it meant the parent group met less frequently ( they could repeat services in the new 'plant'!)Any church that didn't participate would effectively be saying they had nothing worth sharing beyond their own walls; as 'Anonymous' says,such groups will eventually die out.
9:32 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swords into Ploughshares

  "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Isaiah 2:4 Palestine Action are doing just this: beating swords into ploughshares i.e. putting weapons out of use. In doing so they are fulfilling this biblical mandate. They are expressing God's peace as expressed in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. God desires that our swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, that we should unlearn war. That the government wants to make this action illegal has to be confronted in the strongest terms. To rush to condemn attacks on weapons but not attacks on children is perverse. To call attacks on weapons terrorism but not attacks on children is perverse. When government comes to such an extreme position - legislating that peace is war, that weapons need more protection than children - then they have fundamentally gone wrong. This is the definitio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is humanism theologically tolerant?

OK, well this might be controversial, but I feel the need to say it. Is humanist tolerant? Please note I'm not asking about humanism within society. Clearly humanism certainly believes in tolerance within society and I'm forever glad they are often the only people in the media calling for a separation of church and state. No, what I'm talking about is descriptions of Unitarianism like this and adverts like this , discussed at Peacebang here , which say that humanism is one option, Christianity is another, God is one option among many. The trouble is, humanism, by definition is theologically opposed to theism. This is very different from the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism. These two traditions may be vastly different, but Buddhism, by definition , is not opposed to Christianity, and Christianity, by definition , is not opposed to Buddhism. But humanism is consciously defined in opposition to Christianity and theism. So to say that humanism and theism can bot...
14 comments
Read more

Clergy-wear during protests

OK, I'm wandering into the territory of Beauty Tips for Ministers here, but a couple of recent conversations have brought up the issue of what clergy should wear for protests. I know a number of Ministers who only wear clerical collars for protests. The logic is that it's important to identify as a Minister when you're supporting something society doesn't expect clergy to. So Ministers will wear a collar at gay prides or pro-choice rallies to make this point. Now I could understand this if it you wore a collar going about your general business, and also did during a protest, but I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea of wearing clerical wear ONLY for protests. The seems to be something worth exploring. I have said before that I'm not in favour of special titles or clothing for religious leadership, mainly because Jesus explicitly said this was a lot of nonsense. Religious leaders should not need these articial crutches. I have no problem with certain liturgical c...
11 comments
Read more