Unitarian Universalists covenant with one another for all of us to hold each other accountable to our agreements. We agree to a process of how it is that we will treat each other, and how we will call each other back in to community with radical humility and love. The idea is not that we are perfect human beings who will always be within the elegant confines of our agreement, but instead that because we are imperfect, we’ll sometimes need help coming back into covenant.
We enter into covenants that are sometimes limited by time, like small groups that last only a matter of months. We also enter into covenant when we join a religious community and sign the membership book. This signing of the membership book is a sacred act that binds us into accountability with the community, and calls for standards of behavior from each member.
By calling ourselves Unitarian Universalists, we “covenant to affirm and promote” our Seven Principles. The Committee on Right Relations (CRR) is, perhaps, the most important committee in our congregation. The CRR’s first goal is to help members in conflict to resolve that conflict by talking to each other. If that is not an option, the CRR might step in to address a behavior that is negatively affecting the community. A further step, if the CRR finds itself unable to help a member address a negative behavior, would be to take the behavior to the board, who is then expected to care for the health of the larger community in reference to the behavior. The details of this process may vary from congregation to congregation, but the sacred nature of the work the CRR holds is one of the cruxes of Unitarian Universalism. Holding each other to account for actions and lovingly, humbly, telling individuals how their actions affect others is at the heart of how we do Unitarian Universalism. This action, this calling back into covenant, is hard. Be prepared to do it anyway.
It falls to the CRR to help members implement the covenant, and to the board to ultimately decide who can be called back into covenant, and what actions are too egregious for invitations to be extended. There is not a head of the Unitarian Universalist Association, currently based in Boston, who can make this decision. We are an association of congregations, and each congregation decides its polity. Covenanting, and how we call folks back into covenant with each other, is not only sacred, it is one of the things that makes us Unitarian Universalists.
We are people who actively choose Unitarian Universalism over and over again, and strive to be within covenant with each other.
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