UCM Welcomes New Ministry

2025-1005—UCM Welcomes New Ministry

UCM—Rev. Rita Capezzi

In the fall of 2017, I was in the second year of my ministerial internship. I was about to appear before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UUA, the body that would determine whether my training, my intention, and my heart-felt preparation for ministry would indeed result in clearance to seek ordination by a congregation and thus practice ministry officially. What and how had I been preparing, you might wonder?

First, I experienced a “call,” an impulse toward a religious life, specifically to live and work as a Unitarian Universalist minister. This call was the beginning of entering what is called “formation”—taking all the bits of our former learning and life, adding more, and shaping it into the role of minister. Sometimes formation takes as little as three years. Sometimes it takes decades.

So anyway, I got “the call,” and by 2017, for two and a half years, I attended seminary classes on the theory and the practice of ministry. I learned about Unitarian Universalist theologies and rituals.

I served in community organizations and in a congregational internship. To learn church dynamics and to learn my social privilege. I underwent psychological and vocational assessments to discern my predisposition for ministry and to uncover the shadows in my mind and spirit that might inhibit sound, healing practice, as devoid of ego as possible. I worked with mentors, teaching pastors, spiritual directors, and student learning circles. I practiced preaching and pastoral care wherever and whenever I could.

And I brought with me to all this training the skills and lessons of my former career—my researched expertise in sound teaching practices and in literary analysis and in attention to the intersections of stories and the cultures that produced them. I brought administrative experience in managing people and systems. I brought knowledge of change-making and conflict management.

I brought all this, and then, in the company of others with experience and others in formation, had to determine what would serve ministry and what would not.

And I brought my personal life with me—my life as a spouse in a very long marriage, my parenting of a son and a daughter, my existence as a child of working class parents with financial struggles and little understanding of my commitment to education and learning, my willingness to open my life and my home when justice was required. I brought all this of myself and more, and then had to discern, with the aid of therapists and spiritual directors, how such a set of life experiences would impact being a minister, productively as well as problematically.

In 2017, I brought all this with me, poised to participate in a meeting that would affirm or deny all that I had done in order to be deemed prepared and worthy to become a minister, and I had a doubt. I had a worry. I had a moment of choice: would I go to this life-altering meeting or would I change my mind and go back to my university job? Was the call I heard, to serve a specifically religious community strong enough, robust enough?

In that moment of fear and doubt, in that moment of risk, I reached out to a mentor. I confessed my worry, my vulnerability. “I don’t know if I can really do this,” I said. “I don’t know if I am really capable.” And she said, “At this point in your preparation, it is not really about whether you CAN do it. It is about whether you WILL do it.” Not whether I was capable of doing ministry, but whether I was willing to take on all that it requires. I made a choice to serve, with all that is required of that service. I am grateful I made the choice for ministry. I am grateful to have served the holy of life with you, in this congregation.

I’ve shared some of this story in pieces before. And it is a partial story, after all, each of our lives more complex than what we present in a single story telling. It is a story still in process. Like with Tim Atkins story about learning to throw a clay pot on a spinning wheel. Each of us sees ourself at the center of the story—sitting behind that wheel, wedging the clay, shaping the bowl. We bring our level of skill, increasing each time we take the risk of trying to make something out of something else. But other things come into the creation, too. The qualities of the wheel, foot kicked or electric, well-maintained or wobbly. The qualities of the clay matter in the making of the bowl, stoneware clay or porcelain, impurities that make for different textures and colors, water content. As Tim mentioned, the qualities of the glazes and how they are applied matter. The qualities of the firing methods and of the kiln temperature matter. Who knows, maybe air temperature and humidity matter too when you set out to throw a bowl on a pottery wheel. Yes, it is our story, our pot, each our own, and still so much beyond our control ends up affecting the product. It’s the process that matters most.

My children made quite a lot of pottery as they grew to adulthood. My daughter preferred hand-building, but my son became quite expert at wheel work. He was an instructor to kids as one of his early jobs—good at describing how to make a pot, patient with beginner’s errors and insecurities, excellent at demonstrating technique by doing it himself. Over the years, I’ve displayed my share of bowls that looked like squashed plates as well as fragile bowls with fine raku glazing. And while a final product, whether you make a bowl for an indulgent mother or for one who would like a good-looking vase to adorn an empty tabletop, it is the process that matters.

As our reading today reiterated, “Far and away, the most important lesson pottery has taught me is to not be attached to the final product. There are a lot of places in the process of making wheel-thrown pottery where something different than you expected can happen. I can’t be attached to those final outcomes—the process matters more than the product.”

I have been both the indulgent and the exacting mother when it comes to pottery. In the process of my children growing and learning how to be potters, I changed as a mother, as a person. Similarly, with each congregation I serve, each piece of the service I render for a congregation, that process changes the minister I am and the minister I will become. Sometimes the product is well-shaped, well-fired, well-glazed. Sometimes it flies across the room, spattering everything with clay. The call remains, but the process changes the way I am a minister and the way I minister.

You might wonder why I have gone on so long this morning about myself—about my formation as a minister and this mysterious call to ministry. Part of the reason is to draw attention to the role of minister in congregations. We come to congregations different from most of the other participants in them, unless you are a retired minister. We are human beings, of course, subject to the same stresses and needs and challenges as all of you. But we are different from you. I tell a bit of my story, the process of becoming a minister and continuing to become a minister, so that you think about the story that your new minister will bring.

Rev. DL has their own story, like mine but not mine. A unique person, like all of us. And still sharing qualities of suffering, compassion, and grace, like all of you. A unique minister, less like you and more like me and Rev. Fiona and Rev. Jeff and the long line of ministers who have served your congregation. We all heard a call and we all willingly entered formation. And we all struggled in our unique and still shared ways to take the risk to enter congregational life in the distinctive way that we do, playing the specific role that is needed. As you foster relationship with Rev. DL, I encourage you to seek to know their story, to learn their process of how they became the human being and the minister they currently are. I encourage you to lean into how the gifts they and their way of being, their story, will shape the unique ministerial role they will play in your congregation.

You will learn their story and they will learn yours. You will add Rev. DL’s story of ministry to the story of UCM as a religious community. That is the responsibility you take on. That is the risk you take in being and becoming this religious community. A bowl in process. A bowl and a story never quite finished.

The call to ministry is a call to participation in communities that aspire to be Beloved Community—set aside from normal society with its dominant values, commitments, and homogeneity, its fractures and let downs. Not a social club, though socializing nurtures. Not an activist agency though activism is fostered. What sets a congregation, a church, a religious community rightly apart is the willingness to deep “spirit”—the spirit, the soul, the inner self, the truest self, self-contained and also seeking expansion, the part of you that seeks something better, something higher, something more life-giving and life-sustaining and knows it can’t find it on its own. The part of the self out seeking the source, whatever word, whatever story you use to describe that.

Whether you tell this story of yearning for beauty and wholeness to your companions or keep it silent in your heart, you arrive here to be in company, secure in a place where such a story and such a search is welcomed, is valued, is called for. Whether you sing out loud or just listen, whether you mouth the words or voice them only in the silence of your own heart, this is why we sing: we lift our voice, we move as one in harmony, a never ending gift that circles back again, as the wheel turns, as the story spins out, as we choose, as we take the risk to be a church.

Creating a church, a congregation, is an art. Mundane elements, pragmatic practices—all part of the process. But the beautiful bowl, the marvelous story can emerge only by each of us bringing ourselves and having the grace to make space for everyone. Singing and harmonizing. Expecting specific gifts, looking for them in each of us, fostering them. This is the process, to seek and to see and to wonder at the product emerging. Now, the product is not a space—though clean and well-maintained is certainly desirable. And, it is not high functioning  systems for engaging people and making sure money is well spent and treating staff well, though that all certainly matters greatly.

When you seek to make a bowl on a potter’s wheel, you have to wedge well the lump of clay—you have to center it on the wheel so the spinning and the hands shaping work in harmony. You have to keep the center, and this is the specific call a minister assumes, when they take the risk of serving in a religious community. We are not the center of the community, not at all. But we ensure that the center is held. We remind that deepening the spirit is as much the mission as nurturing community and acting to make a better world. We remind that diversity is the way of reality and that our community ought to reflect that reality. We encourage and cajole, urging not only maintenance of building and systems but tending the constant process of making a space and a place where “We come with different histories and different realities, And yet we come together as one people—with faith that we can use our differences to heal ourselves, and each other, to bring wholeness to a fractured world.”

There is no congregation without the collective, without the many hands and voices and stories, including the specific and unique voice of a minister to ensure that the center is held. Do you hear this call, the change in the air, this invitation to awareness of what you bring—to the dreams of compassionate community and justice activism we dare together?  Can you risk answering the call, to become the change, the difference, our hurting world needs? Will you make the bowl, tell the story, enter the process of mutual becoming that religious life enables and requires? I have faith you do and you will.

Rev. DL has their own story of formation, of becoming a minister, of answering the call to ministry, like mine but not mine. You will learn their story, and they will learn yours. Rev. DL will also center you, call you to hold the center with them, in their own unique way. You will add Rev. DL’s story of ministry to the story of UCM as a religious community. “The process matters more than the product: this is a universal truth in art and creativity, and it transcends every artistic medium. No matter what form the art takes in the end, no matter what artistic medium you use, the process of making that art changes who you are, as a person. How we’re changed differs from person to person, but we are fundamentally changed by embracing our creativity.” And creating religious community is an art.

So, as you being to imagine this new ministry, as you lean into its possibilities, “remember To breathe deeply, To rest, To take in, To pause,” to contemplate your story and this Congregation’s story. In the process, be ready to enjoy the change and all that it requires of each of you. And then “risk jumping in, Risk taking action, Risk speaking up, Risk using the gifts we have been given,” so you “can say with absolute clarity That no part of [your congregational] existence was wasted in fear of failure or fear of success.” Embrace that risk of change. Bring your whole selves lovingly and bravely to it.

Together, and now with Rev. DL, you continue to write the story of UCM, each person here and also those who have yet to arrive but are right out there, in need of this religious community. “Those are stories,” yours is a story, “still in the making, stories that have yet to be fully written, stories with the potential to create change.” “We won’t know how the story ends until we get there, but we can decide what words we use to write those stories. Words like hope, kindness, gratitude, peace, courage, perseverance, joy, And love, above all else, love.”

Let the bowl hold all that is good and healing and life-sustaining. “For All That Is Our Life,” may you each and all together answer the call to awareness, engagement, and gratitude for the lives we share, especially the lives we build in this congregation.  May it ever be so.