We all know there are at least two kinds of dreams, the night ones and the day ones, and I think there are at least two kinds of visions, too -- or at least there's a difference between the plural "visions" which are are perhaps more like dreams, especially the kind of dream people had in Bible stories, or that the poet Coleridge had while in his opium-induced trance, and the singular "vision", which suggests to me an ability to look imaginatively into the future, and maybe the past and present as well. The little exercise we did in the Children's Time pointed out for me, and perhaps for you too, how difficult it sometimes can be to see clearly with our mind's eye, our imagination. Have you ever had the experience of trying to see in your mind the face of someone really close and dear to you and finding it quite elusive and fuzzy?
You've heard me speak before about the image which best expresses for me what ministry is all about. The image is that little bottle of clarifying liquid which soothes and clears our sight if we wear contact lenses. When things are starting to look blurry, when our eyes feel scratchy and sore, or it's hard to see things clearly, a few drops of this liquid can make a whole lot of difference to our vision. You may remember, too, my strong conviction that ministry is everyone's business, and that one of the most important things we can do for one another as members of this congregation is to be that clarifying liquid, to help each other to see as clearly as possible, to assist each other's vision of the world as it actually is so that we can live real life rather than a cloudy existence. Then this congregation, as well as the individuals in it, will be a body with vision.
Having vision, clear-sightedness about the nature of reality, about our relationships, our environment and the things that are most important to us, is I think a prerequisite for having "a vision", that is a picture of how we would like reality to be, what we would wish for our
relationships, our environment and this religious community, this congregation of seekers. Only when we're seeing clearly, when we've had our sight tended to by thoughtfulness, caring and tender treatment of our blind spots, removal of the specks or beams which hinder us from seeing, application of the wisdom of others, past and present -- only with vision can we hope to have "a vision", a clear sense of the desirable future. Once we can see, then we may be able to see something worthwhile, but not till then. The first task in shaping our vision, I'm convinced, is to care for each other's sight, to share with each other our insights, doubts, perplexities, reading and thinking and yes, our dreams, so that our collective, corporate vision is clearer. Then the congregation with "vision" can also be a church with "a vision".

What might that vision be -- that image of the future, that mental picture of the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo five or ten years from now, that fantasy of the role we might fill? In the discussion time, you'll have the opportunity to share your individual visions if you want to. Right now, I want to stimulate your thoughts a little so your fantasies can be as wide-ranging as possible. I'll also say a little about my own very tentative vision of our congregational future, which may be completely different from yours and perhaps will trigger
some contrasting ideas.

First, let's consider what might be a valid vision for free religion as a whole, not just for our own particular congregation. Do we have a collective vision of free religion which goes anywhere beyond the hope of staying or becoming financially solvent and gaining a certain number of new members? What is the Unitarian Universalist movement about? We need to know that before we can visualize how it might be successful in bringing something about.

At my ordination service in Olinda six years ago, Rev. Martha Munson who preached the sermon told the story of a group of people who lived on a dangerous seacoast, where storms often resulted in wrecked boats and sailors' lives in peril. The people set up a rescue operation and found that when they were organized they were much more successful in saving people's lives than when they worked individually. In time, they built headquarters from which their activities could be supported by special equipment and communications systems. With the
camaraderie that so often develops from working on a worthwhile project together, they began to socialize among themselves as well as to engage in their rescue endeavours, and in time the headquarters building was beautified and made more appropriate for their social events.

Gradually, the rescue operations became less important than the socializing, and there were people who began to feel that they shouldn't engage in a rescue more often than once a week, or in one that was likely to take a long time, or to result in danger to the rescuers or wear and tear on the property. They had great parties, though, and their numbers increased, and they were generally considered a success, even though as time went by they lost the skills of rescuing people from the sea and even the wish to do it, figuring that was best left to other people -- or perhaps, indeed, it was best to simply let Nature take its course.

It won't surprise you to know that Martha and I and many others who like this story think it says something about what can easily happen to congregations who lose sight of the primary purpose for which they were started. Some of us take the analogy a bit more seriously than others: we may believe that our congregation's purpose really is a rescue operation -- rescuing people from sin and sorrow, or from loneliness and despair, or from guilt and irrational beliefs -- and that our meetings together might no longer completely fulfill that mandate to rescue if we've lost sight of the purpose or don't find ourselves committed to it any more. Others of us are a mite uncomfortable with the idea of "rescue" in the first place -- we've read our self-help books and know how dangerous it is to think that we can be rescuers -- but we understand the general concept: that a congregation can easily lose its sense of purpose, or betray the ideals of its founding people, or drift into the way of being that's most comfortable, regardless of how that fulfills its mandate. The concept of an institution which starts out with a dangerous and vital mission and gradually becomes a cosy club is easy for us to grasp and apply to our local congregation. It can provide a useful stimulus for us to take a fresh look at what we're doing and why -- to ask ourselves what our original purpose was, whether that's the same now, or has changed by intention or default, and how we're fulfilling what we now think of as our purpose.

Once I went to a workshop on congregational growth at which we were told that a sense of mission focuses a congregation's awareness on its direction, its purpose and its reason for being. With a mission, a congregation can then have some criteria for evaluating all of its activity and for developing future goals.

I deeply agree with this, although I try to avoid using the word "mission" very much, because I'm aware that for some of us it has inescapable overtones of dogmatic evangelical Christianity, although mission statements are trendy now far beyond the religious realm. In business and industry, in Universities and non-profit organizations, it's considered important to work out a mission statement which can provide a framework and a yardstick for our activities. Here's part of an article from the Globe & Mail "Trends" section, back in 1994; it's headed "Companies in search of Visions'": "It's sort of like the Ten Commandments," says Ashley LeBlanc, director of Northern Penobscot Tech, a vocational high school in Lincoln, Maine, which recently drafted mission and vision statements. More than 50 percent of big companies have mission statements now, twice as many as five years ago, says ... a vice-president with Gemini Consulting in Morristown, New Jersey. [And] a Cambridge, Mass., consultant says companies are clamouring to hire him -- at $3,000 a day -- to help divine their visions. Such work now makes up half his business .....

That article was written five years ago -- I bet it's a huge majority of companies who now have vision and mission statements. And by the way, the two words are almost interchangeable; usually "mission" refers to a one-sentence or one-phrase slogan, whereas "vision" is a little more expansive.

There was a team from the London congregation at that growth workshop I mentioned, and the London newsletter the next month had an item about it. They asked, Does our present mission statement clearly represent our vision? ..... Our vision is our sense of why we exist, what we offer of value to the ..... community that is not offered by other organizations. Our vision is also our belief about how we will live and work together. We need to have all members and friends take part in the dream-catching exercise so that we can describe our vision with greater specificity and capture it in a mission statement that can be used to evaluate our activities, policies and future goals.

I like that phrase "a dream-catching exercise. It's what I hope can take place in the coming months as our Board and congregation revisit our statements of what we're all about. We have several you know -- for example, the words of our weekly chalice-lighting,

Let this flame be to us a symbol of the wholeness we seek,
ITS BRIGHTNESS DISPELLING GLOOM, LIGHTING A PATH TO FAITH AND HOPE,
Its glow reminding us of the sacred bonds which link us to all people,
ITS RADIANCE CALLING US TO FULFIL OUR DESTINY, TO CAST THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM, JUSTICE AND PEACE UPON ALL THE WORLD.

Then there's the mission statement I have, dated November 11 last year -- I'm not quite sure when it was actually adoped, but it was some time before that. It says: The mission of the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo is: To provide regular Sunday services enabling the exploration, challenge and growth of our religious beliefs, and the opportunity for worship;
To provide religious education based on our Unitarian and Universalist heritage and curriculum;
To express our religious beliefs in the practice of social action;
To welcome, support and nurture all who gather with our congregation for community;
To uphold the Principles and Purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

That's really a vision, but now we also have an up-to-date mission statement, one of those short, pithy slogans; it's on our lovely new sign telling the world that we're "a centre of liberal religion".

Being non-conformists and free spirits, some of us may well quibble over details of anywording that we ever come up with to express who we are, but I hope that we'll be able to agree on the spirit of our vision. We'll still need, though, to ask ourselves, continually, how that vision translates into action, into what we can and should be doing, how we want to be seen by the world which surrounds us here at Unitarian House.

I once heard a sermon by Conrad Dippel, who's now the quarter-time minister for the UUs of Windsor Region -- a very new congregation. The sermon was titled "About Salvation". First, I admired him for tackling a topic which, as I know from my own experience, tends to make religiously free-thinking people a little uneasy. Salvation, like mission, is something we associate with other churches more easily than with our own congregation. Then, I also appreciated the way he showed the root meanings of the word, the way that salvation is related to safety and health and wholeness. Salvation may be the mission of a congregation, in the same way that in Martha Munson's story rescue was the mission of the people who lived by the sea. Enabling people to find their way out of the chilly waters of soul-sickness and despair to the safe haven of spiritual wholeness and healthy interaction with the world: this might be one good statement of mission. But what I most admired in Conrad's sermon was the way he told storiesabout salvation in action, in the real world.

Conrad said that we bring about salvation by our interactions with others. He illustrated this with his experience in a University library where he spent many hours tucked away in a remote corner, and where he saved old and obscure books from oblivion by checking them out. Some of them, even ones which had been on the shelves for decades, had never, ever, been checked out before he took them to the counter, had them stamped with a return date and then walked them over to the returns counter. They had been books nobody wanted or noticed until he noticed them. I suggest to you that one marvellous vision is of a congregation which offers salvation into safety and health and wholeness to people who for various reasons have been forgotten, who may have been unwanted and unnoticed until finding this community, people who need what we can offer -- community, wholeness, sacred bonds. Maybe we won't keep them long, but if they're here for any time at all they'll have the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo stamped on them forever, like the library books Conrad Dippel saved.

I seem to have become, as usual, a little analytical about our dreams and visions -- a bit wordy rather than experiential. Let me try to correct that as I end by asking you to day-dream for a few moments, to call up a vision for this congregation. Close your eyes, if that might help, and
let yourself visualize, in a dreamy, wishful way, how this congregation might look in five years from now what kind of building we might be in who might be here -- how many, what ages and other characteristics what the services might be like what might be happening in the building during the week what we might be doing in the K-W community what our mission statement or slogan might be then.

And take a moment, too, before you open your eyes, to give yourself permission to do this dreaming often, knowing that it's what we need if we are not to stagnate, for as the old book says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish". And as someone else has remarked, in our own time, "Build your castles in the air; they belong there -- but then put foundations under them."

So may it be.