Each year, in accordance with the by-laws of this congregation, we hold an Annual General Meeting. We're doing that today, after the service, and we won't do it again until 2003. Each year, responding to a request from the Canadian Unitarian Council, we devote one Sunday to the topic of "Sharing Our Faith". We're doing that today, too. I think, though, that there's a big difference between these two annual observances. The AGM really does happen only once a year, though there are many equally necessary ongoing activities of the congregation. But sharing our faith, which we're giving special attention to this morning, is (I suggest) at best a day-in, day-out, year-round activity. I have the same slight discomfort with the idea of a special Sunday for sharing our faith as I do with such observances as Mother's Day, or Bring-a-Friend Sunday, if it suggests we only do it on special occasions! I think that we can share our faith every day - with each other and with people who might otherwise have no idea what we believe and practise. What's more, I think many people in this congregation are splendid examples of exactly how that sharing takes place, and I'll be mentioning some of them this morning.

The Canadian Unitarian Council, CUC for short, which is the organization uniting 50 Canadian Unitarian congregations, encourages this theme at this time of year as part of its aim (and I quote) "to raise our collective consciousness about our strengths as a religious movement and empower our members to feel confident in their identity as Unitarians or Unitarian Universalists." This morning's service, then, is about who we are religiously and how we can feel pride in sharing that identity, as well as how we can best make our existence and our identity known to others. Let me ask you to consider this question - and I assure you there's no one correct answer, and I know the spectrum will go all the way: How big a part of your identity is your religious faith, and how often do you mention it when you're getting to know someone? For some of us, our faith, our spirituality or religious approach to life, is rather incidental, perhaps equal in importance to a hobby or leisure time activity; for others, it's about up there on a par with our job or our family status - not something that goes unknown for long among friends or even acquaintances. How many people know about your faith? My guess is that Board members, and Chairs of Committees, and people who've belonged here for many years, and perhaps some who've discovered us recently and are in the first flush of enthusiasm, tend to tell (or have told) about their beliefs and their congregation quite widely. How about you?

If you're thinking, "Not me," please know that I realize there are some valid reasons to hesitate about sharing our faith with others. We ministers have some reservations about it which you'll probably understand, as well as some obvious opportunities. When someone asks what line of work we're in, it's both a privilege to be able to say, "I'm a Unitarian Minister," and sometimes a slightly daunting question. Will it put an immediate damper on a relaxed social situation? What about the person who asks the question right after telling me about all the horrendous experiences he's had with organized religion and abusive clergy? Or the hairdresser, snipping away, who's just given me detailed advice about how to be creative on my next tax return?

Once I chickened out and said I'm in social service work, and once I said "motivational speaker," but mostly I'm glad of the question, especially if it's followed up by, "What's a Unitarian?" You may not get such direct opportunities, but I know there are some creative folk among you who say things like, "Well, my paid work is such-and-such, but I also do work for the Unitarian congregation," and that can also lead to "What's a Unitarian?" Do you have an answer to that? One that you're happy to share? It took me a long time to work out my one sentence answer, but I feel good about it, and I offer it to those of you who may not have heard it before. When someone asks me "What's a Unitarian?" I say, "Our central principle is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and we meet to support and encourage one another in that search." You might want to work out your own sentence - and then, take it from there, because more questions will follow!

One of the other reasons we might hesitate about sharing our faith is discomfort with that very word, faith. Some of you know that I've been involved with the formation of a wonderful new organization in this area, called the Kitchener-Waterloo Interfaith Association, with representatives from a multitude of faiths. Because we're a new organization, we've been struggling with finding an identity and self-description, and the Buddhist representatives raised some concerns about how we use the word "faith," concerns with which I could easily identify. I said I thought that historically there has been a sense of tension between faith and reason. Unitarians have a strong commitment to the use of reason in arriving at beliefs and are wary of anything which suggests, even unintentionally, that reason is disvalued or secondary. Unitarians are also strongly committed to non-credalism and freedom of belief. The use of the word "faith community" in relation to our congregation or denomination may suggest that we all hold certain theological beliefs, which is very far from the case. Still, with all those reservations, we have yet to come up with anything better than the word "interfaith" for our new organization - and it's a wonderful venue for us to do some sharing of our faith - not in the sense of proselytizing, but with the hope of becoming better informed, more understanding about each other's convictions.

How about you - do you have places and settings where you can share your convictions, your beliefs - about politics, about society, about relationships, about what's of ultimate importance - in other words, about your faith, because all those things are part of it? There are many people in this congregation, and you may well be among them, who're engaged in all kinds of volunteer activities, from The Working Centre to Habitat for Humanity, and a wide variety of social interests, from book clubs to hiking to music appreciation, all of which provide opportunities for that kind of sharing. And if you include the name of this congregation as the place where you find encouragement for your spiritual search, who knows what you may achieve!

Some of you do share your faith in that way, and we have the joy of welcoming your friends and acquaintances to services, sometimes years after you first mentioned the word Unitarian to them.. Sometimes your sharing is so low-key that you may not realize it's happened, until you realize that someone has come to a service here, or in another community, because they met you, and liked you, and thought that the place you went on Sundays was probably quite special. Never underestimate your own power and influence! Use it for the good - after all, if this congregation has been important to you, and provides something valuable in your life, it would be a friendly and caring gesture to pass on the word about it.

Sharing your faith could also be considered altruistic. One comment on the survey was that we should cap our growth somewhere short of 125 members, because after that we won't all be able to know one another. How true! If knowing everyone in the congregation is a particular treasure for you, it will take considerable unselfishness to trade that in so that more people can find community - and at the same time to look for new ways of knowing people, in smaller groups. Let's share our faith, to the extent that we're willing to give up knowing every Unitarian in Waterloo region -- and knowing, too, that growth will mean we'll have to move, or go to two services on a Sunday, or some other equally challenging change! Sharing our faith is not directly related to being comfortable.

Although as a Unitarian congregation and as a movement we have many varieties of personal faith, there are what one document from our Unitarian heritage called "things commonly believed among us". At the very core of those beliefs is the welcoming of diversity. That may be the one faith we hold together, a faith that it's all right to believe differently from one another and to live differently from one another. I think we have to expect frequent disagreements and even conflicts in our life together, because we care passionately about our beliefs and they're often different from those of the person sitting next to us. We don't try to gloss over those differences, we celebrate them as making possible the conversations which move us a little further on in our search for truth and meaning.

The Board has just received the results of the survey that was conducted along with the Canvass, and the huge range of comments that were made and points of view that were expressed, many of them diametrically opposed to one another, make it crystal clear to anyone reading them that diversity is alive and well and living in this congregation! Let's share our faith that that's all right, more than all right, because as we live with it we're carrying out one of the greatest of all human challenges: how to love our neighbour, our contrary, ornery, different-from-us neighbour - and sometimes our self-identified enemy too! But you know, this isn't a comfortable faith either: it's so much easier to simply enjoy the very real pleasure of being with those whom we often refer to as "like-minded people" than to be with those who are not at all like-minded. Fortunately, Unitarians who've been around for even a little while quickly realize that there are many discomforts in our congregations, and that they're worth facing for the sake of the one big comfort, in the original sense of com-fort - the joy of being strengthened for our spiritual journey.

The phrase "sharing our faith" may suggest to you a kind of pressure which is at odds with our principle of respect for other people's faiths. A more positive kind of group sharing might mean being visible in the community as an unusually diverse crowd of people, even as rather odd. Parents of children in our Religious Education Programme are particularly aware that schoolmates and friends may find it strange when one of them belongs to something other than the familiar mainstream churches. Working to give children the confidence to share their faith, perhaps in some of the simple words we'll use in our closing reading, can be a valuable exercise for the whole family. Often our youngsters are braver than we are, too, and better at summing up the core of our faith. "Unitarians can be themselves, even at church," was how one child put it!

Suggesting that we should share our faith may also provoke all kinds of anxiety in those of us who have a hard time expressing our feelings about anything more personal than last week's hockey game or what's the best place for a winter vacation. Some of you know that my husband's finally moving in with me, after 7 months of living apart, and he's starting to say goodbye to the people in his neighbourhood who've come to know and love him over the past 24 years. The other night he visited his next-door neighbour, who wept profoundly for the loss she was suffering as he leaves, and then the neighbour opposite, a man who coped with his emotions by asking lots of practical questions about the logistics of the move. We can't judge who was feeling more, but we do know that there's no way the less expressive neighbour could or should have done it differently.

You don't need to do it differently; you can share your faith without exposing your innermost thoughts; you might just tell a neighbour about the good music we have, or invite them to an Adult Education programme. Work up to talking about what we, and you, believe! There are people here who do that, even though it takes effort to overcome their natural reserve, and its often more effective than when it comes from someone who finds self-expression easy and everyday. While I respect all the reservations we may have about sharing our faith with others too loudly or forcefully, I want to repeat what I've said before about why I think we need to share it: there are many spiritually homeless people out there (and perhaps in here, too), and just like the physically homeless, most of them crave a warm place of their own, a shelter from the winter chill, walls that are strong to keep hate out and hold love in. We have that here, but most of the religiously homeless don't know about us. The desire to share, the sense that we need to share, comes from a recognition of our own abundant good fortune in having a spiritual home and a hope that others might be similarly blessed. When you've got something good, don't hug it to yourself, pass it on!

Someone has pointed out how much easier it is to open up about our beliefs when other people do, and while this could mean never being the first to mention religion, it might also be a reminder to us to keep our ears open for opportunities to share. If you're discussing local issues with someone, for instance, you might be able to say, "We were talking about that at Unitarian House last week," clearing the way for further conversation. Or you might prefer to use a discreet UU sticker on your car, or to wear a CUC pin, and be ready to answer a question about it.

Our acceptance of diverse points of view means that we're definitely not about persuading others to our beliefs, but we do have opportunities to make people aware that there's this "alternative faith community" in Waterloo Region. We can support the publicity provided by our newspaper advertisements, our yellow pages listing and our sign outside, by our own readiness to mention our congregation's existence and location and the fact that we're part of it, that being a Unitarian is part of who we are. Several people have said that they'd been in this area for years before they found out that there was this free-thinking congregation here, and how much they regretted those unaware years. One member had a good Unitarian friend, who for years didn't mention her congregation or her beliefs -- when she finally did, it was a wonderful revelation, but it could have been wonderful much sooner! We can help make sure that doesn't happen to other people; we can get the word out that we exist, who and where we are, and what we stand for.

In the newsletter introduction to this talk, I included the sharing of our faith that goes on within thecongregation, and so far I've hardly touched on that. In our Annual Meeting, however, you'll get an overview of how much of that goes on here, in explicit, spoken ways, and in the implicit forms of the work which so many people here collaborate in because they care about this faith community. The one overall value that I most want to encourage this morning is open and direct communication with each other. It can get us through so many difficulties; it heightens the good times and lightens the bad times, and it's one of the best ways of sharing our faith in each other's worth and integrity. Those of you who come to discussions and committee meetings and participatory programmes and small groups of all kinds - you know about that; you're sharing your faith, and I'll bet that you're glad of it and find it satisfying.

A congregation I know about has friction between those who are enthusiastic about growth in numbers and those who feel that the inner growth of the current membership is more important. Their minister encourages members to voice their discomfort and seeks, she says, to "give everyone permission to come out of the closet with their beliefs." And this, I believe, is a responsibility we have in our free faith: to be true to ourselves, to voice our convictions, to come out of the hiding places in which we've been keeping our beings and our beliefs, to dare to share them with each other in the trust that this is a place of acceptance and celebration of one another at the same time that it may be one of disagreement and difference. As a teacher of theology has observed, "giving voice to deeply held beliefs can be a transformative experience."

Sharing our faith happens, I believe, when we struggle to articulate our faith, for our own benefit as well as for others. As we discover what our fellow members believe, we find that the sharp theological distinctions between us are fading. What seems to be evolving is a "new humanism" -- one that maintains the insights of traditional humanism but is softer-edged and more open to a sense of awe, mystery and wonder. This inclusiveness and softening of the boundaries between us is at the core of our faith, I believe. It's what we stand for as individual Unitarian Universalists, as members and friends of this congregation, as part of the Canadian Unitarian Council, and as part of the wider movement of free religion.

Our central principle is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and we meet to support and encourage one another in that search. That's what our faith is about. Let's share
it ever more widely, with one another and with as many people of all sorts and conditions as we possibly can. May we be helped to draw circles which take each other in rather than keep each other out. May the circles reach wider and wider. May we share the faith. So may it be.