I don't know if you noticed, but the title as it appears in your Order of Service has two facets, which were prompted by the confusion between the two words "Who's" and "Whose" -- "Who Is" in charge of the congregation's affairs and "Whose" congregation it is! I'd be happy if you'd ask yourself these two questions this morning, with an open mind: who's in charge, and whose congregation is it?

If you care about this place and the people in it, you need to know the answers so that you can relate most effectively to the people in charge and those the congregation belongs to. If you're here for the first, or almost the first, time, the answers may help you decide whether you want to come back again. After all, if you find out that it's some big corporation who's in charge here and who owns Unitarian House and the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo, it will give you a very different impression than if you discover, for example, that a supernatural spirit is in charge. You may be glad to know that those are not the only two possibilities! You may also be glad to know that for once, unlike all those times that I end my reflection by saying something like, "It's an open question . . ." this time there is a clear and factual answer, though it may take a little while to get to it.

Sometimes, we have to find our answers to questions by a process of elimination, and to shortcut our musings a little bit, I'm going to suggest a few mistaken answers, although naturally each mistake may have a little bit of truth in it. Firstly, you might be tempted, especially if you're new to this congregation and perhaps come from a different and more hierarchical tradition, you might be tempted to answer the question, "Who's in charge?" by saying "the Minister." Wrong!

It's unlikely that you'd make that mistake if you've been around for a while, because you find out after a very short time that not only is the Minister of this congregation, namely me, incapable of being in charge, but she's not supposed to be. Our newly adopted by-laws say that my job is "to fulfill a supportive and facilitating role and [to] assist the Board, the Members and their committees". And my Letter of Agreement says that the reason for having a Minister is that the congregation "is supported and enlarged by the presence of professional leadership," and that I am to "provide professional service to the Congregation." Clearly, the Minister's role is not to be in charge, but to be of help. One of the things I'd like to stress today is that I'm very conscious of both the limits and responsibilities of that role, and to encourage you to play your part in helping me to fulfill it.

So, if the answer to "Who's in charge?" is not the Minister, what are the other possibilities? Another likely response, and again it's especially common from those who're fairly new with us, is "the Unitarian Universalist Association" or "denominational headquarters" or any of the other phrases that might be used to refer to some kind of parent body, like a Roman Catholic Diocese or a United Church Presbytery. Wrong again!

The Unitarian Universalist Association, which has its headquarters in Boston, is an association of congregations, with no control over the workings of its individual member congregations. Oh, sure, the staff there in Boston, and in the Districts, try to stay aware of what's happening in the thousand or so UU groups which exist on this continent, and they offer resources to us, but they don't tell the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo or any of the others how they should manage their affairs. The congregations in the UUA are democratic in polity and operation; they govern themselves.

They unite in the Association to provide services that individual congregations cannot provide for themselves. Things like magazines and pamphlets; things like people with experience in finance and fund-raising; things like networks of members with similar concerns and interests. What they don't provide is any claim to ultimate truth or any claim to be in charge of us. The Unitarian Universalist Association, like the congregation's Minister only on a much larger scale and with far greater resources, exists primarily to serve its member congregations.

The Canadian Unitarian Council then? It's made up of about 45 congregations of widely varying sizes across Canada, from Newfoundland to B.C., but again it's a voluntary association which was formed in 1961 "to do those things for Canadian societies which the UUA could not". Some of the services which CUC provides are: educational programmes with Canadian content; pamphlets; information about Canadian legal and financial matters affecting our congregations; and support for the growth and development of congregations."

Nothing there about being in charge or owning the congregation, is there? At the moment, the CUC, based in Toronto, is in the process of becoming stronger and more independent as an organization and taking on responsibility for many of the services which have until now been provided by the UUA in Boston and the St.Lawrence District based in Buffalo, but this will not affect who's in charge of our congregation, because neither the CUC nor the UUA has ever been in charge or owned us.

The elimination method is bringing us close to home, I think. If the obvious suspects, the Minister, the UUA and the Canadian Unitarian Council are not in charge, and don't own us, who is and does? Must be someone right here. Perhaps it's the President of the Board of Trustees? That's been Margaret Insley for the past year, and on February 21 the first meeting of the 2001 Board members, whom you recognized this morning, will decide whether Margaret continues as President or hands over to someone else. Well, right away you can see that the President isn't completely in charge - it's the Board which decides whether she's the President. But maybe once she's elected, she has all the authority, right? Let's look at what the by-laws say about that:

The President shall be the chief executive officer of the Congregation and shall, if present, preside at all meetings of the Board and of the Members. The President shall sign all instruments which require such signature, and shall have such other powers and duties as may, from time to time, be assigned by the Board.

Hmmh . . . it does seem as if we're getting closer to an answer, doesn't it? Sounds as if the President is pretty much in charge. But let's take a closer look. What else do the by-laws say about where the power lies? "Chief Executive Officer" sounds very imposing, but if it's just a matter of presiding at meetings and signing papers which require a signature, maybe it doesn't mean very much. It depends on whether anyone else is named as in charge, doesn't it? And lo and behold! Someone else, or rather a body of people, is named.

On the very first page of the by-laws, way before any mention of the President, who isn't mentioned till about Page Four, and the Minister, who doesn't appear till about Page Seven, right after three statements about our leading principles, our denominational affiliations, and our location in Waterloo, comes this vital, definitive statement under the heading "Administration of the Congregation":

The affairs of the congregation shall be managed by a Board of at least nine elected Trustees, of whom four shall be Officers. The four Officers shall be the President, the Vice President, the Secretary and the Treasurer.

The Board may exercise all such powers and do all such acts and things as may be exercised or done by the Congregation except where the by-laws or statute expressly direct that they be done by the Congregation at a Meeting of Members of the Congregation.

That certainly sounds like a declaration of authority - as if the Board itself is in charge of everything - doesn't it?

But you may have noticed something very intriguing: the Board can do everything that the Congregation can do except some particular things which can only be done by the Congregation itself! And there's nothing the Board can do that the Congregation can't. In other words, the Board doesn't actually have as much authority as the Congregation! And that's borne out by a description of the duties of the Trustees, which is remarkably like the description of the Minister's duties:

It shall be the duty of Trustees in their individual capacities and collectively as a Board to aid the Congregation and the Minister in the conduct of congregational observances and activities and at all times to promote and to maintain the principles of the Congregation.

Even the Board, apparently, is at the service of the Congregation! That's where the power ultimately resides. That's who's in charge - the Congregation!

And who are they, these powerful people in charge of the First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo? They are most of you! Oh yes, some of you are just visiting and may never grace our doorstep again, but you are the people we so much want to reach that we spend many hours pondering how to bring you to this point of visiting and devising strategies to ensure that we meet as many of your needs as possible so you will in fact come back. Some of you have been around for a year or two, or even a generation or two, without ever taking out a voting membership, for your own diverse good reasons, but you are in many cases the ones who do a high proportion of the nitty-gritty work which keeps us going -- and in nearly all cases you're the ones whose views the members take into careful consideration before they cast a vote on just about anything! And you, the members - the voting members - is there anything you cannot do, any limitation at all on your power?

Not much, actually! The membership of this congregation really is the body who's in charge. It's true you can't decide to liquidate First Unitarian's financial assets and divide them up among you - the by-laws specifically guard against this by providing that in the event the Congregation ceases to function, its net assets go to the general purposes of the Canadian Unitarian Council - but I couldn't find many other things which are forbidden to the Congregation. There are a few. Legally and ethically we are bound by the leading principle stated in our by-laws as "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning." If we stopped affirming that principle, and if we didn't amend it in some way consistent with a free religious faith, we'd be morally obliged to disband, I think. Our very identity rests in our principles.

One restriction that's even more important than the one which prevents us running off with the money, is the one which prevents discrimination. By-law # 1, subsection 001, provides unequivocally that

This congregation shall be open to all people regardless of such attributes as race, ancestry, place of origin, gender identification, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, marital status or disability.

This is a vital balance to the power which the congregation holds as a body. Without such a provision, it would be only too easy for First Unitarian, like any other similar organization, to degenerate into a closed club, open only to people just like the original members. With this provision, we make it clear that we want to include among us the wonderful rainbow of human diversity which goes beyond categorical thinking, and refrain from trying to contain individuals, or our collective identity, in predetermined boxes.

People sometimes worry that anti-discrimination statements of this kind mean that we have to accept anybody in our congregation, regardless of their respect for human worth and dignity, for instance. Not so. There is no mention of religious or philosophical beliefs in the by-law which requires us not to discriminate. A religious organization can discriminate on the basis of religion. You can see all the potential for creative tension here, can't you? We want in this congregation only those who embrace a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, yet we want those of many beliefs and shades of opinion within those wide boundaries.

There's another safety valve in our by-laws which gives us the additional security of knowing that we would not need to retain in our congregational membership anyone who was totally out of sympathy with our principles. Cautiously, as befits an open and accepting community, we make it clear that an individual's membership can be terminated by the Board "for cause," that is, for specific and identifiable reasons, not simply because the person is unpopular or problematic or demanding or needy - those vague labels which can be applied to any one of us at particular times by those who see life through different lenses than our own. The gravity of such an action, which is taken extremely rarely in Unitarian congregations, is recognized the fact that it takes a two-thirds vote of the Board, and the person in question has the right of appeal to a meeting of the Congregation - a meeting which could override the Board's decision, because it's the Congregation who's in charge.

You may be wondering when I'm going to get to the second part of my question, because I've been concentrating almost entirely on "who's in charge". But I think you may also have been coming to your own conclusions about "whose congregation is it?" Just in case, in the unlikely event among UUs that you're waiting for me to tell you the answer, I'll state it very emphatically: it's our congregation! Certainly not mine, in any possessive sense -- although I do speak with pride, as I hope you do, when I refer to First Unitarian as "my congregation."

Not just yours, because I'm a part of it too, as Minister and as a member. Not just the Board's, let alone just the President's, because the Minister and Board and President are the servants of the Congregation. It's ours; it's up to us to determine what direction it takes, how to instruct the Board about our wishes, what activities we want to initiate, which programmes to attend, how to represent ourselves to the public, and most of all, whether we have a vision for the future as well as an appreciation of the past.

Leadership, in First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo, as in other areas of life, is a matter of taking some of the responsibility for setting a group's direction, but not for taking over. It's in this sense that the Board of Trustees of this congregation are leaders: they have a shared responsibility for setting the congregation's direction in consultation with the members. As my colleague Brian Kiely, the Minister in Edmonton, has written about Ministry (and it's applicable to the Board, as well),

In our churches we view the minister-congregation relationship as a "marriage between equals", where both parties enjoy freedom of thought and speech. It is a relationship of mutual respect, with freedom balanced by a sense of responsibility to each other.

As minister, my job is to be a "leader among you" working to help you articulate and implement your vision of the church, rather than imposing my own. There will be times when we disagree, however. Part of the understanding of the call is that I am free to speak my mind at these times without fear of reprisal, although it is also understood that should I stop leading you where you want to go, my ministry would lose its effectiveness.

As we continue to think, as I hope we will, about who's in charge and whose congregation it is, as we feel grateful towards and hopeful about those who're taking on the tasks of leadership for the rest of this year 2001, keep this in mind: what you're hoping to get from those leaders, even when they're at their best, can only come about when your own participation has given them the material to work with. Your money alone won't do it; their attendance at meetings won't do it; the best intentions and most polished managerial skills in the world won't make leadership work without the co-operation of those who want to be led and the willingness by everyone to share the roles and responsibilities. It's the stuff of your lives that's needed, and what makes it work is mutuality, sharing and caring, love.

Someone before me said it better: St. Paul, or whoever it was who actually wrote the Epistle to the Romans. This is from Chapter 12, verses 4-18:

For just as in a single human body there are many limbs and organs, all with different functions, so all of us, united in our faith, form one body, serving individually as limbs and organs to one another.

The gifts we possess differ as they are allotted to us by . . . grace, and must be exercised accordingly: the gift of inspired utterance, for example, in proportion to a person's faith; or the gift of administration . . . A teacher should employ his gift in teaching, and one who has the gift of stirring speech should use it to stir her hearers. If you give to charity, give with all your heart; if you are a leader, exert yourself to lead; if you are helping others in distress, do it cheerfully.

Love in all sincerity, loathing evil and clinging to the good. Let love for our fellowship breed warmth of mutual affection. Give pride of place to one another in esteem.

With unflagging energy, in ardour of spirit, serve the cause of good.
Let hope keep you joyful; in trouble stand firm; persist in prayer. Contribute to the needs of [our] people, and practise hospitality.

. . . With the joyful be joyful, and mourn with the mourners. Care as much about each other as about yourselves. Do not be haughty, but go about with humble folk. Do not keep thinking how wise you are.

Never pay back evil for evil. Let your aims be such as all people count honourable. If possible, so far as it lies with you, live at peace with everyone . . .

And if we can do that, then we'll know that in the truest possible sense, we're in charge and this is our congregation. So may it be.