Beyond Us

Simple question: Can a dream ever really be too big?

We're often told to be realistic, to know our limitations. "Be practical. Look at what we have and make the best of it!"

There's wisdom in knowing what we can actually accomplish. There's wisdom in being honest about our resources and our limitations.

But have we gotten so used to asking what is realistic that we've forgotten how to ask what could be possible? What is worth dreaming about even if we will not be the ones who see it come to pass? Important dreams in human history have always been bigger than the people who dreamed them. Dreams that take decades, generations. Dreams that begin as nothing more than a whisper in someone's mind who has almost no reason at all to believe they will ever see it happen.

And yet they believe.

They carry it and protect it, and they pass it on.

Imagine being enslaved in the United States in 1855. Imagine living in a world that had built an entire legal, economic, and social system around the idea that you were property. Chattel. Imagine being told, repeatedly, that your children could be taken from you. That your education was forbidden. That your freedom was impossible. That God Almighty had ordained you to this fate. And imagine dreaming anyway. Of freedom. Of descendants who would be free. Who could read. Vote. Own property. Walk into places their ancestors had been forbidden to enter. Determine the course of their own lives.

And imagine dreaming of something so far beyond the world you knew that it would've sounded completely absurd. A Black president of the United States. Could someone in 1855 have imagined that? Maybe. Maybe someone did. And maybe, for someone living under the crushing weight of slavery, that dream wouldn't have looked like a realistic future. It might simply have been a tiny piece of hope, a reason to believe that the world was not finished. That history was not finished. That the circumstances of one lifetime didn't have the final word.

Y'all, that is a different kind of faith. It's a faith that stretches beyond the boundaries of our own lives. It's the kind of faith I'm after.

We sometimes think of history as a series of accomplishments. Someone had a dream. ➡️ Someone worked hard. ➡️ Someone succeeded. ➡️ And here we are.

But that isn't really how human progress works, is it? We inherit unfinished work. We inherit unfinished dreams. We inherit both the victories and the failures of those who came before us. And then we make choices about what we do with them. Preserve them? Enlarge them? Abandon them? Hand them to the next generation? Give the next generation something larger than what we received? Because a dream that ends with us is not much of a dream.

I sometimes think about that when I think about my congregation. And I think about it when I think about Quincy. There's a temptation, particularly in an institution that's been around for a while, to confuse continuity with faithfulness. We begin believing that because something worked before, it has to continue exactly as it is. We begin equating familiarity with goodness. With "enough." We begin protecting what we know simply because we know it. Eventually, without even being fully aware of it, we can move from: "What could we become?" to: "How do we keep things from changing?" Those are very different questions. One looks toward the horizon. The other looks over its shoulder.

I love my church. I'm grateful for the people who kept showing up when it was difficult.

I'm grateful for the people who gave their time, their money, their labor, their ideas, their prayers, their arguments, their patience, and sometimes probably their sanity to keep it going. I'm grateful for every person who has ever unlocked the doors, arranged the chairs, made the coffee, stood in the pulpit, sang, taught.

Being part of a church means standing in something that other people built, and that is sacred. But there is a danger in loving what we inherited so much that we forget that we, too, are ancestors in the making. And someday, someone else will stand where we are standing. Someone who has never met us.

Someone who will know almost nothing about our individual lives. And they will inherit whatever we decide to leave behind. So we have to ask — what are we leaving them? If our answer is, "We are who we are, and who we are works fine," then what are we saying to the generations who come after us? That our work is finished? That our imagination has reached its limit? That Quincy is already all it can be? A church that loses its capacity to dream begins to turn inward. It starts preserving itself rather than preparing a future. Gratitude for the present is not the same thing as a vision for the future.

The question isn't whether we're enough for ourselves. The question is what are we building for the children of Quincy? That is the question. Not: Are we enough? Not: Have we done enough? Not even: Are we comfortable with what we have? But: What are we building?

Because a congregation is always building something. Even when we aren't consciously building.

Every decision builds something.

Every priority builds something.

Every dollar we spend builds something.

Every person we welcome builds something.

Every person we make feel unwelcome builds something, too.

Every time we say, "We've never done it that way before," we build something.

Every time we say, "Let's see what happens," we build something.

We are always constructing a future.

The question is whether we are doing it intentionally.

Have we settled for simply maintaining what already exists? Because I don't believe the purpose of a congregation is simply to keep its doors open. Keeping the doors open is important. But why are we keeping them open?

What are those doors open for?

Are they open only for the people who already know where they are? Or are they open for the person who is lonely? For the family that has never felt comfortable in a church? For the child who needs somewhere to belong?

For the person who has been told that their questions make them difficult? What would it mean for our doors to be open not just in the physical sense, but in the imaginative sense?

To make room for people we have not yet met.

To make room for ideas we haven't tried.

To make room for possibilities we can't fully articulate yet.

It takes courage to dream when you are small.

It takes courage to dream when your resources are limited. It takes courage to dream when the demographics aren't necessarily on your side.

It takes courage to dream when the easiest thing to do would be to say, "Well, this is who we are."

Maybe that's when dreaming becomes most important. If we only dream according to what we currently have, we'll never have anything different. If our dreams are no larger than our current membership, our current budget, our current building, then our dreams are too small. Our calling is to dream in the dimensions of generations, and dreaming in the dimensions of generations changes the way we understand our own lives. It changes the question from what can I accomplish? to what can I begin? It changes will I see this happen? to can I help make it possible? It changes will this benefit me? to who might benefit from this someday?

This is just one reason our elders are so important. They have the extraordinary gifts of wisdom, perspective, stories, and lived experiences. We need our elders — not as curators of what has been, but as midwives of what is yet to be. We need them to stand behind the next generation and say, "Go farther than we did." That's how we honor our heritage. We make sure there's still a church community for the children of Quincy 50 years from now. 

Think about that.

50 years.

Some of us won't be here. Some of us may be living somewhere else. Some of us will be dead and gone. And yet the choices we make now will still be speaking.

And what about our children. Saying  that children are the future is a beautiful sentiment, but it's also an incomplete one. Children aren't waiting for some future moment when they become important enough to belong. They're not apprentices to the church. They're not simply potential future members whose primary purpose is to make sure the church survives.

The children are not the future of the church. They are the church. Today. They are the church. Right now.

Their questions matter now.

Their experience matters now.

Their sense of belonging matters now.

Their voices matter now.

Their joy matters now.

Their discomfort matters now.

Their wonder matters now.

We cannot merely ask whether our children fit into the church we already have. We have to ask whether the church we're creating is worthy of them.

And here's the thing.

A church with only a few children has an even greater responsibility to cherish them. When there are dozens of children running through the building, it's easy to think of Religious Education as one committee among many. But when there are only a handful? Every child becomes more precious. Every family becomes more precious. Every opportunity to make a child feel that they belong becomes more precious. The fewer children a congregation has, the more intentional it has to become. Because every child is a living question: What kind of church are you becoming for me?

Imagine what it would feel like to be a child in a congregation where the adults aren't simply tolerating your presence. 

Where they aren't sighing or clenching their jaw when you make noise.

Where they aren't thinking of you as an inconvenience to the "real" worship.

But where they are thinking:

You belong here.

We are glad you're here.

Your presence makes this community more complete.

You are a sign of all that is good. 

We are building something with you in mind.

And we have to dream for those who haven't gptten here yet. For families who don't yet know there is a place for them here. That means we have to imagine people we can't yet see. And that's difficult because we naturally build things for the people we know.

We know what they need.

We know what they like.

We know what they're comfortable with.

We know the traditions.

We know the rhythms.

But if every decision is based on the needs and preferences of the people already in the room, then eventually we've created a place that's perfectly designed for the people already in it.

Terribly ironic because eventually there might be no one left to inherit it.

We don't have to abandon what we are. We have to expand it. We don't throw away the table. We make it longer. We don't put out the fire. We make it bigger. We don't tear down everything that came before. We build another room. We don't tell the children that someday they will inherit this church. We tell them this is yours, too.

And then we ask them what they want to do with it.

Faith is the willingness to step toward something before the whole path is visible.

Our UU tradition has always carried a deep faith in human possibility. We don't have a single creed that tells us exactly what the future needs to look like.

We gather.

We listen.

We question.

We argue.

We learn.

We change.

We discover.

We revise.

And hopefully, we grow.

That means our faith should make us particularly capable of dreaming. We already know that the answers are not finished. We already know that our understanding can deepen. We already know that we can be wrong. We already know that tomorrow can teach us something today cannot yet know.

So why would we be afraid of imagining?

Maybe the most dangerous thing a congregation can say is, "We've already figured out who we are." The moment we think we've completely figured ourselves out, we have stopped listening. And the moment we stop listening, we stop growing. And the moment we stop growing, we begin preserving. And preservation is not the same thing as life. A museum preserves. A living community evolves. A living faith breathes. A living church listens for the voices that aren't here yet.

So I want to go back to the question. Can a dream ever really be too big? Maybe.

Not every dream is a good dream.

But maybe the bigger danger is dreaming too small. Dreaming only for ourselves.

Dreaming only for the people currently sitting in the pews. Dreaming only as far as the current budget. Dreaming only as far as our own lifetimes. Dreaming only as far as what we already know how to accomplish.

What happens when we stop doing that?

What happens when we allow ourselves to imagine?

What dream are we placing into the hands of the children of Quincy?

And will it be large enough for them to grow into?

That is the question I want to leave here.

Not:

Will we survive?

But:

What will we make possible?

Not:

Will the church look exactly the way it does now?

But:

Will there still be a community here for people who haven't even arrived yet?

Not:

How do we protect what we have?

But:

What can we begin now that someone else will finish later?

We receive.

We tend.

We change.

We pass on.

And then we let go.

The point is not that the next generation will do things exactly as we did. The point is that they will have something worth carrying forward.

The point is not that they will preserve our church. The point is that we will help them build theirs. The point is not that Quincy will remain exactly as we know it. The point is that Quincy might become something more beautiful than we currently know how to envision. We just need the courage to believe that the future is still unwritten.

So dream.

Dream extravagantly.

Dream beyond the budget.

Dream beyond the membership numbers.

Dream beyond the walls.

Dream beyond your own lifetime.

Dream for the child making mayhem in the hallway.

Dream for the child who isn't here yet.

Dream for the family who hasn't found us.

Dream for the person who has been told there's no room for them.

Dream for the people who will come after us.

And when someone says, "That's too big," maybe we should ask, "too big for whom? Too big for this year? Too big for our current resources? Too big for one congregation to accomplish alone?" Possibly. But is it too big to begin?

No.

Because we don't have to finish the dream.

We have to carry it.

We have to enlarge it.

We have to make room for it.

We have to place it carefully into the hands of the people who come after us.

And then trust them to carry it farther.

None of it belongs to us.

The church does not belong to us.

Quincy does not belong to us.

The future does not belong to us.

We are temporary stewards of something much larger than ourselves. What will we do with what has been entrusted to us? Will we make the circle smaller? Or larger? Will we guard the door? Or open it? Will we preserve the past?

Or use the wisdom of the past to create something the past couldn't yet imagine?

Will we leave behind a carefully maintained institution? Or a living, breathing, beloved community? And when the children of Quincy look back at us someday, what will they find?

Will they find that we were afraid to dream?

Or will they find that we dreamed so expansively that they had room to become more than we could imagine?

A dream that is only big enough for us is too small. A dream that ends with our generation is too small. A dream that requires everyone to remain exactly as they are is too small. But a dream that reaches beyond us...A dream that makes room for people we haven't met...A dream that gives children somewhere to belong...A dream that asks elders to become guides rather than gatekeepers...A dream that imagines a better Quincy...A dream that we may never live long enough to see fulfilled...

That's not a foolish pipe dream. That is hope. That is love stretched across time.

That is faith.