You'll notice that with the rest of you guys out there, I'm not wearing a tie, and I thought it would be a nice gift to Josh that he has now the opportunity to join the rest of the male clan and not be preoccupied. I don't know why a tie should be for us now a symbol of our divinity, you know. I know you're wrestling with this in the public press, so-

Anyhow, I'm not sure how I can tell you how much it means to me to be with you. I keep tabs of you quite well, reading your newsletter and reading Josh's and Nancy's statements, and I've been doing this ever since I left you back in-for retirement, back in 1984. And you continue to prosper, and I'm in awe really of what this congregation is achieving. Every step of the way, it seems to me, you have responded to the challenges that face you with good sense and with real joy. I'm particularly impressed with the report that Nancy had mailed to us from the agent from the UUA Fund Raising office, and with her compliments, as well as the statements of her concerns. It confirms what I already knew, and I have great confidence in the outcome of what her report portends.

You know, institutions are a lot like people. Their basic character gets set early on, and it really doesn't change much, anymore than people can really change their essential character. And I'm glad to have been around when your truly radiant institutional personality took shape. You're an hospital people, down to earth, practical and forever young in spirit.

Think back, if you will, of the time when you first entered the doors of this congregation. Was this place an answer to prayer for you, a spiritual home you had been looking for, for a long time? Of course, if you stayed, the blush wore off a bit. You realized that this was really a human place with a full complement of warts and pimples and the like, but for most of you it became family and you knew you belonged. So do me a favor right now, if you will, if coming here, coming to this community was your first Unitarian Universalist experience, would you raise your hand? Well, there you have it. The first service did just as well as you.

It's impressive what this congregation has achieved, and I'm in-I thank you for being here. And you know how important this community is to so many, so many, many souls. And I rejoice in the planning that you're doing to make more room in the inn for those who are searching, as you searched for this common faith of ours.

There's a worldwide hunger for the kind of spiritual liberation that you practice together here. A place where people can come, just as they are, and be stretched as well to see the thoughtful connections we all must make beyond the borders of class and race and sexual orientation and economic circumstance. A place that proclaims the human spirit has no limits to its growth. That shall draw a circle to embrace all creation into its affection, with its love.

Excuse me-I'm going to give Josh another opportunity. You may wonder why I used the word "Entrepreneur" in my title and the word has come to me in conversations I've had with some of the leaders of our denomination. They're concerned that our churches are not growing, not growing. Most of our churches not growing in proportion to the potential that exists for our sort of gospel. Liberation. Freedom. Transformation.

Most of our churches, the bulk of our churches are very small. Many of them a hundred or less in membership and they can't pay our ministers a living wage. They must find-my colleagues, our colleagues must find other work or marry someone who has resources that are not available to them. If they're recently in the ministry, they are saddled with enormous debt. It costs as much to go through a theological school as it does to any other graduate education.

And it's complicated, it's exacerbated by the fact that our theological schools are graduating more students than can be placed and the churches, for the most part, are too small to be of any real help for them to pay their bills. It's a crisis in our movement and we see coming out of our seminary, our seminaries, two kinds of ministers.

What in the vernacular of the people that are concerned about our movement, about this situation, what are classified as the Entrepreneurs and the Handholding ministers. Now, I know it sounds derogatory and it's too bad, but we have many ministers in our movement and coming into our movement who are good people, caring, loving people, wise counselors, capable of giving good sermons, respected in the community, loved by their congregations and that's about it.

The former, the entrepreneurs have as well the zeal and the skill to build institutions that will survive and grow. They're endowed with a sense of mission, with a conviction that their message of liberation must be taken to others in quantity, to an ever widening circle of believers. That is to say, they're smart about achieving growth.

Of course, you and I know that it's not just the ministers. The people have to be with them. The congregation needs to be moved by the memory of what it was like when they first came in the door. And they must be called, these members of the congregation, called to bring the message to others. And as you've probably figured out, and I hope you're somewhat self-satisfied sitting there, that you and Josh make a great entrepreneurial team. Every sign from your behavior points to say that you are on your way to shining the UUSE light on hilltops far and wide. Connie understands what I'm saying because she was part of it, too.

So you see, I'm happy to be here with you today. And I'm going to make a prediction. You're going to be successful in this new enterprise. There will be more space and many more will come to you. Perhaps for a while your new space will accommodate the whole congregation, and then you will need to go to two services again. I predict that you might even do, as some of our churches are already doing, having three and a few, four services during the week.

So when you reach that point, make sure I am still alive! Because I want to know what you're going to do next.

Well, as promised, I want to talk for the rest of my time about my brother, who served for twenty-two years as minister in Houston, Texas. He went there in 1950 and he died just this past August 15th and age ninety-three. He's ten years older than I. And I was able to spend a good deal of time with him this past summer. I'm so thankful I was. I was six weeks in Little Compton, Rhode Island at Carolyn's summer home, her family's summer home, and Horace was in a nursing home in Fairhaven, which is not far away and I was able to see him three times a week during my time there. And we talked quite a bit about his years in Houston.

When he got there in 1950, he inherited a threadbare old building and what must be called at best a pallid handholding ministry. In just two years, he and his congregation managed to sell the old building, buy land on a major thoroughfare and built a splendid southwestern style new physical plant with a spacious sanctuary down one side of a great courtyard and an assembly room and school classrooms and church offices and the like on the other sides of the quadrangle.

Now, to be sure, Texas was booming then when he was there, and he was able to call to his side a considerable group of committed people who were also, being in the oil business for the most part, able to be generous. But he succeeded in no small part because he was bringing our liberating gospel in the midst of a rigid, right wing conservative city. He brought fresh air to Houston, and don't think it was easy. He lost church members on the race issue because, among other things, his church was the first White church to become integrated. He went to Selma and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.

I don't think my big brother could have done any better. Now, that wasn't the end of it all. Ten years later, his new church was bursting at the seams. They were on double sessions. They were crowded and Houston was growing. So the First Church leadership went out and bought land in a neighboring area that was more affluent-did you know there's no zoning at all in Houston? But a new affluent neighborhood grew up not far from the First Church, and they raised the money to put up another building and for one year, Horace preached at both churches. He preached at nine o'clock at what they called the Emerson Unitarian Church and then he went back to the First Church and preached there at eleven. Sometimes, to get some much needed exercise, he would bicycle between the two places. And it's probably hypocriphal, but I am told that occasionally he would not bother to take his robe off as he biked, and children would call out "There goes God."

At the end of that year, when he was preaching at both churches, the congregation committed what I suppose could be called spiritual mitosis. They split. They broke up the budget, everything because the two churches were one unified unit for that first year. Then they broke off in two parts, and my brother, God bless him, stayed with the poorer church, which was the First Church. Most of the money and the millionaires were in the Emerson Church and he stayed with the-and he could have feathered his career, you know, by going with the-

Incidentally, I looked up in the yearbook what the membership was right now of these two churches. They're both about the same, around five hundred members and their budgets are, each of them, around half a million.

I want to talk more about his legacy because that's just a small part of it. This November I was invited by the two churches to come to Houston for their memorial service for Horace and there must have been over seventy-five people at the First Church who came. People from both churches for the celebration of his life. At the same time while I was there, I met with a group of Houston people who share this concern for the lack of entrepreneurial spirit in our movement. This reaching out to bring liberation and transformation to human spirits yearning for meaning in anguish at a void they sense in their lives.

Well, we now have seven societies in greater Houston and working together, they started something that is quite interesting. They raised the money. They had a lot of guidance from Unitarian Universalist Headquarters, and they set up an area wide advertising-yes, marketing campaign. Marketing, using billboards for two months in three high traffic areas with a daily drive by population of half a million cars.

They ran ads in the magazine "Get Smart," which is published by the Houston gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender community. They used seven weeks of NPR radio announcements on station KUHF. In this blitz of PR, they ran two hundred thousand banner impressions on the main news page of the Houston Chronicle website. On February 20th, this past February 20th, they ran-they had inserted in the Houston Chronicle an eight page four-color piece about what it means to be in a free church like ours. They sent postcards, a series of three postcards over a month apart to two hundred thousand homes. They had eight pages of-quarter page inserts or ads in the main news section of the Chronicle, with a Sunday circulation of over three-quarters of a million. And get this, beforehand they trained greeters to know how to respond to the numbers that they knew were going to come, as a result of this advertising, marketing campaign. The Houston church, the First Church discovered they had five entrances to the building. I don't think anybody had counted them. So they had to have teams at every entrance to make sure that whoever might wander in, would be welcomed warmly.

Now, what are the results so far? As luck would have it, during the middle of this campaign, Focus on Family-do you know about what Focus on Family is? Was holding a conference in South Houston to bring a message of the causes and prevention of homosexuality, and the UU quickly responded with new print ads about it, and then members of the congregation showed up at the protest with the protestors, with our UU banner about including everyone. And so it goes.

My friends, things are hopping in Texas. I don't know what your image of Texas is up to this point, but please include your brothers and sisters in the faith. First Church had more than fifty visitors come on the weekend following that eight page Sunday supplement. Emerson is averaging now thirteen visitors a Sunday, whereas it had been just four.

They're doing the same thing in San Diego with their own program right now. And the real question facing our movement is shall we sit back and let the religious right be the only faith community voice making a loud noise? Or shall we dare to use marketing media and proclaim there is another way? Their headline theme is "Imagine a Religion," and they have what you might imagine a religion like ours might be to someone who didn't know about it. Imagine a religion that sets the mind free, is not at war with science that proclaims justice as the most powerful force for peace. Well, you get the idea. I don't need to say much more.

I have to-you see, I still believe that our churches have a mission to free human spirits. I can't get it out of my system. That's the way my brother and I were brought up. Back in the late '20s my dad had a job working for an organization now defunct called the Unitarian Layman's League, and after the First World War, they set up a program using the media available then to send first a Catholic Priest, who became a Unitarian, Father Sullivan, and then dad inherited his job when Mr. Sullivan's health wore out. And dad would travel by train because airplane traffic wasn't there, and cover the length and breadth of this land and Canada, speaking in Unitarian and Universalist Churches. He would go for a week at a time, Monday through Friday and then on Sunday he would speak and then go onto the next time, and there was an advance man who went ahead and arranged other speaking engagements for Rotaries and Kiwannis Clubs and the like.

And he was at it until the Depression came and wiped out the funding. Some day I'll tell you that story. I'm not going to-I'm ending now. But the old man set a pace for his sons to follow, and I'll tell you parenthetically, I'm in counseling right now dealing with issues with my father. I don't know if you've seen the book, fellows, called I Don't Want to Talk About It, but it's a gem, and if you have any feelings towards your father, get hold of a copy of it. I'm in a men's group in the Hills reading this book and sharing the trip laid on us. And I don't know what would have happened if I had read the book before I entered the ministry. It was only published two years ago.

So just let me remind you again that this church was here for you when you first walked in the door. The chances are you didn't know what to expect. Indeed you may have had some fear. Were you wondering just how strange these UU people might be? Well, now you know what we're like. Now you know what you're like. Now you know you're part of the family and I'm glad you're going to help bring what happened for you, may happen for others.

What you do here together is really very much needed. Actually, it is very much needed for our whole planet, and I trust also that you know, as well as I, that in doing it, in being entrepreneurs together, it can be a lot of fun.