Liberal Religious Youth merged fifty years ago
by Deborah J. Pope-Lance
At my first youth group meeting back in 1966, we listened to Frank Zappa
on vinyl and played “sardines” in the darkened church, a game
of hide and seek where once a seeker finds the hider he or she must hide
there too until everyone has found the tightly-packed bunch. Many who
joined local Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) groups like mine were found
there in ways that changed lives and, one could say, saved their adolescent
souls.
Every Sunday night the group, drawn from three churches in Massachusetts,
met with our advisor, Charlie McGlynn, a middle-aged state employee, father,
and possibly the only person over twenty-five we trusted. Charlie let
us run the group and—only when necessary—saved us from youthful
errors in judgment. We sat around a candle in the church basement and
talked about spirituality, sex, war, equality, freedom, responsibility,
and the pressures and pleasures of coming of age in the late 1960s. Like
other local LRY groups, we hosted coffeehouses and conferences, repaired
low-income housing and protested the draft, and annually offered a Sunday
service. One year, we conducted a funeral for the “death of God,”
complete with casket and pallbearers. For many, LRY was our first experience
in self-governance and self-expression.
LRY was formed fifty years ago with the merger of Unitarian and Universalist
youth organizations in 1953—eight years before the consolidation
of the denominations. Its history began with the Universalist Young People’s
Christian Union in 1889 and the Unitarian Young People’s Religious
Union in 1896, youth and young adult–led organizations largely independent
from their denominations. LRY inherited this philosophy of youth autonomy
and grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s into a spirited, politically involved,
continental organization led by a teenaged executive committee and an
adult executive director.
In 1969, LRY leaders decided that an executive director wasn’t
needed. Meanwhile, poorly managed instances of typical teen behavior problems,
adults who actively joined in, and LRY’s hippie image exacerbated
distrust between adults and LRYers. By the late 1970s, continental LRY
persisted, but many local youth programs had died.
To reverse that trend, in 1983 LRY gave way to Young Religious Unitarian
Universalists ( YRUU), the UUA’s current youth organization. At
twenty, YRUU has blended a rich history of youth autonomy with a commitment
to adult collaboration.
A recent twist of fate reminded me of LRY’s legacy. I became an
interim minister in the church where I was once an LRYer. Now I stood
every Sunday in the pulpit where my LRY group had eulogized God. I met
with parents in classrooms where we had played sardines. I sipped tea
after services in a hall where a candle and a community had held back
the darkness. But there was no youth group. With help from parents, church
leaders, the YRUU Web site, and a promise from me, their minister, to
show them my favorite hiding places, a group formed. Now on Sunday nights,
youth and their adult advisors gather for pizza and talk about things
that trouble and mystify them. They play sardines and are found.
The Rev. Deborah J. Pope-Lance consults
with clergy and lay leaders about the ethical challenges of congregational
life. She was interim minister of the Unitarian Universalist Area Church
at First Parish in Sherborn, Massachusetts, from 2001 to 2003 .
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