Transformation: It's What Liberal Faiths Do, Rev. Josh Pawelek, October 11, 2026
“Amazing Grace” – one of the most familiar and beloved hymns in the Christian world. It is a song about transformation: “I once was lost, but now am found.” I’m not the same person I was. I’ve grown. I’ve changed. In collective terms: We are not the same people we were. Together, we’ve grown. Together, we’ve changed. Together, we’ve transformed.
This is the second sermon in a series on the six Unitarian Universalist values. This morning’s value: transformation. I want to share reflections on some transformations in our Unitarian and Universalist history that, for me, illustrate how, over time, liberal religious people consistently let go of older, more traditional ways of thinking about and practicing our religion, and embrace new ways in response to changes in the wider world—new scientific discoveries, new cultural expressions, new technologies, new social, economic and environmental conditions. Liberal denominations, congregations, clergy and theologians do not wall ourselves off from the world. We encounter the world; we embrace what we deem good in it; and we challenge what we find problematic. Through this process of encounter, embrace and challenge, we are inevitably transformed.
I’ll speak about this dynamic in Unitarian Universalist history. Also, because it is National Coming Out Day, I want to say a few words about coming out as transformation.
One of my guides in this discussion is the Unitarian Universalist Rev. Dr. Paul Rasor, who I believe is now retired as the Director of the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom at Virginia Wesleyan College, and with whom I had the privilege of studying liberal theology in seminary. In his 2005 book, Faith Without Certainty, he says “like any other human endeavor, theology reflects the influences of its own social context. But while some theologies have sought to minimize this influence or even to separate from the larger culture, liberalism has embraced it. Among other things, this means that religious ideas are often adapted or restated in terms of the language and values of contemporary culture. It also means that theology often looks to the natural and social sciences, the arts, and other cultural sources in formulating its doctrines and other theological claims.”[1] Rasor calls this the central characteristic of liberal theology. He refers to it as “meditation” or “cultural adaptation”[2]—meaning that liberal theology—and by extension liberal denominations, congregations, clergy and lay leaders—mediate an ongoing dialogue between religion and the world. Through this dialogue, liberal religion slowly transforms.
One of my favorite examples of religious transformation is the impact of the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. The late historian of Universalism, Ernest Cassara, writes: “Darwin’s theory that life presently on earth evolved by adapting through natural selection held in it the greatest challenge Christianity had faced since Copernicus and Galileo. If Darwin was right, the Bible’s account of God’s instantaneous creation of [humanity] and other creatures was wrong. Evolutionary theory was in direct contradiction to the creation story in Genesis.”[3] Many Christian denominations rejected Darwin’s theory in 1859, and are still rejecting it today. Among Universalists, Cassara says, initial resistance eventually “gave way to a willingness to entertain the idea—however cautiously. Universalist thinkers in the vanguard insisted that religion had nothing to fear from science. By the 1870s they began to display an open sympathy which allowed them to begin the task of adapting the faith to the new scientific [theory].”[4]
On Unitarian side, many historians point to the late 19th-century theologian Francis Ellingwood Abbot as a leader in adapting religious thought to evolutionary theory. The historian Sydney Ahlstrom described Abbot as “the first American theologian to develop a system of religious thought in complete consonance with Darwinian evolution.”[5] The historian David Robinson said Abbot “saw evolutionary philosophy as the first opening of an insight into the universe as an evolving organism.”[6]
Or consider the Rev. Eleanor Gordon, assistant minister to the Rev. Mary Safford at the Unitarian Church in Humboldt, Iowa in the 1880s. In addition to running the church’s Sunday school, she was also principal of Humboldt’s public school. The historian Cynthia Grant Tucker says that “Gordon insisted that her students approach whatever was studied in the scientific spirit. Instead of simply accepting what was offered to them as fact, they were expected to use their powers of observation and reason to form their own perceptions of truth…. [As a result,] she was frequently called before the school board by its trinitarian members for teaching what they referred to as flagrant ‘Unitarianism.’ Generally, this meant teaching evolution, or anything that smacked of it, and this, [Gordon] learned, could be nothing more than telling a physiology class that the thumb’s position across from the other fingers was what had made all the arts of civilization possible.”[7]
Apparently, there were “no such problems in Gordon’s Sunday School, where the youngsters … were studying Darwin and Emerson and reading Scripture in the light of the higher biblical criticism before they had reached the age of twelve.”[8]
Remarking on changes within liberal religion in response to Darwin, the British Unitarian doctor and scientific researcher, W.B. Carpenter, in an 1882 address to the National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches said “If any one, a quarter of a century ago, had ventured to assert that within twenty-five years from that time we should be able to study the Chemical and Physical conditions of every body that the telescope can render visible with the highest powers possible to use—that we should be able to follow by its means the actual progress of that great Evolution of the physical universe which is now regarded as beyond the reach of discussion—every one would have believed [them] a dreamer.”[9] And yet, in a Unitarian Sunday School in rural Iowa, children were studying the theory of evolution as part of their religious education curriculum.
That is, in response to the theory of evolution, Unitarians and Universalists of the 1880s were not the same religious people they had been 25 years earlier. They were growing. They were changing. They were transforming.
In more recent history, in response to the social ferment of the 1960s, we’ve seen significant transformation as a result of Unitarian Universalism’s efforts to understand and dismantle its own sexism, racism, white supremacy culture, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and more. I’ve preached previously about the successes we’ve had as a denomination, like the 1977 “Women in Religion” Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly resolution, which opened the door to women having equal access to leadership positions within our faith, and which resulted in the UUA becoming the first mainline denomination in the world to achieve gender parity among its clergy. Or our Welcoming Congregation work, launched in the late 1980s, which has opened doors for LGBTQIA+ people to openly and proudly participate in our congregations as members, leaders and clergy. Or our denominational work on welcoming and including people with disabilities. Or our denominational antiracism work, which consistently asks the question: how do we as a historically white denomination welcome, include and empower black, indigenous and people of color within our congregations? And how do we hold ourselves accountable to the goals and vision of black, indigenous and people of color organizing for justice in the wider community? This work is far from complete; but because of it, we are not the same people we were at the 1961 founding of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Together, we’ve grown. Together, we’ve changed. Together, we’ve transformed.
Our congregation was certified as a UUA Welcoming Congregation in 1999—almost 30 years ago. Because so much has changed in the wider culture since 1999, and because there has been such cruel and pernicious backlash against LGBTQIA+ people and communities in recent years, our Program Council, along with our Denominational Affairs Committee, has begun pursuing renewal of our Welcoming Congregation certification.
Which is why I want to remind us that today is National Coming Out Day. This observance was the brainchild of two activists, Rob Eichberg and Jean O’Leary, who wanted to capitalize on public momentum from the October 11th, 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The purpose of that march, among other things, was to dramatize the federal government’s inaction in confronting the AIDS crisis. The following year, on October 11th, 1988, Eichberg and O’Leary launched National Coming Out Day both to give people the safety of a community in which to be themselves, and to build the power of the gay rights movement by increasing its visibility.[10]
As a cis-gendered, hetero person, I don’t have my own story of coming out. There’s a part of me that isn’t entirely comfortable commenting on what is a very personal, often very painful experience for LGBTQIA+ people. But as your minister, I also don’t feel comfortable not commenting on what it means to come out—especially on National Coming Out Day.
I’ve been wondering about the act of coming out as an experience of transformation. Many people describe the experience as transformative, but not necessarily in the sense of becoming a new person. It’s more commonly an experience of leaving behind the person one was raised to be—a false person, a conformed person, a mask, a façade—in order to become and live as the person one has always been at their core, the true self, the actual self. This is who I really am! Or as Lady Gaga sings, “I'm beautiful in my way / 'Cause God makes no mistakes / I'm on the right track, baby / I was born this way.” And though coming out can be painful, especially when family, friends and community refuse to accept your true self, it is also often an experience of liberation, joy, peace and coming home.
Having said that, I was recently moved by the reflections of a United Church of Christ minister, the Rev. Heather McDuffee, who suggests that coming out isn’t always a return to one’s original self. In her sermon, “Be-coming Out,” she says, “Thanks Lady Gaga, but I wasn’t really ‘born this way.’ I grew this way: like a bent tree, adapting to wind and water, salt and sun.” She continues: “I lost a lot: my husband, my job, my sense of self. But, thank God, I also gained a lot…. I have an amazing life: a new girlfriend, a new definition of family, a new definition of ministry. Be-coming out has been a long process. But it’s my process. Be-coming out taught me about being human and about being spiritual. Be-coming out shows all people that we can adapt, grow, and emerge victorious.”[11]
For everyone in this UUSE community who has come out, or who is contemplating coming out, I want to acknowledge and celebrate your transformation, no matter how you understand it, in all its messiness, pain, joy and liberation. And for all of us, I want to celebrate this positive aspect of our Unitarian Universalist history, our decades of work as a denomination and as an individual congregation—work that is not finished—expanding our welcome to LGBTQIA+ people and to so many more who are marginalized or demonized by the wider culture.
When I contemplate that work, I realize: We are not the same people we were. Together, we’ve grown. Together, we’ve changed. With the aid, perhaps, of some amazing grace, together, we’ve transformed.
Amen and blessed be.
[1] Rasor, Rev. Dr. Paul, Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2005), pp. 12-13.
[2] Rasor, Faith Without Certainty, p. 11.
[3] Cassara, Ernest, Universalism in America: A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1984) p. 36.
[4] Cassara, Universalism in America, p. 37.
[5] Rasor, Faith Without Certainty, p. 14.
[6] Robinson, David, The Unitarians and the Universalists (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) pp. 209-210.
[7] Tucker, Cynthia Grant, Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 51.
[8] Tucker, Prophetic Sisterhood, p. 51.
[9] Carpenter, W.B., excerpt from a speech delivered to the National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches at Saratoga, U.S.A., September, 1882. Republished as “Science and Religion” in Reasonable Religion (London: British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1893). See: https://www.unitarian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/1893_Reasonable_Religion.pdf.
[10] I am drawing this history from Sosin, Kate, “The History of National Coming Out Day Contains Both Pride and Pain,” at Them.Us, October 8, 2021. See: https://www.them.us/story/the-history-of-national-coming-out-day-contains-both-pride-and-pain.
[11] McDuffee, Rev. Heather, “On Be-Coming Out.” See: https://www.uua.org/worship/words/homily/be-coming-out-homily.
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