Getting to Know Barbara Fast

Give the people something of your new vision. You may possess a small light, but uncover it, let it shine. Use it to bring more light and understanding into the hearts and minds of men [and women]. Give them not hell, but hope and courage.   J. Murray

It has been said that a calling is where the world’s greatest need and your greatest love meet. I am called to love this world with you. I love to preach and teach. I love to share.  I love sharing all aspects of congregational life.

I am privileged and humbled to partner with and pastor to you, to share your spiritual life journey. Through partnering we will bring “more light and understanding” into our shared lives and perhaps the world we share with our neighbors. I think Jack Mendelson said it best, “Good ministers and good congregations create each other.”

I love preaching and leading worship. I am called to invite you into an increasing experience of happiness and holiness through work, worship and celebration.  It is my ministry’s theme. 

I love to encourage, to ‘grow’, leadership. I want to serve a community where good faith, collaboration, a process of mutual gifting, is the normative working assumption. I work best where there is a sense of trust and mutual respect. Who doesn’t?  Whatever our responsibility, we are all engaged in ministry, be it hospice visiting or hospitality. How we treat each other, no matter our age and ability, is a religious task.  My working style is to encourage staff and lay leaders. I love to share challenges and laughter. I love to celebrate success and shared struggle.

I have my hopes.

I hope to be your pastor.  To be present with you in a way that invites you to come in and talk about your life, your challenges, and your hopes.    I hope to serve a congregation and do what a good minister does: Lead worship, preach and teach, listen and counsel, dedicate children, celebrate rites of passage.  Nurture people at every age and stage of life so that they find the strength and faith to say 'yes' to life.  I hope to minister with a community of individuals who minister to each other and the world.

I am known for my enthusiasm, intelligence, intensity, compassion and humor. I hope to laugh with you.  A good laugh is as good a benediction as I know.  In other words, I hope to love a faith community into fuller faith, life and service.

Know that I take your struggles and hopes seriously and so I hope to celebrate your life’s passages and the passages in the life of your congregation.   Finally when that time in life comes to ‘let go,’ I hope that my presence will one of those you seek when you need pastoral care, consolation, comfort or strength.  If that ministry finds me, as I have faith it will, then the day will surely come when we will celebrate the life we have shared together.

As the Hindu greeting goes: Namaste. The divine in me honors the divine in you.  I look forward to getting to know you better during Candidate week and beyond.
 

 
Barbara’s Reflections on Preaching

Emerson said the role of preacher is to “deal out his life passed through the fire of thought”.  My purpose, whether through worship, sermon or counseling, is to invite us to recognize the sacred, awful and awe filled moments of our lives. Florida Scott Maxwell wrote, “When we claim all of our experience, we become fierce with our own reality.’

Human experience is necessarily paradoxical. Our human experience is filled with the miraculous and the terrible. I love to illustrate ideas with a good story, parable, poem or joke. Language is insufficient to describe our lives. I use the language of metaphor. I paint pictures with my words. I love poetry and story telling. I love the religious imagination expressed in art, music, drama, and song.  I appreciate silence.

As any good pastor I comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  I also know that the comfortable are often afflicted. My voice calls upon the infinitely rich imagery of different faith traditions that serve the same end: wisdom, compassion and action. It is strong, empathic, empowering, and prophetic.

The context of my preaching ministry is the congregation. I love congregational life. I love preaching to those with whom I am in relationship, to see your faces and realize, Sunday after Sunday, the many and various threads of connection that knit us together. It is in our congregational life times that we come to truly appreciate each other as we endure tough times and enjoy good times, all the time together.

Covenanted congregational life gives us a place to practice what is preached. To live interdependently is difficult! It is good.



Barbara’s Theological Reflections

Mind you, this is a work in progress.  We have much to learn from each other. I so look forward to that journey.

For me, theology is grounded in autobiography. And it takes practice.
We discern it through the stories that we tell ourselves and those that we tell about our selves.  Human beings have always told their stories out of their experience and their imagination. The stories that really matter, culturally and/or personally, live on through the ages because they bring us meaning, hope, courage, and faith as we face our realities. Or so we are taught, and so we hope. And so it matters what stories we tell and what meanings we make of them.

Throughout our lifetimes we ‘build our own theology’ out of our experience, intentionally or unintentionally. Huston Smith wrote that “Religion alive helps human beings confront reality and master the self.”  Life challenges us, invites us, calls to us, over and over, to integrate our beliefs with our behavior and life’s reality. Out of that emerges our faith: in our self, each other, humankind, nature, and/or God. “Building theology” is ‘religion alive’. It is how we recreate our “living tradition”. It is the process of faith development.

So then how do we ‘confront reality and master the self’.  We practice! When we practice embodying a spirit of love and forgiveness, I have faith that each of us comes to know in our bones that we are blessed and can bless, that we are called to bless, to love, to persist in loving. Imperfectly and irresistibly. 

I have learned that I do have a kind of “litmus test” for a theology or philosophy. I ask, “Does this foster life? Grow wholeness? Build justice? Honor creation?  Does this bring life or death to the health of the spirit?” Are we invited, encouraged and empowered to persist in loving; ourselves, our lives, each other and the world?
  
Now, if I have to name myself, I would say that I am a Heretic Universalist Unitarian Buddhist.

Heretic: the root of heretic is heresy, which merely means being able to choose.  This is my chosen approach to faith.

Unitarian: Unitarian heritage and history, its loyal witness to religious freedom, its embrace of science, and optimistic faith in the human capacity to know and reason, and its imperative summons to justice challenges me to be better.  Unitarianism gives me courage and hope in humankind and in our capacity to choose the good and bring our human reason and intelligence to bear on our works of faith.   It calls me to lead and serve, and stand with those seeking to become their best selves.

Universalist: I bring a growing Universalist heart to my well-developed Unitarian head and an increasing enthusiasm for our Universalist heritage. Its loyalty to our first principle: the inherent worth and dignity of every human being; its optimistic impulse toward Universal reconciliation; and its belief that “holiness and true happiness” are inseparable and the comfort it provides the broken in spirit sustain my ministry.

Universalism gives me hope and courage in the face of so many cruel realities. We are born fully human, universally entitled to pursue happiness, in the eyes of law, culture, religion and ‘God’.  Universalists would say that we are all loved by ‘God’: gay, straight, Bi- trans, able and disabled, men and women, black, white, poor and rich, young and old; that, we are the ‘hands of god’ at work in this world; that our actions and failures to act teach us how to love; that, ‘heaven’ is a state of mind, experience of or faith in the possibility of reconciliation, forgiveness, wholeness or happiness. It is a chord of my prophetic voice.

Buddhist: Buddhist teachings and Zen practice (for the past 20 years) help me integrate, sustain and center my life and my calling, put life into perspective, and realize the happiness we are all invited into every day.

Some additional thoughts:

I listen carefully when God is spoken of.  I listen to hear if the speaker holds ideas of God like a weapon in a clenched fist or whether his hand is open, empty, held out to clasp mine.

I am a solid defender of the humanist and atheist and have counted myself among them. Typically I discomfort as well as comfort both theist and humanist.  A professor once said, “If you are happy with everything that happens in worship, somebody else is being left out.”  I also enjoy inviting the liberally religious to claim religious language, to wrestle with the ideas beneath the words, and to make connections that have value and provide nourishment.



Barbara’s Reflections on Lifespan Religious Education

It is all religious education. Everything that happens and doesn’t happen in our lives, in our congregations, is religious education. What we talk about, how we talk about it, what we do not talk about, and how we treat each other, it is all religious education. We integrate our lives at every age and stage. Experiences can nourish or starve our spiritual, mental and physical health. Everything depends on how we integrate reality and experience. We have the sacred opportunity and responsibility to be intentional and compassionate about this process.

One way is to foster Small Group Ministry programs. I have loved the work I have done to create, build, grow, nurture and facilitate small groups.  It is a way we share ministry.  I have admired all the adult programming you have in Westminster. Your sense of community, shared ministry,  confirms how well you support, encourage and sustain each other.

One of my hopes is that we can better inoculate children, adults, and seniors from the fear based messages of a culture where commerce is god, images of what is success are materialistic, scarcity is the economic myth and social Darwinism dominates. Our congregations can be refuges, safe enough places to let ourselves be fully human. It matters that we encourage, menches, real human beings.  Don’t let your light go out!

I am so happy that your children’s program is important to you. It is vital and so it is vibrant.  You and your staff are appreciated and dedicated to the spiritual health of your children.

As Associate Minister I supervised a three person RE staff and was professionally responsible for a program which included over 350 registered children and Youth.  I have many thoughts about and some experience with religious education.

Most important is the truth that I love learning. So I am looking forward to learning about you and the children and learning from you, the children and staff how I can support the good work you are already doing. I believe in practicing the three A’s- Attention, Appreciation and Affection. That goes for staff, volunteers, parents and children, youth- for the whole congregation.

As a parent and a minister, I know that parents are a child’s primary religious educators. In a congregational RE Program we have a child about 40 hours a year. Sunday RE programming complements and contextualizes the every day religious education a child gets from family and then, as they get older, from friends and the media culture.  A congregation partners with parents as they nurture their child’s and their own spiritual growth, as they clarify their family and faith values. Parents need our support.

Children have a deep sense of fairness at an early age and they are watching us all the time, to learn how to “be” in this world. They are competent compassionate human beings that can and want to help others just where they are. I believe in practicing justice-making at every age.

I remember some of my childhood experiences. Some of them inform my commitment to social transformation and my interfaith voice. Socially responsible actions need not wait until adulthood. They are transformational.

Sophia Fahs, minister and religious educator wrote "The struggle to be like someone else rather than to be one's own true self or to do one's best in one's own environment, a child is in danger of losing the pearl beyond price- the integrity of one's own soul."

Finally, at all ages, it is important who has a voice, and who does not. I am called, which is to say, one of my greatest joys is when others find their voice and recognize it, perhaps for the first time.



From the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association

The UUMA Guidelines describe the purpose of a congregation, a call and the work of a minister to and with a congregation.  It makes good sense to me, so I thought I would add it.

“Members of our congregations have freely gathered to become a body of people seeking to find and to walk together in ways of truth and affection. Members have gathered in freedom to worship; to teach, encourage and support one another; and to speak to the world in words and actions of right, beauty, peace and goodwill.”

By the corporate act of call, the members of the local congregation acknowledge their need for the service of one prepared by education and personal commitment, and they pledge to support the work of the minister, to provide for his or her personal life, and to labor with him or her in bringing to fruition the promise of the free church. The call signifies creation of a distinctive partnership in which minister and congregation alike affirm their intention to share in a religious pilgrimage of mutual care, forbearance, self-discipline and a desire to serve the common good.

The minister is to lead the congregation in worship and nurture spiritual growth. The minister, in keeping with our tradition of the free pulpit and the free pew, is to preach and teach the truth as she or he sees it without fear of any person and with respect for all persons.

The minister is to provide and enable others to provide occasions - personal and institutional - conducive to the spiritual and intellectual growth of the people of the congregation and to their power for social good.

The minister is to provide the agency or means of counsel and comfort.
The minister's life and vocation is to reflect honesty, forthright love and service with and for the congregation.”

To which I add my Amen.


Meet Rev. Barbara Fast

Barbara’s greeting to the Congregation
Why we chose Barbara

Q & A about the search process

What is a Call?

A Brief Resume


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