Galen Guengerich, who served as our acting minister and who was ordained by our congregation in 1992, spoke to an over-flow crowd at Sunday's dialog on the need for liberal religions in today's world. Using a mixture of slides, recorded poetry and music on the theme of "Koyanistasis" or "life out of balance" due to human destruction, Guengerich stated that from 5 to 10,000 to one of us today constitute the religious right in the United States. Opposing the value of "How we know what we know" with that of blind faith he quoted Sam Harris and Bill Mahr from their book and movie as well as the philosopher John Dewey who divided people into two camps: believers in doctrine and believers in experience.

He traced the freedom to believe in our experience back to the Renaissance and Martin Luther in the 12th and 15th Centuries when new voices arose other than those of the Catholic Church. The Church's view was that belief in it was necessary for salvation; Luther taught that salvation is between the individual and God. With the rise of modern science came freedom to learn from experience and find proof for those experiences.

Guengerich maintains that words such as faith, prayer and religion can be used by UU's with our own meaning, and we need to reclaim them. "I haven't found betters terms", he said. He continued, "We need to change our national conversation about religion or are we are all doomed." The uniqueness of Unitarian Universalism is compelling, and our challenge today is critical if we are to stop our decline in numbers, which has amounted to 50% in the past few years.