By Dean Poling
dean.poling@gaflnews.com

VALDOSTA

The Rev. AI Boyce was not always of the Unitarian Universalist faith. He grew up with an old-school fundamentalist Protestant background and felt its calling. But in the mid-1970s, he left it all behind.

"It did not feel authentic. I no longer believed in a personal God and it was extremely sad," he explains of leaving the faith of his youth. He returned to school to pursue other career choices and he recaIls a pivotal incident at a cocktail party during this period. "I said I would never stand behind a pulpit again and tell anyone what is correct and what is not correct about God, and someone said, 'Well, you may be interested in the Unitarian Universalist Church.'"  

The remark slowly opened a new door of faith to Boyce. He studied the church and its history and became a Unitarian minister. He has pastored at a New Jersey Unitarian Universalist Church which was part of the New York City metro area and recently he took a yearlong sabbatical at his home in Maine. A few weeks ago, he accepted a position as the pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Valdosta, which reportedly marks the first time the church has had a full-time pastor who lives in the region.  

Nowadays, Boyce sees himself leaning toward becoming a Christian Unitarian, but he also sees himself in the role of a person seeking the divine from within and respecting each person's right to do the same in their own way.

In his first sermon at the Valdosta U.U. Church, Boyce said, "In our kind of spiritual journey we walk together in love with all of our diversity. That is the great adventure. We may disagree, even strongly disagree theologically, but we walk together. We treat one another with respect and never condescendingly. We dare to speak truth as we see it and we listen intently as others do the same."  

Boyce sees spirituality as seeking understanding and taking care of one's body, spirit, and soul. For example, when he preached in Miami, Boyce says he spent several days and nights living on the streets to better understand the region's homeless population. And when his ministerial duties lead to personal burn-out and spiritual fatigue, he believes a minister should take a break to care for his or her own spirit as he did when he took his sabbatical in Maine. 

Boyce shares a painful story of a teen-age girl who wanted an abortion. She visited her Protestant preacher and the preacher told her abortion was a sin and she should not do it. The girl did not get the abortion. Instead, she committed suicide.

"Unfortunately” Boyce says, "we live in a world where no one is interested in the questions. We want pat answers and those pat answers don't always answer the real questions. We want everything to be as simple as black and white. I want everything to be black and white. I want everything to be defined. I would like that. But the world has shown me that it isn't black and white. It isn't that simple. We have to live the tough questions, ask the hard questions and trust the divine within us. Death, the environment, God, the divine. These are some of the hard questions that cannot be easily answered."
 

Unitarian Universalists, Boyce says, have a deep commitment to social causes, social justice. They aim for moral and ethical responses to the world's problems and in finding one's own spiritual journey. "In a Unitarian service, someone can say I'm a pagan, I'm a Christian, I'm an atheist and here's why" Boyce says. Atheists, by the way are some of the most world's most caring people and have a deep sense of social conscience."

As for the Unitarian Universalist Church, it has a long tradition in the U.S. and in several of the nation's social movements.  Many of the Founding Fathers, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were of a Unitarian bent. Transcendentalist thinkers, who often saw the divine in everything, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were Unitarian thinkers. Social movements such as women's rights, civil rights, the environment, gay/lesbian rights are supported by the U.U. Church.

Though there is no set theology, Valdosta's Unitarian Universalist Church's services are spiritual in tone and nature like any other church service. Its 50-plus-member congregation works as a democracy; members vote on issues and ideas. Boyce notes that being and believing in different things "does not mean that you" can tear the place up. After all, you have chosen to become part of a community. In a community, nobody always gets their way. We have to think what is best for everybody. That's why we have a democracy here. Majority rules. One person … one vote. Like the U.S. at its best."

Boyce says U.U. congregations are often found in communities with college campuses or concentrations of intellectual thought. On average of two Sundays per month, Boyce will deliver the message; on other Sundays, guests from the community and other locales are invited to speak about a multitude of issues and topics.