Early Adopters

A service titled ‘Early Adopters', led by Rev. Stephanie Bisby, with readings given by John Humphreys and Patricia Brewerton, announcements from Brian Ellis, and music from Benjie del Rosario and Blanca Graciá Rodríguez.

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SPEAKER_03 2:12

Why do we gather? We gather to solve problems we can't solve on our own. We gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to mark transitions. We gather to make decisions. We gather because we need one another. We gather to show strength. We gather to honour and acknowledge. We gather to build companies and schools and neighbourhoods. We gather to welcome and we gather to say goodbye. These words from Priya Parker's beautiful book, The Art of Gathering, welcome all who has gathered this morning for our Sunday service. Welcome to those of you who are here with me in person at Essex Church. And welcome also to those who are joining via Zoom. And I know that we have some guests from Godalming Unitarians and some from Yorkshire. Wherever you are visiting from today, welcome. And welcome, of course, also to those who are listening later via YouTube or on the podcast. For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm Stephanie Bisby, and I'm half-time minister with Doncaster Unitarians in South Yorkshire, and I'm a member of the National Executive Committee who act as trustees for the Unitarian and Free Christian movement. It is a great pleasure, as always, to be here with you today to lead your worship in the absence of my friend and colleague Jane. This morning our theme, our service, is on the theme of early adopters. And this theme was inspired by two largely unrelated connections with today's date. Firstly, May the 3rd is the anniversary of the first successful heart transplant in the UK, performed just about 20 minutes from here at the National Heart Hospital. The patient survived only 45 days, but the operation has paved the way for many successful surgeries since. Secondly, May 3rd is also in some church traditions the feast of St. Philip and St. James, two of Jesus' early disciples. And those two things have got me thinking about innovators and pioneers, and those people who aren't afraid to step into the unknown and do something a little different. But before we get to talking in detail about things that are a little different, let's begin with a familiar ritual. We'll light our chalice flame now, as we do each week. It's a moment for us to stop and take a breath, settle ourselves down, put aside any preoccupations we came in carrying. This simple ritual connects us in solidarity with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists the world over and reminds us of the proud and historic progressive religious tradition of which this gathering is a part. Our chalice words today are by Charles Howe, adapted from an affirmation by the wonderfully named Napoleon Lovely. That new truth is ever waiting to break through to illumine our minds, and that new love is ever waiting to break through to warm our hearts. May we be open to this light and to the rich possibilities that it brings us. Amen. Now we come to our first time singing together, and we are singing hymn one three five in the Green Book. It may not be familiar to everyone, so we're going to have a whole verse played through before we sing together. Sing in celebration. And this prayer is based on words by Kyle Flannery, and they're entitled A Blessing for Leaders. And I know that many people in our churches often think that they are not leaders because they don't have an official leadership role, but I think we have a lot more leaders in the room than anyone necessarily realizes, because as is my theme today, simply being here and showing up in a space which is so often not recognised by much of the world is itself an act of leadership, and so is every contribution you make, whether that is lighting a candle or pouring a cup of tea. So this is a blessing for leaders. And if you'd like to, you might adjust your position at this point for comfort, close your eyes, or let them rest unfocused. If there's a posture that helps you feel more prayerful, feel free to sit that way. And if you'd like to put your hymn book down at this point, do whatever helps you feel in the right state of body and mind for us to be fully present with ourselves, with each other, and with that which is both within us and beyond us. Blessed are you who hold the thread who trace the through line Who tag the climbing rope for this team's journey. Blessed are you who tag twice, three times to check such precious weight this thread support. May it hold. May it hold. May it safely lead us together where we couldn't go alone. Blessed are you who weave your thread with many others, to welcome, to warm, a warm blanket, a tapestry, a climbing rope, holding history, guiding the journey, a square with mat and shine to rest beneath a warm bowl of food. Blessed are you in your picking up and your setting down, letting another join and weave, or letting this design muddle or rest in the background for a spell. Nothing is lost. All is love. You are still a weaver. There will still be warmth and bread in every culture, to dances, to trade places, to bless your intention to love, to comfort, to draw close, to weave, beauty, coherence, symmetry, to yes. All masterpieces contain flaws, a broken and inscrutable beauty we did not create, nor can we remove. No weaver works alone. No weaver works without ceasing, but the great weaver. Seed, movement, flourishing, rest, unraveling, rebirth. Each climber stops to feel the winds embrace, to admire the trail, to rest, eat, brilliant, tending to what is sore, allowing inspiration to unfold. But in colour International In the nostrils and the text in yearning and in vain. And later As you go forward, it is your life.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

This reading is um from a book, The Diffusion of Ideas by Everett Rogers, uh, entitled Controlling Scurvy in the British Navy. Many technologists believe that advantageous innovations will sell themselves, that the obvious benefits of a new idea will be widely realized by potential adopters, and that the innovation will diffuse rapidly. Seldom is this the case. Most innovations in fact diffuse at a disappointingly slow rate, at least in the eyes of the inventors and technologists who create the innovations and promote them to others. Scurvy control illustrates how slowly and obviously beneficial innovation spreads. In the early days of long sea voyages, scurvy killed more sailors than did warfare, accidents and other causes. For instance, of Vasco da Gama's crew of a hundred and sixty men who sailed with him around the Cape of Good Hope in fourteen ninety seven, one hundred died of scurvy. In sixteen oh one, an English sea captain, James Lancaster, conducted an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of lemon juice in preventing scurvy. Captain Lancaster commanded four ships that sailed from England on a voyage to India. He served three teaspoonfuls of lemon juice every day to the sailors in one of his four ships. These men stayed healthy. The other three ships cons constituted Lancaster's control group as their sailors were not given any lemon juice. On the other three ships, by the halfway point in the journey, one hundred and ten out of two hundred and seventy-eight sailors had died from scurvy. So many of these sailors got scurvy that Lancaster had to transfer men from his treatment ship in order to staff the three other ships for the remainder of the voyage. These results were so clear that one would have expected the British Navy to promptly adopt citrus juice for scurvy prevention on all ships. Not until seventeen forty-seven about a hundred and fifty years later, did James Lynde, a British Navy physician who knew of Lancaster's results, carry out another experiment on the HMS Salisbury. To each scurvy patient on this ship, Lynne prescribed either two oranges and one lemon, or one of five other nut supplements, a half a pint of sea water, six spoonfuls of vinegar, a quart of cider, nutmeg, or seventy-five drops of vitriol elixir. The scurvy patients who got the citrus fruits who got the citrus fruits were cured in a few days and were able to help Dr. Lind care for the other patients. Unfortunately, the supply of oranges and lemons was exhausted in six days. Certainly, with this solid evidence of the ability of citrus fruits to combat scurvy, one would expect the British Navy to have adopted this innovation for all ships' crews on long sea voyages. In fact, it did so, but not until 1795, 48 years later, when scurvy was immediately wiped out. After only 70 more years in 1865, the British Board of Trade adopted a similar policy and eradicated scurvy in the merchant marine.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

Thank you, John. It's rather mind boggling, isn't it? Our next hymn is again in the green book, it's number two hundred and one. And now Patricia has a reading for us.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

Reading from a faith that matters by the Reverend Bill Darlison. Matters to what or to whom one has to ask? I suppose the answer will be to society and to the individual. We Unitarians have been very good at saying and doing things that matter to society. We have taken a stand on many of the big social and political issues of our time and on the big social and political issues of times past. We can boast a proud record of standing up for the underdog, of proclaiming freedom and tolerance in times when it was unpopular and even dangerous to do so. Our involvement in social justice issues has been and is exemplary. But what about the individual? What about the person who feels an existential sickness of soul? Who is seeking answers to life's deepest questions? Who wants to learn how to pray, how to approach God, how to find forgiveness for past sins, and how to find hope and faith for future endeavors? What can we offer him or her? Is it enough to say that words like God, soul, forgiveness, sin, prayer and faith are very troublesome and so don't get much attention in our churches? Is it enough to satisfy such a sensitive individual when we preach about world religions, global warming, gay rights, feminism, abortion rights, assisted suicide and the like? Is it enough to say to the earnest inquirer, here you are free to find your own spiritual path? When they probably came through our doors, thinking we could offer them one. The great American playwright Tennessee Williams became a Catholic towards the end of his life. When he was asked why, he replied to get some goodness back. Would someone become a Unitarian to get some goodness back? I doubt it. We don't deal in such categories. As James Wood wrote in The Guardian a few years ago, Unitarianism is tediously untragic, meaning that it is a fair weather religion which speaks to the optimistic and the comparatively prosperous and which confidently and often patronizingly addresses issues of social amelioration, which has little or nothing to say about the anxiety and despair which afflict us all, not because we are poor or disadvantaged, but just because we are human. Like so many people who convert later in life, I naively used to think that when people heard about Unitarianism, they would immediately be attracted to it. But it's not true. Very few of my friends and family have shown much interest, and our declining numbers demonstrate lack of interest generally. And it's not, as we sometimes condescendingly assume, because the vast majority of people are simple minded and in search of certainties. It is rather because people instinctively feel that life has more meaning than the sterile rationalization of our white Anglo-Saxon Protestant outlook, which will allow will allow, and so they go where their imagination can be fed, where their deepest instincts can be satisfied, where their sense of transcendent otherness can be explored. Our own ethical society masquerading as religion satisfies few human desires. We lost so much when we surrendered to contemporary naturalism. We need to start exploring boldly again, to become, in the words of John Pickering, spiritual pioneers. We need to stop the interminable agonizing over words, to let the spirit move us, to relearn the moon meaning and importance of prayer and of regular spiritual practice. And most of all, we need to discard our literalism and discover the centrality of poetry and imagination in religion. If we can do these things, if we can put as much emphasis on our interior life as we put on our political efforts, we can be a faith that matters.

SPEAKER_03 28:14

I'm going to share some words by Leslie Hoover Fales, and they include an adaptation of a Hebrew blessing. Following the poem, as is our tradition, we'll hold a few minutes of shared silence, which will end with the sound of a bell, and then we'll hear some music for meditation. So do whatever you need to do to be comfortable for these next few minutes. As ever, the words and music are just an offering. Feel free to use the time to meditate in your own way. All that we have been separately, and all that we will become together, is stretched out before and behind us, like stars scattered across a canvas of sky. We stand at the precipice, arms locked together like tandem skydivers working up the courage to jump. Tell me, friends, what have we got to lose? Our fear of failure, our mistrust of our own talents? What have we got to lose? A poverty of the spirit, the lie that we are alone, what wonders await us in the space between the first leap and the moment our feet, our wheels, however we move our bodies across this precious earth, touch down softly on unknown soil. What have we got to lose that we can't replace with some previously unimaginable joy? Blessed are you, Spirit of Life, who has sustained us, enlivened us, and enabled us to reach this moment. Give us courage in our leaping and gratitude in our landing, and share with us in the joy of a long and fruitful ministry together. It certainly seemed strange to me. And yet, there is evidence all around us that many of the best inventions languish ignored for long periods of time before being adopted, or are even passed over in favour of other less effective solutions. Okay, who here is old enough now to be thinking Betamax? There is an even better example, which the techies among you might be familiar with, and which Everett Rogers dives into in the book The Diffusion of Innovation. If you have a computer at home or are sitting in front of one now, you'll be familiar with the standard keyboard layout, known as QERTY, for the six letters which appear in the top left-hand corner. But do you know why those letters appear, where they do, in the order they do? If you do, shh, don't spoil it for everyone else. The QRT layout has been around long enough that it tends to feel as if that's just the way things are. But in fact, the earliest typewriters had their letters in a much easier to predict alphabetical sequence. The problem with this was that some letters that were often used together also sat right next to each other. So if the typist moved quickly, one of the hammers would pop up before the one next to it had gone down, and you'd end up with a clumsy tangle which had to be fixed before typing could continue. So the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow things down and prevent such tangles. When we moved from typewriters to computers, the QWERTY format moved over too, because people were used to it, even though the electronic keys couldn't tangle in the way that typewriters' mechanical hammers had, and so there was really no reason for it. And in 1932, a professor at Washington University, August Dvorak, did a time and motion study, figured out how much time was being wasted by this absurd inefficiency, and proposed a whole new keyboard design, which would eliminate the vast majority of these d delays. The Dvorak keyboard is provably vastly superior. Typists using it regularly beat world speed records. But what do you find when you go down to PC World for a new device? Yeah. Quirty. People are not logical. We like what we like, and what we like is predominantly what we know. All of which made me realise just how astonishing it was that Jesus' earliest followers, without a formal church to join, without the social proof of prominent citizens leading the way, without anything but a single charismatic individual with a new take on Judaism, were willing to drop what they were doing and sign up to support and promote his radical worldview. Matthew 4 tells the story of the first disciples this way. As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, Follow me and I will make you fish for people. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James, son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. In John I, Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip he said to him, Follow me, and Philip did. I don't think I would have been that brave. It took me ten years to go from I really like listening to my friend play the organ at Golders Green Unitarians to I think maybe I'm a Unitarian. For a supposedly intelligent person I can be very slow on the uptake. Which makes it all the more comical that for so long, like Bill Darlison, I naively used to think that when people heard about Unitarianism, they would immediately be attracted to it. After all, I wasn't immediately attracted, it took me ten years. But then I became a Unitarian, and then a minister. And then I forgot why Unitarianism had ever seemed strange, and wondered why anyone wouldn't immediately want to dive in and follow us. Don't get me wrong, I still think that if people were logical they would. Not everyone, of course, and by that I don't mean that I think some people are simple-minded and in search of certainties. Some people are attracted by firm doctrines, others are attracted by ritual or beauty or mysticism. For some people, logic and science just live in a different category to faith, and there's no need to test one against the other. But if you are the sort of person who likes to ask a lot of questions, it's open to reconsidering the answers when knowledge changes, and wants to test their faith against tough realities. Surely you'd want to be a Unitarian. It's only logical. Just as if people were logical, they would eat oranges to ward off scurvy, and type on the high-speed Dvorak keyboard instead of the deliberately cumbersome, quirty one. But people are, as we have seen, driven by many things besides logic. I very much do not agree with James Wood's words in The Guardian. Unitarianism is tediously untragic. Nor do I really agree with Bill Darlison's paraphrase. Unitarianism is a fair weather religion which speaks to the optimistic and the comparatively prosperous, and which confidently and patronizingly addresses issues of social amelioration, but has little or nothing to say about the anxiety and despair which afflict us all, not because we are poor or disadvantaged, but just because we are human. Unitarianism does, I acknowledge, speak more to the comparatively prosperous. Its intellectual demands require us to have a certain amount of headspace, which is rarely available to those who are struggling for day-to-day necessities. And it does speak to me as a natural optimist. But part of the reason it speaks to me is because it has something to say to the anxiety and despair which afflict me on occasions, not because I'm poor or disadvantaged, but because I am human. What it says to me is that the world is complex, and in its complexity lie many possibilities. The possibility of beauty, of progress, of greatness. I believe in Hans Rosling's brilliant thesis expressed in his book Factfulness, which has the subtitle, Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Rosling says that in general the world is getting better, and we only think it is getting worse because of a genetic bias towards negativity and a media bias towards attention grabbing, for which read negative headlines. We might not always move straight to the perfect solution, but give us time and we do get there. Scurvy was eventually eradicated in the merchant navy and marines.

unknown 43:58

Dr.

SPEAKER_03 43:58

Donald Ross performed the UK's first heart transplant with short-term success, leading to Sir Tower's English performing the first heart transplant with long-term success. And now hundreds of people are alive who would not previously have had a chance at life. Over time, medicine is advancing, life expectancies are increasing, and so in general are incomes and standards of living. Things are changing, and in many ways, over time they are changing for the better. These changes depend on people willing to try things that may not succeed, to take chances, to experiment. We need innovators and pioneers, radical thinkers and experimenters, and we need the people who are willing to follow in their footsteps, the early adopters, the disciples, who may not have the most visionary ideas, but have the courage to be able to step up and do things that aren't obvious, that aren't yet regarded as the norm. The first Unitarians were pioneers who thought differently about the Bible and asked questions that other people weren't asking, about the relationship between God and Jesus, the demands of faith and the promise of salvation. Along the way, Unitarians have pushed the boundaries in all sorts of ways. Our first female minister was in 1904, a long way ahead of most denominations. We have stood up where change is needed, supported gay ministers, worked for recognition of same-sex marriage, passed a motion in favour of trans rights, and we stand up for the need for spiritual foundations in an all-too material world. Unitarians nowadays may not center their faith around God or Jesus or the Bible, but we still center the difficult questions and we still hold that as humans, the things we do and the things we believe matter. Our meditation earlier asked us, what have we got to lose? Our fear of failure? Our mistrust of our own talents? What have we got to lose? A poverty of the spirit? The lie that we are alone? We do not need to be alone. We can be together even if our beliefs are not identical. Because we value the quest, the journey, the voyage of discovery. As Bill Darlison reminds us, we need to let the Spirit move us, to relearn the meaning and importance of prayer and regular spiritual practice. We need to start exploring boldly again, and to become, in the words of John Pickering, the spiritual pioneers. So may we be. And now we come to our third and final hymn, again in the green book. It's 166. All heroic lives remind us. Let's sing.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

Thanks to Benji and Blanca for the music. And thanks to Patricia and John for reading, and to John for greeting. Pat and Anna have disappeared, ready to make tea and coffee, so you can all rush to the hall soon after. And Ramon has brought some cake as it was her birthday this week. Our Minister Jane is on leave for a few weeks, but all our usual events are happening. Tonight on Friday at seven, we've got our online heart and soul online contemplative spiritual gathering. This week it's on the theme of influence. You need to sign up with Mandy for tonight or Helen for Friday night. You can find their email addresses on the Order of Service or in your Friday emails. Wednesday night we have the poetry group here in person. Please send any poems you have to me so I can print them out before the evening. Sonia will be here with Nea Dance on Friday lunchtime. It says have a word with Sonia. Sonia isn't here, but her details are on the back of the order of service. Next Sunday, the service will be led by Dr. Mel Prideau of Midwales Unitarian on the theme of listening. That will be followed by yoga with Hannah and our regular craft noon at one o'clock. We also have a late addition to the programme. After the service on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of May, we'll be hosting a screening of the People's Emergency Briefing. A 50-minute film about the climate emergency. Followed by a conversation about our responses and what we can do to bring about change. Jasmine is organizing, so perhaps you can ask her if you need any information or would like to speak about that. Our walking group is going to the Lee Valley on Tuesday the 26th of May. Please let Jane or Patricia know if you're planning to come along to that. And we'll let you know the precise meeting details. This month the Better World Book Club is talking about Is This Working by Charlie Kohler. And there's one copy left at the back if you wish to read the book. That's on the 31st of May on Zoom. Sign up if you plan to come. Details of all these various activities are on your order of service and also in the Friday email. So sign up for our mailing list if you haven't already done so. And the congregation very much has a life beyond Sunday mornings. We encourage you to keep in touch, look out for each other, and do what you can to nurture supportive connections. Now just time for our closing words and closing music.

SPEAKER_03 53:03

We extinguish our flame, a mere wisp of matter in process, almost as insubstantial as the thought of it. Yet our civilization has harnessed the power of such a flame to drive and shape a new world. So may it be with the power of our thoughts, that in truth and love they may drive and shape a better world. Amen.