I met Rev Mwibutsa (Fulgence) at a Minister’s retreat. At the time, he lived in Burundi, where he was running the entire UU church of Bujumbura as a side gig. Around his full time job and his family. Every Minister in the circle has the same question, which was “tell me about your schedule?”
Rev Mwibutsa laughed, and said “that is a very Western question”. He explained that he did pastoral visits in the weekday evenings, wrote his sermon on Saturday, and preached on Sunday. There was dead silence, as we all thought “But when do you do your twenty hours of emails and meetings each week?”
The answer was, he doesn’t.
And I, who hadn’t yet started the UU Hysterical Society and was mucking around with the mission statement “I will train to serve Unitarian Universalism in a way that’s an embodiment of the values of Unitarian Universalism” needed to know exactly how he was doing all this.
This was at about the time of the “Congregations and Beyond” whitepaper. Unitarian Universalism was just beginning to try to figure out how to survive with far lower pledges and volunteer commitments in the coming years. We were (and are!) working on solving a problem that has already been solved in other parts of the world.
Mirth and Dignity runs very differently from how a congregation would run. Some of this we have taken from the world of business, some from content creator culture, and a whole lot of it we’ve learned by copying Flaming Chalice International. I knew I didn’t want to attend one more Board meeting that felt just like all the other Board meeting’s that preceded it… But without FCI, I wouldn’t have known how to set things up any differently.
Interested in learning more about FCI’s role in Mirth and Dignity? Check out “How Mirth and Dignity got its name”, or start the story right at the beginning with “Wait, What’s the Connection between Mirth and Dignity and Flaming Chalice International?” or go straight to those rivetting governance tips with “Learning from FCI” and “Not my potatoes”.
Interested in learning more about FCI’s work? Check out “The Not-a-Church we helped build”, or “How Flaming Chalice International got its Name” Or check out FCI’s website. We particularly recommend this story about Mwibutsa's mother. It’s really beautiful.
Liz James
President, Mirth and Dignity
This page has been updated to reflect Rev. Fulgence Ndagijimana’s new name: Rev. Mwibutsa (Fulgence) Ndagijimana.