FOREWORD TO FELLOWSHIP: THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
The bulletins of the First Unitarian Fellowship of Carbondale are issued each week by a few members who do the typing, duplicating, folding, addressing and mailing. One year's volunteers dubbed themselves "The Benjamin Franklin Memorial Publishing Society"; and although the reference was intended to be taken lightly, it also revealed how much they valued the quality of talk and the spirit of fellowship as they shared their task. Kay Sanders was one of the volunteers that year, and one day when she went to mail the bulletins she noticed the Post Office announcements of stamps commemorating the nation's Bicentennial. She concluded that the Fellowship itself had lived through some interesting times during the latter half of the twentieth century. Later at a meeting of the Fellowship Board she proposed that a committee be appointed and charged with recording a history of the first twenty-five years of the Fellowship.
The modest account which follows is the result. It too was a shared task performed in good humor, amiability, and fellowship. When, for instance, Russell Trimble came up with the word "quinquennium" to describe half a decade, we were pleased -- not out of pedantry, but because it then provided us with the delightful abbreviation "quinq." There was no professional historian or writer on the committee, but with lively spirit we embarked on our journey of recollection. The committee dusted off - quite literally, in some ways -- accumulations of weekly bulletins, the Fellowship files, the minutes, the copies of those Sunday talks which had been duplicated and saved, and personal reminiscences.
At the first meeting it was agreed that an anthology of sermons alone would not suffice -- not only because a representative selection would be difficult, but also because other concerns of the Fellowship, even mundane and trivial ones, might reveal more fully its life and times.
At subsequent meetings members read aloud what they had written down, with the others then trying to fill in gaps, making suggestions, adding, deleting, rewriting and revising. No one had personal pride of authorship. Everyone said, "Rewrite the whole thing if you want to." The result is truly a group collaboration by the following people named in alphabetical order: Lillian Adams, Will Gay Bottje, Lenore Brooks, Cameron W. Garbutt, Gladys R. Jones, Wilbur C. McDaniel, Carolyn Moe, Willis Moore, David and Jean Ray, Russell F. Trimble, and Rachel Wendt.
The writers expect that others will find errors and omissions. They expect and hope, that each reader will add his own marginal notes and that someday someone with more perspective will delve once again into the history of this microcosm, this Fellowship.
Fellowship. That is the key to what we have tried to express here: general friendliness and companionship, the community of feeling, the mutual comfort and sustenance, the tolerance and forbearance -- even, or especially the capacity for disagreement, for seldom have the members of the Fellowship been fully unanimous in agreement.
The final meeting of the History Committee took place in December, 1977, just two hundred years after the Continental Army had retired to a winter of bleakness and suffering at Valley Forge. The principles for which they endured that trying time remain our bulwark. This account, in all its modest and humanity, its large and petty concerns, must above all bear quiet testimony to those principles. Freedom -- particularly freedom of belief and expression -- is at the very heart of the existence of The First Unitarian Fellowship of Carbondale, Illinois.
Carolyn Forman Moe
Chairman, History Committee
1978