Janet and John Foord

Janet and John Foord

Janet:

We started attending the Unitarian Church in Summit in 1962. We went there because we were living in Rome and had been taking our 5-year-old twins to visit the catacombs and wherever we went, the nuns would say, “Bones of Christians, bones of Christians, tee he, tee he.” Then one of our sons asked, “Do we know any Christians?” and we that we realized that we had not been attending to their religious education. The Unitarian Church was the obvious choice for us. I had been a Unitarian in college, but John had been relapsed Presbyterian.

When we started at the church, we did not become members. I didn’t become a member for 30 years. I happened to become a member because David, who was the minister, said that he would have an amnesty for anyone who wanted to join the church. Amnesty meant that you didn’t have a breakfast in your honor and that it was not recognized in the newsletter. There were 30 of us who joined the church on that occasion, and no one ever knew it.

John, on the other hand, has never joined the church because he doesn’t believe in organized religion and at that time, we can certainly say, our church was not organized.

One thing about the services in those days is that they were all conducted by the minister. We never had visiting speakers. The minister spoke and the only time the audience was allowed to speak was at the feedback, which we had at the end of every service. There was this one woman who was always the first to stand up during the feedback. She brought up every item that she was interested in; it had nothing to do with the sermon and it was not feedback. She would go on and on and on to the point where we had to get rid of the feedback.

However, when I was on the board (not yet a member), they asked us to give short speech, so I said that our marriage was much like the church. At that time, we did not know what to do with our two different properties. We had the same problem with our marriage. John wanted a sheep farm in New Zealand, and I wanted an apartment in Paris. He moved on to preferring Oregon and we compromised and stayed in New Jersey.

John:

I was involved in the church when LRY [Liberal Religious Youth] existed. LRY was created by the church around 1899 and it was doing very well. It was independent of the church, other than the church giving them space. They were defunded by manipulations of the UUA in Boston. They were a very, very wild group that could do basically what they wanted. They had their own funding, primarily from former LRY members who left them money.

They were a great group that did an awful lot of work for a lot of people. For 10 years, I was an advisor to them and had a great time. I’d always say that they were my psychoanalysts. They did such a great job with me. I was an old-fashioned 1950’s kid with no ideas, and here was this 1970’s group that was beyond liberal, but not quite radical. It really helped a lot to give them the chance to speak their piece.