Climate Change Comes Home: Unitarian Universalist Congregations Face Devastating Impact of Extreme Weather

Vermont beckoned when Scott Hess and his wife, Amy, were considering places to retire after years in Manhattan. Among other things, they wanted to avoid regions with water shortages and other consequences of global climate change.

Nothing terrible happens in Vermont, Hess recalled thinking when they chose to move to Montpelier in 2009. “Yes, it’s getting a little warmer here, like everywhere else, but it’s kind of safe.”

He chuckles ruefully. “Well—wrong!”

The Hesses found a place with water, all right—too much, it turned out. In 2011, when Vermont was hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene, he and others chalked it up as an aberration, a “hundred-year storm.” Then came the Great Vermont Flood of 2023. Over two days in July, it rained so much that much of the state was flooded and two people died. In Montpelier, many buildings were damaged, including the 160-year-old Unitarian Church of Montpelier, where Hess and his wife are members.

“We’ve now had two ‘hundred-year storms’ within a twelve-year period,” notes Rev. Joan Javier-Duval, minister of the 260-member congregation. The summer of 2023 also brought record-breaking Canadian wildfires, which rendered the Vermont skies so smoky people stayed indoors, and Hurricane Beryl in July 2024 brought more serious floods.

“If you follow science, it’s not a stretch to say this has to be climate change induced by human use of fossil fuels and our carbon emissions,” Javier-Duval says.

“Without a doubt, it will happen again,” adds Hess. Contrary to what he once believed, “This is not a problem that is somewhere else. Climate change is here.”

As Record-Breaking Extreme Weather Threatens UU Congregations, Insurance Companies Limit New Policies

Here, there, and everywhere: be it fires, drought, hurricanes, excessive rain,heavy winter storms, changing tornado patterns, no place on earth is safe from the ravages of human-fostered climate change.

Pick a single recent year in a single state: California in 2018 suffered the deadliest wildfire season in its history, with more than 100 deaths and entire towns wiped out. And in 2023 in Hawaii, the island of Maui, which each year grows hotter and drier, erupted in wildfires that killed over 101 people.

After 2023 registered as the hottest year on record, there is now a 61 percent chance that 2024 will be even hotter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with many extreme weather events expected.

The steady increase in billion-dollar disasters—2023 broke the record for them in the United States—is prompting some insurance companies to abandon hard-hit states. As of 2023, Farmers Insurance no longer writes policies in hurricane-vulnerable Florida, while in California, at least seven insurers, including Allstate, are limiting new homeowners’ policies.

For UU congregations, the climate crisis isn’t just on their doorsteps, it’s flooding over. In May 2024, the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge—a city with a series of climate disasters in recent years, including hurricanes, ice storms, and flooding—was informed by Church Mutual Insurance that it was dropping its coverage.

Indeed, a spokesperson for Church Mutual, one of the nation’s largest insurers for religious institutions, told UU World that in order to “mitigate the severe impact catastrophic weather has had—and will continue to have—on our bottom line and our ability to serve customers nationwide,” it is no longer providing property coverage in Louisiana.

Rev. Nathan Ryan, senior minister at the Baton Rouge congregation, scrambled for a replacement. “When I found one that’s almost double the cost, a colleague [from another church] told me, ‘Lock it down, we’re paying ten times as much,’” he recalls.

Ryan rattles off a jaw-dropping list of climate-related catastrophes over the past eight years: in 2016, 40 inches of rain in a few days led to floods that damaged or destroyed the homes of sixty families in the 300-plus person congregation.

“Without global climate change, you don’t have a flood like that,” says Ryan, “and in 2021 we had another big flood that got fifteen families.”

In the summer of 2020, five hurricanes hit Louisiana, and in 2021, the state was walloped by Hurricane Ida. Even though it didn’t hit Baton Rouge directly, parts of the city were without power for a week.

“And those are just the hurricanes,” Ryan says.

In 2023, South Louisiana endured fifty-five straight days of no rain and temperatures no lower than 80 degrees, with many days above 100; flowers died, even swampy areas were crispy. And the record-breaking ice storm that devastated Texas in 2021 also affected Baton Rouge, where Ryan’s young family, which includes two toddlers, went without power for eighteen hours.

“There’s a palpable dread you can feel in the congregation,” Ryan says. “The end of springtime, for us, is terrifying. We know bad stuff is coming. At the very least it’s going to be miserable for the next six months—with the heat to start with, but then you don’t know if a storm or a flood is going to come.”

The congregation’s climate support group, he adds, functions “almost as a pastoral support group for the upcoming climate.”

‘Climate Changes has Come Home’: UN Agency Projects 1.2 Billion Climate Refugees by 2050

Halfway across the country, members of First Unitarian Society of Westchester, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, continue to mourn the painful decision to sell their longtime building after flooding from Hurricane Ida in 2021.

“We cleaned it out, but we realized that because we’re in a flood plain and this was not the first time we flooded, this would keep happening, and we didn’t have the financial or emotional wherewithal to keep doing this,” says Denise Woodin, president of the Board of Trustees.

After almost three years of searching while holding its services in space generously shared by a local church, the congregation has signed a five-year lease in a space safe from flooding.

But maybe safety is an illusion. The entire globe, and everyone on it, is increasingly affected as the planet heats up. In other words, you can run but you cannot hide—there might not be any trees left to duck under.

Marginalized communities, those least responsible for climate change, are shouldering the heaviest burden: The National Institutes of Health projects 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050, and most refugees fleeing violence and persecution come from places particularly vulnerable to climate change, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

“There is no longer any distant devastation,” observes Rev. Deanna Vandiver, director of the College of Social Justice, a joint initiative of the UU Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Association. “The home you knew is going to change, whether it’s on fire itself or because people are coming in from places on fire or flooding.

“Climate change has come home.”

UUs Make Space for Spiritual Care and Mutual Aid amid Climate Crisis Grief

Confronting the crisis head-on—not that there’s much alternative besides denial—offers a spiritual invitation to shed delusions of human separateness and to reimagine our sense of home, Vandiver believes.

In this time of the Great Unraveling or the Great Turning, as she and others call it, major spiritual and societal shifts are called for, including a shift from paternalism and saviorism to mutual aid.

At General Assembly 2024, Vandiver co-presented a workshop, “Building Home Together: Spiritual Mapping Beyond Borders,” created in collaboration with BorderLinks, a CSJ partner in Tucson that offers experiential learning about migration and U.S. immigration policy. The workshop invites us to create a vision of a collective sense of home beyond borders, one resilient to climate disasters and geopolitical violence.

Recognizing the deep grief so many feel today, the workshop offers spiritual practices “that help us sustain a sense of home no matter what is happening,” she says, including rituals to acknowledge that grief.

“We all have to figure out how to flourish together,” she says. “One of the beautiful gifts of Unitarian Universalism is that it invites us to understand that we are already connected. So, part of our work is simply clearing out the illusions of disconnection. We aren’t building bridges—they’re already there.”

Through a series of serious challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic and years without a permanent home, the Hastings-on-Hudson congregation in New York hasn’t cancelled a single Sunday worship.

“Whatever we need to do to stay connected, we will do it,” says Susan Greenberg, Board treasurer.

And in this time of the Great Turning, the congregation is growing: four new members joined the eighty-member congregation this spring, and pledges during the current pledge drive are substantially higher than last year, says Rev. Arlin Roy, a member for fifty years and the congregation’s part-time minister.

After the flood, messages of support and care, and financial donations, poured in from around the country, including from other UU congregations, which “was a tremendous learning experience for me and a spiritual experience as well,” says Diane Guernsey, a lifelong UU.

“We can’t, as individuals, solve the climate crisis on our own, but it made me realize how much we all can do if we work together, and how really eager people are to reach out and help.”

Vermont UUs Work Together to Recover from Flood and Move Forward

At the UU church in Montpelier, scores of volunteers showed up to help clean up the tremendous mess of soaked and moldy materials in every nook and cranny of the flooded basement. And under the performance stage, where young member Anna Neuburger had crawled to grab whatever she could haul out, a message from the past emerged in the form of some very old blueprints.

“I don’t think anyone knew they existed,” says Javier-Duval. “We laid them out to clean them off a bit from the mud and discovered they were blueprints for renovations needed to the building after the 1927 flood, which was the last great flood in Montpelier” before last year’s.

“I kind of took it as a sign that while we have no idea what comes next, and how we’ll make it through this, and how we recover as a community, these blueprints were saying it is possible,” Javier-Duval says. “There is a way forward, there is a way to come back together and to start anew. We don’t have to feel lost.”

While the congregation has been concerned about the climate crisis for a long time, she says, “it was always more of a kind of distant, ‘oh, that’s happening over there’ situation. But this disaster has brought home the necessity of adaptation and resilience,” and the congregation is in discernment about what it means to be a climate-resilient congregation.

“I think one of the greatest spiritual tasks that facing the climate crisis invites us into, if not necessitates, is to be awake, to be in real relationship with the realities of our time in a way that is honest about the situation and willing to bear the pain that’s caused by it,” she says. “That to me is a real heart-stretching kind of spiritual task.

“But of course we can’t stop there. We know that we have to lean into our relationships to survive, that we’re not going to make it without community, without seeing how we are connected to the earth and learning to live in more mutuality with people and the rest of the environment and natural world we belong to,” she says.

That means “a commitment to actually put our bodies into action . . . to care for others in our community and show up, whether it’s showing up with a bucket to muck out mud from a neighbor’s house or showing up at a protest.” Action, she says, “both reinforces our sense of agency and, to me, is the cultivation of hope. When we join with others and take even what seems like a small action, we are making our hope active.”

Because, in the words of Rev. Sean Parker Dennison in the poem “How to Survive the Apocalypse”: “In order to survive the apocalypse—any apocalypse at all—we have to give up the counterfeit currency of self-sufficiency, the mistaken addiction to competition, the lie that the last to die has somehow survived.”