Dear ones,
Recently, I spoke with a People’s person who received a tricky question from a coworker about our community. He wanted to learn how others answer this question. (Some of you might have seen part of this in our People’s Perpetual Coffee Hour Face-book group.) After I responded to him, I thought it might be worthwhile to share my answer to this question in the newsletter for everyone.
Is People’s Church part of a Christian denomination?
The short answer is “no” — People’s Church is not part of a Christian denomination.
Here is the longer answer:
People’s Church is part of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, which is not a denomination, technically, but lots of people call it one. (The difference has to do with church governance structures.) The UUA is the group of about 1,000 congregations that we partner with on things like training religious professionals, developing curriculum, and best practices for navigating a pandemic that would be very hard to do on our own. We also collaborate with other congregations – like for the upcoming UU Climate Justice Revival.
Both People’s Church and the UUA are not Christian organizations, though we have Christian members. We include people with lots of different beliefs who choose to be together, united by shared values, principles, and promises. We do not all believe the same thing – or say that we believe the same thing—which makes us unusual in the American religious landscape.
To make this even more complicated (because that’s just what we need, right?) both People’s Church and the UUA used to be Christian, though we haven’t been a Christian tradition for the last 100 years or so. Because of our Christian heritage many of the words we use (like church and minister) and practices we have (gathering on Sunday mornings, our order of service) reflect this… and the words ‘Unitarian’ and ‘Universalism’ are both words for specific Christian beliefs about God, words we still claim even though those beliefs aren’t what’s most important to us now.
Understandably, all of this can make us a little hard for a coworker to understand us.
I’m grateful that this People’s person brought their question to me. One of the things that I know is true is that whenever someone comes to me with a question, a wondering, or a struggle there are several other people in a similar situation. If you have a question you don’t know how to answer, an ethical quandary, a theological conundrum, or any-thing similar, please send it my way. We can talk it through – and, with your permission – it might be-come the topic of a future newsletter column or worship service.
Take good care, everyone,
Rev. Rachel