WHAT WE BELIEVE

Let’s begin with what you may have come here to find out.

There is no creedal test.

No catechism to memorize. No doctrinal checkpoint where someone asks whether your understanding of the Trinity, the resurrection, salvation, scripture, or Jesus is sufficiently correct.

You do not have to pretend certainty you do not possess.

Members of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship hold a wide variety of beliefs. Some understand God personally; others as the holy depth within life. Some pray to Jesus. Some follow Jesus without being sure what they believe about him. Some speak of resurrection as a historical event, some as a living spiritual reality, and some are still standing near the empty tomb, wondering what on earth to make of it.

There is room for all of this.

Most UU Christians do not read the Bible as a flawless document dictated by God. We receive it as something stranger, messier, and more alive: a library written, gathered, edited, and preserved by human beings trying to make sense of their encounters with the Divine.

Scripture contains liberation and domination. Courage and cruelty. The widening circle of grace, and the human impulse to draw the circle shut.

So we read with reverence, but not surrender. With scholarship, imagination, historical awareness, and attention to those whose voices have been silenced. We ask not only, “What does this passage say?” but also, “Who has used it, and for what?” “Whom does this interpretation protect?” “Whom does it harm?” “Where, in these words, is life trying to break free?”

We differ about Jesus, too.

Some UU Christians call Jesus the Son of God. Some call him a teacher, prophet, healer, liberator, mystic, rabbi, or wisdom-bearer. Some believe he reveals God uniquely. Others believe his life shows what becomes possible when a human being is radically available to love.

But across these differences, we keep returning to him.

To the one who touched the untouchable. Ate with the excluded. Challenged religious hypocrisy. Blessed the poor. Confronted empire. Told inconvenient stories. Wept at a grave. Forgave his enemies. And kept widening the table until the respectable began to worry about where all of this might lead.

We return to Jesus not because we have solved him.

Because he has not finished troubling us.

What UU Christianity Is Not

No creed does not mean no commitments.

UU Christianity is not fundamentalism: the claim that one interpretation of scripture must silence every question and overrule every human experience.

It is not partialism: the belief that God’s love is finally reserved for some people and withheld from others.

It is not exclusivism: the insistence that only one religious path contains truth, goodness, or access to the Holy.

It is not Christian Nationalism: the use of Christian symbols to sanctify political power, racial hierarchy, cultural supremacy, or the domination of one group by another.

And it is not any form of Christianity that weaponizes the gospel against people because of their race, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, history, body, family, or way of loving.

People arriving from these traditions are welcome. Many of us have arrived from them ourselves, carrying both wounds and wisdom.

But theologies of domination are not neutral variations within UU Christianity. A gospel used to divide and conquer has been turned against its own purpose. The good news, if it is good, must help join and heal and strengthen. It must move us toward liberation. Toward repair. Toward the dismantling of white supremacy and every system that sorts human beings into those who deserve fullness of life and those who do not.

This does not mean we agree about everything. It does not mean UU Christianity comes with a partisan platform.

It means love cannot be separated from justice.

What Holds Us Together

Not uniform belief.

A shared journey.

We study scripture. We pray and sing. We think, doubt, argue, celebrate, grieve, serve, organize, repent, and begin again. Some approach the tradition through scholarship; others through worship, contemplation, activism, art, or the ordinary discipline of trying to love the people in front of them.

The Universalist inheritance tells us that no one is finally disposable.

The Unitarian inheritance reminds us that faith is freely chosen and faithfully lived: not merely something we claim, but a covenant we practice.

Together, they call us toward a Christianity large enough to welcome the whole human family, and demanding enough to ask something of us once we arrive.

So bring your beliefs.

Bring your doubts about your beliefs.

Bring your anger, your hope, your questions, your complicated history with church. Bring the parts of Christianity you still love and the parts you cannot yet bear to touch.

You do not have to settle every question before you join us.

You only have to be willing to join the community.

And join the journey.

UUCF History

The Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship (UUCF) was founded in Boston in 1945 and has members and small groups across the country. We are a major producer of progressive Christian events, publications, online communities, and resources. We are in relationship with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and we are in communication and relationship with UU Christians around the globe.

We hope this website will allow you to go deeper into the ancient, living and thriving tradition of Christianity based on freedom and not dogma. Although many discover the UUCF through a Unitarian Universalist church, some have deciced to join the UUCF even though they are not Unitarian Universalists. Still others have been interested in UUCF's historical witness and want to affirm it, without laying claim to the title of Christian for oneself. True to our tag line of "Freely Following Jesus," we trust that if you are drawn to participate in the UUCF, the Holy Spirit is leading you in the right direction!

Below are a few links to articles about our heritage:

Christian Voices in Unitarian Universalism

Dave Dawson: “I share a desire for the freedom to test the outer limits of my Christian faith. Within my church I am not told I am wrong, just looked at quizzically when I say I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ…I remain a UU Christian as a witness to those in mainline Christianity that, yes, universal salvation is alive and well, and it is a beautiful option for those people mired in shame-based churches."  

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