WHO ARE THE UU CHRISTIANS?
 

The short answer is: people trying to follow Jesus, without pretending certainty they do not possess.

But the longer answer goes back a ways.

Unitarian Christianity and Universalist Christianity are not modern attempts to make Christianity more palatable. They are old arguments inside the Christian family.

The Universalist stream reaches back to early theologians such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, who dared to imagine that God’s reconciling love might finally leave no one outside—not forever. The modern Universalist movement took organized form in America in the eighteenth century, through preachers including John Murray and Hosea Ballou. Their central conviction was plain and radical: God does not create human beings for eternal abandonment. Love wins because God is love. Gregory, among Christianity’s most influential early theologians, explicitly taught the eventual restoration of humanity.

The Unitarian stream runs through the radical Reformation in Poland and Transylvania, where Christians questioned the Trinity, defended religious freedom, and insisted that faith could not be coerced. In America, William Ellery Channing gave the tradition a public name with his 1819 sermon, “Unitarian Christianity.” Unitarians emphasized the humanity and moral authority of Jesus, the use of reason in religion, and the freedom—and responsibility—of conscience.

In 1961, the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America joined to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. By then, both traditions had grown beyond their exclusively Christian beginnings. Today, Unitarian Universalism includes humanists, Buddhists, pagans, Jews, Christians, atheists, seekers, and people whose religious identity does not fit neatly on any form. Still, the two historic denominations that joined were Christian traditions.

UU Christians are part of that larger, living pluralism.

Some believe in the Trinity. Some do not. Some speak easily of God; some hesitate over the word. Some understand the resurrection literally, others mystically, others as a question they are not finished asking.

What holds us together is not an answer sheet.

It is a covenant.

We gather around the life and teachings of Jesus, not because we have solved him, but because we have found in him a way worth following: toward mercy, courage, justice, forgiveness, truth-telling, table-sharing, and love strong enough to confront whatever diminishes life.

Which brings us to the question beneath the history lesson.

Do you have a place here?

If you are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, or still finding the words for who you are: yes.

If you doubt: yes.

If you are angry at God, or at the church that taught you to fear God: yes.

If you do not know much about Christianity, have never memorized the Bible, and are not entirely sure whether Galatians is a person or a place: yes.

If you are ashamed of who you have been, what you have done, or how long it has taken you to find your way here: yes.

Not merely because we are trying to be friendly.

Because Universalism says there is nowhere you can go where divine love finally gives up its claim on you. And because the covenantal heart of Unitarian Christianity does not ask you to recite the correct formula before joining the journey. It asks what you will pledge your life to. How you will love. Whether you will help repair the world entrusted to us.

Grace without exclusion. Commitment without coercion.

A faith wide enough to include you, and demanding enough to change you.

UU Christians are people freely following Jesus, in community with one another, toward what he called the Kingdom of God: not merely heaven after death, but heaven pressing toward earth. The hungry fed. The estranged reconciled. The captive set free. The discarded brought to the center. Love made practical.

We have not arrived there.

But there is room on the road.