Who We Are
Our Congregation
We are a liberal religious community welcoming anyone of any background. Our community includes Buddhists and Christians, atheists, agnostics, theists, spiritual journeyers of all kinds, and many for whom a label is not relevant.
We gather to explore religion together and to support each individual’s personal search for meaning and truth. We engage religion through our reason, through our feelings and sentiments, through our knowledge of the world and humanity. We read poetry together, listen to music and sing together, discuss Sunday reflections with each other, hold meals together – all to build the bonds of love and community that cradle our mutual religious exploration.
At the Free Congregation, we approach religion not as an answer to be unquestioningly accepted but as a set of questions to be continuously explored:
In what do we find the meaning of our existence? To what do we owe our ultimate loyalty? What brings worth and value into my life, and into the life of my community?We believe that religion is one of the great human endeavors. Like art, like literature, like science, religion is a creative adventure, a part of the human story. We feel free to consider critically the wisdom of religious traditions. We feel free to create new and personal religious perspectives, combining the wisdom of existing religious traditions with insights from philosophy, the sciences, from poetry and fiction, and especially from our own experiences.
If you want your encounter with religion to include exploration, adventure, conversation, loving support, sharing, critical challenge, then we are a good fit for you. Join us at one or more of our various programs!
Our Traditions
Our open approach to religion follows from our unique weaving of two liberal religious traditions. This weaving is always in process; we are an evolving religious community, and our emphasis and interests change over the years.
We are a Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. We belong to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), a liberal religious organization dedicated to a non-dogmatic approach to religion. Our congregation affirms the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association
- The inherent worth and dignity of every person
- Justice, equality and compassion in human relations
- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations
- A free and responsible search for meaning
- The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.
- The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
- Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
Our commitment to Unitarian Universalism is reflected in our Second and Fourth Sunday programs. On these Sundays, we follow a UU order of service.
We are a Free Thought congregation with origins in the German Freie Gemeinden (‘free congregations’ or ‘free societies’). When liberal reform efforts, both political and religious, failed in Germany after 1848, German liberals immigrated to the United States where they founded numerous free thought societies and congregations, most of them in the northeast and upper mid-west. One such German liberal, Eduard Schroeter, helped to found this congregation in 1852 and became its first Speaker (leader and teacher). Ours is the last remaining Free Congregation in North America.
Our commitment to the Freie Gemeinde tradition is reflected in our First Sunday (Spiritual Reflection Hour) and Third Sunday (Free Thought Forum) programs. Our current Speaker, Andrew Kerr, is not a minister but rather a layperson called by the community to lead our exploration of religion.
