(Note: I'm not going to go into a lot - or any - discussion of UU theology or philosophy. If you're interested in that, go here.)
I'm a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fort Wayne, and when I was a teenager I was a member of First Unitarian Church in Omaha. Up until November, those were pretty much the only two UU churches I'd ever attended services in, along with the Arlington Street Church in Boston, which is the Rome of Unitarian Universalism, if one can say such a thing.
But since November I've attended services at UU congregations in (in chronological order) Omaha (First Church), Seattle (University Unitarian), Austin (First Church), Las Cruces, Silver City, Fort Wayne, Chattanooga, and Savannah.
As one might expect, there's quite a bit of variety. Some of these churches are giant (Seattle had about 200 people at its first service) and some are tiny (Silver City meets in a building the size of a large body shop). Some meet in historic old buildings (Omaha, Savannah) and some meet in very cool 1950/1960-era buildings (Seattle, Fort Wayne, Chattanooga). A number of the churches have new ministers, some have long-time ministers, and one is a lay-led fellowship. At some of the congregations I was very, very warmly greeted and at others I was barely noticed. [Aunt Susie, a Methodist minister's wife, points out that there's an inverse relationship between size of the congregation and the attention paid to visitors. This is not a denominational - or even a religious - phenomenon.] Some services have liturgy very similar to what I am used to in Fort Wayne, and some are quite different. One thing they all have in common is coffee hour, coffee and conversation serving roughly the same function for UU's as wine does in some other religions.
But so far I've never found a congregation with as interesting a history as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah. Part of my fascination is my continued naivete about the South, so go ahead and roll your eyes now. Yes, it's finally starting to sink in that the South has experienced American history differently than the Midwest. I've got it.
To begin. The Unitarian congregation in Savannah traces its roots to the 1820's, when east coast cotton merchants moved to Savannah (which eventually became the largest cotton exchange in North America). The theological liberals among them brought Unitarianism, and a society was established. The church fell into troubles and sold its building to the Baptists in the late 1840's. A few years later a benefactor gave them enough money to build another church in Oglethorpe Square. The minister at this time was John Pierpont, Jr., from Massachusetts, son of another Unitarian minister and prominent abolitionist. John Junior's brother, James, served as music director and wrote Jingle Bells. The next generation of Pierponts included John Pierpont Morgan, the financier.
So far that's all sort of interesting, but not too much - although admit it, the Jingle Bells thing is especially cute having been written in coastal Georgia. Childhood memories endure.
But in the late 1850's it gets intriguing. Remember how I said that the Pierpont brothers' father was a prominent abolitionist? Well, the brothers were split on the issue. That whole "brother against brother" thing is not a throwaway line. And the brothers' split apparently reflected a split within the congregation. So in 1859 the congregation disbanded. The building was sold to the Episcopal church, who sold it to a black congregation. That congregation wasn't allowed to be in Savannah proper, so the stone building was disassembled and moved, block by block, to its current location in Troup Square which at the time was apparently not inside Savannah.
A Unitarian presence didn't reemerge in Savannah until the late 1950's - a century later. It was very small at first, and rented space in the YWCA until the congregation's active support for civil rights caused the Y to ask them to leave. They called a minister in 1990 (whom I believe is a colleague of the Minister Emerita of the Fort Wayne UU Congregation) and in the mid-1990's raised the money to buy the Troup Square church back. Considerable renovation ensued, and it's a really lovely church. They just called a new minister this year and his installation was apparently yesterday, while I was getting new tires in Jacksonville.
Here's a picture from their website. I didn't take any inside shots out of respect and because I assumed there'd be some online. I couldn't find any but let's just say that the inside of the building looks the way you'd think it would after seeing the outside. It's beautiful.
This post may be of limited interest to people other than Unitarian Universalists, and perhaps not even to many of them, but I found the story remarkable. We live in a big country, and even though I like to think I've paid attention for forty-uh-hum-some years, travelling has been an eye-opening experience.
More on Savannah later. One thing all Americans have in common, north, south, east and west: we sure do like butter.
*Okay, not every Sunday I was in Omaha.
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