About UUCA >

HISTORY

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta (UUCA), has grown from Universalist (1879) and Unitarian (1882) churches and since 1966 has been located at 1911 Cliff Valley Way. With about 800 members and contributing friends, UUCA is the largest UU church in the Atlanta area. Our size lets us maintain many programs, both within the congregation and the larger community.

ROOTS IN NEW ENGLAND AND CONSTANTINOPLE

The history of a church is inevitably a description of the individual cultures in which it arose and of its people. The history of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta is intricately woven in the south, with slavery and the early civil rights movement of the 1860s. Unitarian leaders in Massachusetts (in accord with the preaching of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing) considered themselves progressive and persuasive. They sent Universalist and Unitarian "missionaries" into the south to promote abolitionist and reconstructionist programs.

Their controversial theological positions actually began as early as the third century, when Origen defied the Christian thought of his time by proclaiming that God would save everyone, not just believing Christians. In the fourth century, a thinker by the name of Arius lost the Nicean debate in Constantinople by claiming that Jesus was like God, he was not the same as God. These two thoughts (the goodness of God, Who would not care for only a select few, and the essentially unitary nature of God) form the two historical streams of "Universalist" and "Unitarian" thinking.

This essential push-and-pull between U-U philosophy and its Christian foundations is nowhere more evident than in the five different names which Atlanta Unitarians chose to designate themselves over its 116-year history: in 1882 when it was founded, The Church of Our Father; in 1904, The Unitarian Church of Atlanta; in 1918, when Unitarians united with Atlanta Universalists (heretofore a separate stream of liberal churchmen), The Liberal Christian Church; in 1927, The United Liberal Church; and finally, when its current site was chosen on Cliff Valley Way in 1965, The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta.

UU HEROES

Both Unitarians and Universalists were at the forefront of ethical and social reform in the nation at large. According to Dr. Edward Frost, Senior Minister Emeritus, in a three-part sermon called Three on Spirituality, "the Universalists were the first denomination in America to denounce slavery, in 1790. They were among the first to advocate birth control as public policy. Among the Universalists were one of the founders of the nation, Benjamin Rush; Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross; Adin Ballou, the pacifist who influenced Leo Tolstoy, Ghandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Thomas Starr King; and Olympia Brown, who, in 1863, was the first woman in America, of any denomination, to be ordained as a minister. And, yes, Phineas T. Barnum was a Universalist.

"Unitarians also have heroes," continues Dr. Frost. "The English scientist, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in the 1770s, was a British clergyman who sided with the revolutionaries in America and France. His neighboring British clergy incited mobs against him and burned down his house and laboratory and drove him from the country. [The very religious intolerance that drove out thousands of others.] Priestley came to America, where he founded Unitarian churches in Pennsylvania and preached to John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson."

RECONSTRUCTION: AGGRESSIVE MISSIONARIES AND EDUCATORS

The hundreds of Unitarian churches in New England united as a denomination to become a national presence in 1865, and formed the American Unitarian Association. Dr. Robert W. Karnan (minister of Northwest Unitarian Congregation when UUCA’s 100-year History was written in 1983) wrote that, "Following the civil war it was understood that the progressive Unitarians were in an aggressive missionary mood. They helped found new Unitarian churches and new public libraries." These northerners were especially interested in sending educators to the South, to found high quality schools intended for anyone, "regardless of race, who desired a fine education." They were interested in enlightened, informed thinking on all matters, religious and otherwise.

In 1862, the AUA sent the Rev. George Leonard Chaney to establish the first Unitarian congregation in Atlanta. Rev. Chaney not only began preaching to a congregation of ten attendees, but also solicited his community for money for books. They built the first free lending library, which pointedly included in its patrons women and people of color. The private Young Men’s Library did not. His effort was so impressive that the Carnegie Foundation founded a public library on the very site of Chaney’s church, buying their building, which sat where the current Atlanta-Fulton Public Library now sits in downtown Atlanta. Karnan reports, "this example was so powerful that church members living in Marietta, Georgia, began a public library there [also supported by northern Unitarian churches, and to which Oliver Wendell Holmes donated a full set of his published works]. This is now the Cobb County Library.

"Before coming to Georgia, Rev. Chaney had been heavily engaged in forming schools in Massachusetts for immigrant children who were struggling in urban ghettos and could obtain only menial employment. He continued that work in Atlanta, where he enlisted the help of his Unitarian membership to found the Artisans Institute in Atlanta, an effort to provide an adult, advanced technical-training school. Georgia Tech emerged out of that effort. Chaney also served on the board of trustees of the Atlanta University system and Tuskegee Institute, again showing his concern that all people have access to excellent education. In line with the modern precept that what you put out is what you draw to you, Chaney later remarked that his church "was fortunate to have artists, musicians, ministers, and statesmen" among them. "I doubt if any evenings so replete with good literature and accomplished art were ever held in Atlanta as those held in this church under the auspices of the Literature and Art Club," he wrote. By the time he retired in 1890, his congregation had an average attendance of sixty. This intellectual and artistic mix is still a fountainhead of Atlanta Unitarianism.

INANCIAL WOES: THE LOCAL UNITARIAN & UNIVERSALIST WEDDING

From 1890 to 1915, the Atlanta congregation had many ups and downs, failing, it appears, to comprehend their responsibility for their own financial affairs. Robert Karnan deplores their "constant begging of their parent organization, the American Unitarian Association in Boston, for support." In 1915, a new beginning was attempted and a church on West Peachtree was built. Stained glass windows were dedicated to George Chaney and his wife, and these became known as the Founders Windows and can be found currently hanging in UUCA's (parking-lot) entrance hall.

In 1918, the Universalists, who had founded churches in other, largely rural, Georgia communities (as early as 1837 in Macon) were also in financial trouble, and sought out what Karnan called "an uneasy alliance" with Atlanta's Unitarians. The Universalists were largely segregationists, and the urban Unitarians were integrationists. "Universalists sat on one side of the aisle, Unitarians on the other; a Universalist usually held the treasurer’s post, while a Unitarian became president of the board. They alternated ministers... until, in 1926 the Rev. Clinton Lee Scott came and 'hit the ground running,' and roused the congregation to a three-year goal of ‘doubling all the resources of the church, in members, finances, and in members of auxiliary organizations.'" Rev. Scott wrote later, "Atlanta was rather primitive at that time, with no hard roads leading into the city. Every institution, including all churches, was Jim Crow. There was an elaborate system of intercolor relations baffling to a Yankee . . . I found all such superficial but deeply rooted formalities difficult to live with, and I never could explain them to my children." In addition to fighting racial injustice, Scott took on the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and renowned Southern Methodist Bishop Warren A. Candler, who did not like liberals. Bishop Candler wrote a pamphlet, "The Menace of Unitarianism," which made Unitarians responsible for the doctrine of evolution, the secularization of religion, and all social reforms not approved by the author. Scott promptly bought large quantities of these pamphlets and used them for publicity for the church.

By the late 1940s, the congregation had dwindled (over segregationist issues) to a mere handful again, and the AUA in Boston stepped in and outright sold the West Peachtree Street building. It was not until the early 1950s that the AUA sent the Rev. Glenn Canfield, who established an integrationist liberalism that sat well. He held services for a year at the Briarcliff Hotel and offered his congregation the opportunity to "talk back" in response to his sermons. A year later, a building at 605 Boulevard was purchased from the Mormons, and the group grew to 127 members. The Rev. Ed Cahill replaced him in 1957 and the city, as Cahill reported in an anniversary letter to the church, came "to know where the church stood on the critical issues. The church was integrated, not just desegregated." Whitney Young, then Dean of the Atlanta School of Social Work (and later national head of the Urban League), was a black member of the Board of Trustees. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., then assistant to his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, was a pulpit guest, as was Sam Williams, another outstanding black minister. Two incidents that occurred during this period:

 

• Atlanta University students had organized a sit-in at the segregated lunch counter in Rich’s. Several hundred were arrested for trespassing, and jailed. On Sunday morning during the talk-back at the service, the chairman of the Public Affairs Committee asked how many members would be willing to return their Rich’s charge cards in protest. Over a hundred hands went up, and over a hundred cards were in the mail that afternoon.
• The second illustration involved the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Coretta Scott King was leader of the Youth Group. The two churches arranged joint Sunday evening programs, alternating between them, so black and white young people could get to know one another.

The Klan called Mrs. Cahill and threatened violence at the next Sunday evening meeting at the United Liberal Church [the Unitarians]. Unitarian officials consulted Coretta King [regarding the options] and she said to go ahead [with the meeting]. All parents were called to give them the option of keeping their children home. Not one parent held back. In fact, all the fathers came that evening and ringed the church outside to form a visible wall of protection.

FROM RADICAL RELATIONS TO PERSONAL GROWTH

In 1962, Rev. Eugene Pickett replaced Cahill and "guided the church to full and prosperous maturity." By the end of his 12-1/2 year ministry, the membership had grown eightfold, to 1,040 members in 1974. The fifth and present church building was overflowing and two new satellite churches were organized. In November, 1962, the Boulevard church was sold; a prospective new site between Lenox and Roxboro Roads generated much local neighborhood resistance and a building permit was denied for "potential traffic congestion." Again, in 1963, a bid to buy a Methodist church at Cheshire Bridge and Sheridan was rejected by the local community.

Finally, the present site at Cliff Valley Way was purchased and ground broken in January, 1965, and in February the group changed its name to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. The church was finished by the end of the year at a cost of $449,000, and the first service held on January 2, 1966. Pickett continued to lead in the fights for human and civil rights in the sixties, and when the heat of those battles cooled and the chief concern became personal growth, he continued to lead the church well, and the congregation shifted under his leadership. For the first time, the church added a second full-time professional to its staff, Edgar Toby Van Buren, who later wrote:

“Survivors of the late sixties will remember times of massive upheaval and conflict. The church reflected these conflicts, suffered with them, and also tried to be a field for dialog and working-out of differences. In this it partially succeeded. We had untold numbers of meetings, sermons, and counter-sermons. Fortunately, through all of this, UUCA maintained its sense of humor. It seemed that people would define some project or area as their own sacred turf– an understandable way of coping with the largeness of the church and the unsettling pace of change.”

Due to the growth of Unitarian Universalism in Atlanta, a spin-off congregation (with 10% of UUCA’s members and 25% of its budget) was started in the Liberty Guinn School in northside Atlanta in 1968. In 1977, this congregation became the Northwest UU Congregation, at 1025 Mt. Vernon Highway. In 1976, eight people joined with the Rev. R. Lanier Clance in his living room in Decatur and eventually formed the First Existentialist Church of Atlanta and built its membership to 450 members by 1981. A third Unitarian group was organized in May 1981, with 50 founding members in Stone Mountain (the group no longer exists). In May, 1982, 32 former members of the Northwest Unitarian Congregation met at the DeKalb Federal Savings and Loan (a bank in southeast Cobb county), and formed the Emerson Fellowship.

When Don Jacobsen came to UUCA in 1970 as minister of education, he built a strong religious education program from the diversity of UUCA’s lay membership: "Thirteen groups of children are in our building, and something of significance is going on in each group . . . and our lay teachers are a special joy: college professors are challenged by the high energy and short attention spans of bright fourth, fifth, and sixth graders; attorneys, administrators, architects, psychologists, and research scientists are excited by the sensitivity of our older children; social workers, physicians, sales reps, market analysts, and computer programmers experience the tender wonder of creating a nourishing religious environment for preschoolers." The RE program remains an essential part of UUCA’s focus today.

From 1976 to 1979 UUCA had no senior minister, interim or otherwise, and Don Jacobsen and a strong lay leadership held the church on course. The Rev. David Oran Rankin headed and tamed the fractious congregation and brought us through 1979 to 1982.

In 1982, the Rev. Terry Sweetser took ministerial leadership of UUCA, and was succeeded in 1989 by the Rev. Edward Frost. In 2000 the Rev. Suzanne Meyer joined UUCA as Associate Minister and worked closely with Dr. Frost and the Adult Religious Education program. And, in mid-2003, Rev. Paula Gable joined UUCA as Associate Minister and served through 2006. Following Dr. Frost's retirement in May 2005, the Rev. David Keyes joined UUCA as Interim Senior Minister.

Personal spiritual growth from many diverse religious roots remains a major focus of UUCA’s Sunday morning services, and social concerns still occupy many of UUCA’s 700 members. The congregation supports many different social justice projects and on Wednesday evenings, the congregation gathers to replicate George Chaney’s fellowship "so replete with good literature and accomplished art," through programs of interest to the membership. These weekly gatherings encourage UUs to meet to share the provocative ideas that make responsible individuals sensitive to themselves, their community, and the world.