Continuing a rich tradition

Since its second opening in 1954 the Unitarian Church of Edmonton has had a rich and varied history of taking action and supporting a variety of excellent causes. Some of those activities are detailed on the history pages of our church website http://www.ucehistory.org/

In the 1980's the church became known as a place where members of the LGBT community could meet safely at monthly pot-luck dances sponsored by church members. That was a time when finding safe places was a difficult thing. Our ties to the LGBT community have remained strong over the years as UCE has long been officially a Welcoming Congregation - meaning our members have done work at confronting our prejudices and have moved beyond tolerating diversity to accepting and welcoming it. We began doing services of Union for LGBT couples in 1974 and proudly began doing legal wedding ceremonies as soon as those oppressive laws changed.

What else do we do? For the last few years we have been working to alleviate homelessness and presently serve as a distribution point for the Edmonton Food Bank. That work is about to pick up again as our minister has become involved in an interfaith initiative supporting the Mayor's homelessness council. Look for more details of that in subsequent posts. Our church is also pursuing status as a Unitarian Universalist Green Sanctuary, a designation earned by assessing our footprint and taking on a variety of educational, worship-related and action oriented projects. On May 1 members of our Walker's Group and the Green Sanctuary team launched the very first Edmonton Jane's Walk in our Queen Mary neighbourhood. There should be a blog report on that soon. Two weeks ago we hosted a forum on Simplicity Circles focused on the environment. We hosted an excellent panel of well known Edmonton environmentalists and hope to have an on-line audio file available soon. Several ongoing Simplicity Circles are growing out of that. For more information contact Kat Hutter, dre@uce.ca

Our church boasts a vibrant Social Action Committee with a broad range of interests and concerns...we even have a whole bunch of glorious Raging Grannies in our midst!

This is important work that we do, important because it is an expression of a liberal faith lived daily through meaningful action. It is important because it helps the wider community outside our walls. But mostly it is important because a religious community needs to be more than just a group of people who gather one day a week. Our Unitarian principles call for us to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person and to acknowledge that we are part of an interdependent web of creation. These alone are reason enough to do justice work.

Rev. Brian Kiely