Des Moines / Iowa / United States
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines is a religious community of over 500 members and friends. Our community encompasses people from newborns to those in their 90s, offering the opportunity for many intergenerational interactions. We are a geographically diverse group as well, stretching from Jasper County to Dallas County, from Warren County to Story County. In addition to two Sunday services ands one Saturday service, First Unitarian offers religious education experiences for adults and youth throughout the year as well as special events that bring our church community together. Our congregation is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations ( UUA ) which represents the interests of more than one thousand Unitarian Universalist congregations, with 200, 000 members and children in North America. The UUA grew out of the 1961 consolidation of two religious denominations: the Universalists, organized in 1793, and the Unitarians, organized in 1825. For more information on the UUA, visit its web site http: //www.uua.org Unitarian Universalism is a non-creedal liberal religion that is over 400 years old. Its religious roots are Christian, but todays Unitarian Universalists ( UUs ) encompass a large spectrum of religious backgrounds and spiritual beliefs. Freedom, tolerance and reason are our guiding principles. Some well-known UUs include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Clara Barton, John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Pete Seeger, P.T. Barnum, Kurt Vonnegut, Louisa May Alcott, Isaac Newton, Eliot Richardson, Whitney Young, and many more. Many consider First Unitarian Church of Des Moines to be the birthplace of Religious Humanism. Our minister in 1917, Curtis W. Reese, delivered a sermon, "A Democratic View of Religion, " that became instrumental in the formative stages of the Humanist movement in the United States. When the American Humanist organization was formed in 1941, he became its first president. We believe that personal experience, conscience and reason should be the final authorities in religion. In the end, religious authority lies not in a book, person or institution, but in ourselves. We put religious insights to the test of our hearts and minds. First Unitarian Church is a Welcoming Congregation for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered ( GLBT ) persons. The congregation became a Welcoming Congregation in 1992 after a period of study and reflection by congregation members. First Unitarian was one of the first churches in the country to be given this designation by the Unitarian Universalist Association. First Unitarian fulfills its role as a Welcoming Congregation by offering GLBT persons a religious home free of discrimination and supporting GLBT events in the community. During the Second World War, an American Unitarian, Reverend Charles Joy, was stationed in Lisbon to help refugees from Nazism escape to safe havens. As executive director of the Unitarian Service Committee, he felt that this new organization needed some visual image to represent Unitarianism to the world. He commissioned a Czech refugee and cartoonist, Hans Deutsch, to design something that could be used on official documents, and thus an early version of the modern chalice came into being. Joy described what Deutsch had drawn in the following terms: "A chalice with a flame, the kind of chalice which the Greeks and Romans put on their altars. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of helpfulness and sacrifice.... This was in the mind of the artist. The fact, however, that it remotely suggests a cross was not in his mind, but to me this also has merit. We do not limit our work to Christians. Indeed, at the present moment, our work is nine-tenths for the Jews, yet we do stem from the Christian tradition and its central theme of sacrificial love." Today, the flaming chalice is the official symbol of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Officially or unoffic
