Our Mission is to create a Beloved Community acting together with compassion, reason, and respect, empowering us to promote a just society.
Join us
Sundays at 11:00 am
Though masking is optional, we encourage a culture of mutual care.
All of who you are is sacred!
All of who you are is welcome!
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta is a place where individuals are encouraged and supported in developing a meaningful, relational, responsible spiritual path. An active, faith-full, shared journey of love for ourselves, each other, and the world.
Just as each individual experiences a unique spiritual journey, our people come to church for a variety of reasons. Some come from a place of deep personal longing, transition, or crisis. Some seek encouragement and community. Some long for a place in which they can renew themselves and the world through progressive values and action. Others seek a place for new and meaningful family tradition. Many long for a deep spiritual grounding. And many desire to reflect on what all of the above means - spending a lot of time with the question, 'why?' Together, we seek to meet each of these needs and more.
Embodying our deeply held values of compassion, equity, justice, and inclusivity, we actively center the experience and needs of folks with targeted identities. Folks whose liberation is most immediately necessary. Whether part of our community or not. If you are often expected to keep part of you hidden, we welcome and celebrate all of who you are! Your whole, holy, sacred being. We also practice a deep, shared reverence and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a small yet integral part. With special concern as stewards of our precious, life-sustaining, endangered planet.
Above all, we make sacred promises to each other and the world. We covenant to live with love and integrity as we embody our mission within, among, and beyond us.
We meet every Sunday morning at 11 AM and we invite you to join us in person or on zoom.
OUR CONGREGATION
Founded in 1954, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta (UUCA) offers a progressive religious community to the residents of the Central Savannah River Area. UUCA cherishes diversity in all its forms. Our members and friends hold myriad intersectional identities. And, our members and friends are grounded by a variety of theologies: humanism, naturalistic theism or earth-centered spirituality, paganism, and Christianity. We also have mystics, pantheists, atheists, agnostics, and skeptics.
What brings us together is an abiding and active love for ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
"We need not think alike to love alike." - Ferenc Dávid (16th Century Unitarian Theologian)
A Message From Our Minister, Rev. Nic Filzen
BUILDING BELOVED COMMUNITY
"Our mission is to create a Beloved Community ..." These are the first words of our mission statement -- a mission statement that was one of the main deciding factors for me to serve this congregation. I can't think of anything more worthy for me to spend my life supporting. But, what does "Beloved Community" mean? In a way, it is comparable to "Heaven on Earth." But not a Heaven where peace and perfection are found and maintained for eternity. Rather, a Heaven in which everyone acknowledges and serves the Interdependent Web of Existence of which we are a part. Again and again. With integrity and compassion. Especially when a mistake is made which harms another. Which harms ourselves. A Heaven in which restorative justice is front and center and folks are lovingly held accountable and make amends for the pain they cause. Especially when the pain was amplified by a power imbalance that favors individualism over and above relationality.
As of right now, this world is nowhere near Beloved Community which is why it's so necessary to include it in our mission statement. We are nowhere near a "just society." We have so much work to do within, among, and beyond. What's in the way? Centuries of systematic oppression, the compound interest of which has given oppressors way too much power to continue oppressing.
Oppression is built into the very systems that surround and (dis)connect humans. Our work, this congregation's work, my work, is to lovingly resist those systems and build new ones. To support and work in solidarity with Black and Indigenous People of Color, Immigrants, LGBTQIA+, and every intersectional identity therein. Any body that is not given full autonomy over themself. Told they don't matter. Showed they don't matter. When in fact, they very much do matter. Our work is for the wholeness of folks who have been marginalized, exploited, imperialized, made powerless, and who are victims of systematic violence. Our work is for equitable access to Joy!
So much healing is needed to approach this grand vision. Healing that can be accomplished in many ways -- joining a progressive coalition, advocating for reparations, voting your values in all elections (especially local and state elections), and a renewed appreciation and reverence for beauty, the arts, and nature herself. What ideas do you have to build Beloved Community? What work have you already done? And when you do the work, to whom are you accountable?
Let's create a new story that is truly inclusive. Truly loving. Truly holy. Let's Build Beloved Community. And then build it again and again. I have faith that we can do this together!