The first Unitarian or Universalist church on the Pacific Coast was the Unitarian congregation established in 1850 and served by the legendary Thomas Starr King in 1860.[i]  In his 1957 book Unitarianism on the Pacific Coast, the Rev. Arnold Crompton wrote that Unitarian ministers and lay leaders came west following the California Gold Rush and the completion of the transcontinental railroad.  Crompton attributes the growth of Unitarianism to five factors:

First, “transplanted” New England Unitarians wanted a church like those back home….  Second, the tightening of the lines of orthodoxy [in the larger society] gave rise to conscience problems among liberal Christians which led them to seek their own company….  Third, direct missionary activity… established churches or planted seeds of future churches.  Fourth, the great ministers… by their preaching, their leadership, and their lives attracted people to their churches and denomination.  The fifth factor was the changing intellectual climate [especially scientific challenges to traditional theology].

While conclusive evidence is lacking about the Universalists, it seems fair to assume that similar economic promises and the transcontinental railroad brought them westward as well.  Appendix I shows the dates when most Unitarian or Universalist congregations were established on the Pacific Coast in the nineteenth century.  While the dates are similar between the two denominations, it is notable that many of the Universalist churches did not survive.  One that did, in Pasadena, was blessed by a large endowment from Amos Throop, who also founded the California Institute of Technology.

In the rest of the United States, as the number of Universalist churches and members declined in the twentieth century. The standard history of the movement reports that the American Almanac for 1832 lists Universalism as the sixth largest denomination.[ii] However, in a sermon given in 1995 and revised later on his website, David Lawyer cited census and other date to estimate that 49,000 to 64,000 Universalist church members existed between 1890 and 1906.[iii]  Lawyer argues that, contrary to many claims, Universalism was in decline before the twentieth century, and may never have grown as much as its early leaders announced.[iv]

The Unitarians as a denomination had a stronger missionary activity on the west coast, fueled by the Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones[v], a Unitarian leader from the Midwest, and Charles Wendte, who served local churches but also, as part of the Pacific Coast Unitarian Conference, led the planting of many Unitarian churches on the coast.  For a congregationally-based tradition, missionary work entailed pulling together enough local people with liberal Christian beliefs (or better, some with Unitarian backgrounds from elsewhere) and gathering them into a congregation.  This work included advertising, publications, and lectures, working on local causes and civic projects, holding worship and dedicating a church building as soon as affordable.

In 1892, the Unitarian churches in Los Angeles, National City, Ontario, Pomona, Santa Ana, Redland, San Bernardino, San Diego and Sierra Madre attended a conference to organize the Southern California Liberal Conference “as a subdivision of the [Pacific] Coast Conference.”[vi] This reflects a missionary optimism.  Yet few of these churches may have been strong, and half those towns no longer have a UU church.  Just a few years earlier, in 1886, Unitarian leader Charles Wendte (heavily involved in church-planting efforts for the faith) listed only four “stable Unitarian churches on the Pacific Coast”:  San Francisco, Portland, Santa Barbara, San Diego.[vii]

Though based in Boston like the Unitarians, the Universalist Church in America and its state conferences were a much less centrally organized body, and membership statistics are unclear.  While the Universalists’ original evangelistic activity on the other side of the continent was impressive, it is unclear to me whether this Gospel zeal is what led to their founding of West Coast congregations.

In any case, the beginnings of the Unitarian Universalist Church on the island of Negros had no connection to the westward movement of either denomination in the United States.  More recent encounters and relationships do show a mostly-Pacific orientation.  But the founding of the liberal faith in the Philippines was both accidental and home grown.

The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA) is the result of a merger (50 years ago) of the Unitarian denomination and the Universalist denomination, both of which emerged on the left wing of the Protestant population in New England in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Both of our denominational movements rose up in reaction to dominant Calvinist orthodoxy.  (In contrast, Universalism in the Philippines, though started by a former Pentecostal, has always existed in a land where more than 80 percent of the population is Roman Catholic.)  Unitarianism in the United States originated in Boston, among ministers of congregational churches who identified themselves as liberal Christians.  We tie their expression of a separate religious identity of Unitarian to a sermon given by William Ellery Channing in 1819 entitled “Unitarian Christianity.”  They emphasized the use of reason in interpreting the Holy Bible, and emphasized the humanity of Jesus and the inherent dignity of all people, rather than inherent depravity.

Universalists also originated in New England, but in a variety of Protestant churches, not only congregational ones.  Universalists argued against the doctrines of substitutionary atonement, salvation by election, and the idea of eternal damnation.  They proclaimed that all souls would be brought into harmony with God, who was a loving parent rather than a harsh judge.  Unitarian clergy and parishioners were typically educated and elite members of their communities.  Universalist clergy were often self-taught, and apprenticed in ministry rather than trained in a divinity school.  Their parishes were often rural, and the preachers more given to “circuit-riding” and evangelism for their Gospel of universal salvation.

Today, Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America are made up mostly of people who have been to college and hold professional jobs.  We are mostly a white, middle-class population.  Our average church size is 150 individual adult members, but with some ranging to 1,000 members.  Most churches have paid staff, at least a minister, who holds an M. Div.  Our members are socially liberal, especially on gender and sexual orientation issues, and our members predominantly are progressive in politics.

http://www.uua.org/uuagovernance/officers/president/moralespeter/192145.shtml

Excerpt

I have observed a number of things that speak to me of the truly historic opportunities 
and challenges that are now before us. Here is a partial list:

We have known for many years that the number of people who identify as UUs is
 about four times the membership of our congregations (about 160,000 adult
 members and about 650,000 people who identify as UUs). In other words, for 
every adult member there are three non-members who say they are Unitarian
 Universalist.
The second largest gathering of UUs, after General Assembly, is the Southeast UU
 Summer Institute (SUUSI). A significant number of people who attend SUUSI 
year after year do not belong to any UU congregation. There are other UU camps
 and conferences that draw similarly large numbers of unaffiliated people.
The majority of children raised as UUs do not join UU congregations when they are
 young adults. However, they continue to identify as UUs and share core UU
 values. Often they have close friendships with fellow young adults they met at
 church or at “youth cons.”
Some of our committed and generous donors do not belong to congregations. I
 recently met with a donor who gave us $300,000 and yet has never been a 
member of a congregation. A few weeks ago I spoke with another non-UU who
 has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars.
An increasing percentage of seminarians choose a community ministry rather than 
parish ministry. They see themselves as having a vocation for ministry, but not
 for parish ministry. Our ministry extends to prisons, hospitals, the military, and
 organizations that seek to build a more compassionate and just world.
Initiatives like Standing on the Side of Love are founded on the realization that many
 non-UUs share our values of justice, equity, and compassion.
Our growth in terms of members of congregations has been stagnant, despite a
 number of ambitious growth efforts.
Demographic research shows that people are less likely to attend traditional worship services of any denomination, even if they consider themselves religious.

Summary

The central conviction driving this proposal is that our core values appeal to far more
 people than are attracted to (or likely to be attracted to) our congregations. We have 
always treated this as a problem to be solved by devising ways to get people to become 
members of our congregations. But the reality of today’s world is that not everyone who
shares our core values will want to become part of a traditional congregation. The fact
 that so many share our values is an enormous opportunity, not a problem. The future
 relevance of our faith may well depend on whether we can create a religious movement
 beyond, as well as within, the parish. I am confident that together we can seize this
historic opportunity for our faith.

The national headquarters of the UUCP is in Dumaguete City (Negros Oriental), a small college city on the coast.  It has fewer cars than motorbikes, including motorcycle taxis with sidecars, known as  pedi-cabs.  Most congregations are in mountain villages, with a few in coastal villages.  For money and food, the people grow rice, sugar cane, corn, root vegetables.  Some have livestock. On the coast, they fish.  Most of their ministers have no more than a high-school education. They learned their ministries on the job, with mentoring by elders.  There’s no salary, so they have other jobs too:  farmer, teacher, school principal.  The national headquarters helps with a little money and a clergy uniform—a shirt with a flaming chalice logo (it’s been the logo of the Unitarian Universalist denominations in the U. S. and Canada for several decades).  The main—but not only—dialect on the Island is Cebuano, rather than Tagalog (also called the Filipino language).  Given that most villagers have not completed high school, most do not speak English.  Translators come in handy on visits to the villages.

This Eric Stetson is not the Bahai-bashing musician who claims to be a UU.  Find OUR Eric on Google Plus.  His website is ericstetsonmusic.com.

Note that OUR Eric Stetson has the word “music” in his web address.

There are a few other Eric Stetsons out there, but none like ours.  I am Pastor Cranky and you can trust me.

The Philippines is the second largest island chain in the world.  It was the first western colony in Asia and the first Christian nation there.  The Spanish empire and Roman Catholic Church controlled the islands for nearly four centuries, following Magellan’s landing there in 1521.[i]  Unlike Spanish colonies in the Americas, the empire prevented Filipinos from learning Spanish.  This way, divided by multiple native languages and scattered on separate islands, Filipinos were less likely to unify themselves against their oppressors.

Spain granted large pieces of land to its elite families, who set up dynasties on the islands and sent their kids back to Europe for expensive educations.   Resistance movements arose, especially against the prohibition against native Filipinos as Catholic clergy.  However, independence was not achieved until 1898, in the Spanish American War.  The next year, a Philippine-American war solidified the islands as an American colony (and left 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 Filipino civilians dead).[ii]

In the early 1900s, Protestant missionaries and other teachers from the United States brought English to the masses.  Now with almost 100 million people, the Philippines is the world’s fourth largest English-speaking country.[iii]  By learning English, this people of diverse lands and languages gained first common language.  American advisors influenced the laws and administration in the Philippine government.  In the Second World War, their soldiers and ours fought side by side during a brutal occupation by the imperial army of Japan.  After the war, American General Douglas MacArthur developed their army.  From the start of our engagement with this territory, we gave local control to wealthy and powerful Filipinos, and left intact what the Spanish had given to them.  They were the people who took over when independence came in 1946, leaving intact four centuries of wealth-inequality.  It is worth considering that the governmental changes which took place American period of colonial control, in the spirit of providing an orderly administration, reinforced the legacy of wealth inequity.[iv]  Poverty is deep in the Philippines.   As with other poor countries, many of its citizens live and work overseas and send money home (from the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, and Arab countries, among others).  Today, Filipinos apply to immigrate here by the hundreds of thousands.  Every year, the U.S. Navy holds open 400 sailor positions for Filipinos.  One hundred thousand apply.[v]

Religious Demographics 

Eighty-three percent of Filipinos are Roman Catholic.  Over six percent are Muslim (most living on the large island of Mindanao), five percent are Protestant, 20 percent are listed as “indigenous Christians,” belonging to “Christian movements founded by native populations, with an interpretation and practice distinct from Western and Mediterranean Christianity.”[vi] About three percent practice tribal religious (also called folk or animist religions).  Moreover, folk religious practices are visible in expressions of Roman Catholicism, which itself is visible in popular culture.[vii]   On my 2011trip to Negros Island and Metro Manila, I noticed in many villages and city neighborhoods houses of worship for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (“Mormons”) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (each of which has 400,000 adherents) and the Iglesia ni Cristo (with as many as four million members); this independent evangelical movement began indigenously in 1913.[viii]  There are fewer than 3,000 Unitarian Universalists in the Philippines.

About the Author and Abbreviations Used Here

I am a Unitarian Universalist minister.  I have been serving a mid-size congregation on the West Coast since 2008, and have been in active ministry with four congregations since 1996, my final year of seminary.  In March 2011 I was part of an organized group visit to Manila and Negros, Island, Philippines.  I am a participating member of the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council (UUPCC) and a contributor to and participant in the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU).  One possible use for this paper (in whole or in part) will be as orientation material for Unitarian Universalists preparing to make a visit to the Unitarian Universalist congregations in the Philippines.

Abbreviations:  UUA means Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, our denomination, which is based in Boston and includes mostly churches from the United States. UUCP means Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines.   UU means Unitarian Universalist, either as a noun (“many UUs”) or adjective (“a UU church”).

Introduction

This paper traces how Universalism came to the Philippines—first as a theological message—and how it developed as a denomination, especially in relationship with the Boston-based Universalist Church of America and then (after1961) with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). This paper includes the religious and geographical context of the Philippines.   Key stories in the life of the Philippine church are its accidental encounter with American Universalism in the 1950s, its admission to the North American denomination and the murder of its founder, both in 1988.  The paper describes the origins of both Unitarianism and Universalism in eighteenth-century North America, and the ways they spread to the Pacific coast in the nineteenth century.  It considers the question of whether this religious movement or its members—in the United States or in the Philippines—can be called Christian.  The paper concludes by describing recent and ongoing activities in the Philippine church and its relationships with North American congregations.

Hymns:  We Are Children of the Earth, Spirit of Life/Fuente de Amor, We Would Be One.

Reading:  #444, This House, by Kenneth L. Patton.

Choral Music:  Love Is the Spirit of this Church, James Vila Blake & Jason Shelton.

Sermon

Online computer dating sites invite you to identify your faith, as well as listing your occupation, income, hobbies, hair color, height and weight.  In the religion category of the sites I have seen, the most commonly used label is not a denomination’s name, and not Christian, Catholic or Protestant.  It’s “Spiritual but Not Religious.”  Many people say this also in casual conversation–“I’m spiritual but not religious.”  There is no authoritative definition of what people mean by this.  I have not read of any study or survey.  My guess is that they wish to identify as having a spiritual outlook on life, or a spiritual practice, or a relationship with God.  Perhaps they feel humility toward life, or an attitude of gratitude for the gifts of life.  Maybe it means they like to hike in the mountains, read poetry, sing gospel songs, hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, or visit old cathedrals—just not when there’s a church service going on.

When people say “I’m not religious,” they may be thinking of dogmas and creeds; rules and commandments; lifeless theologizing; hypocrisy and abuses of power, and preaching that’s dull.  And let us not forget religious intolerance, repression and violence.  Religions have done terrible things.  People have done terrible things, acting in the names of religions.

Living in the fourteenth century, Hafiz was an Islamic poet of the Sufi tradition.  He wrote this:

The

Great religions are the

Ships,

Poets the life

Boats.

Every sane person I know has jumped

Overboard.[i]

A friend of mine is retired from the Christian ministry in a Mainline, moderate denomination.  He’s a radical environmentalist and a veteran of Civil Rights demonstrations. He’s respectful of other faiths and knowledgeable about them.  And he has no patience for the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”  To hold this attitude, he says, is to cut yourself off from history, to be rootless, to be unaware of the source of the modes of spirituality that you hasten to claim.   It is to risk falling for the newest fads and latest fashions, he says, to see spirituality as a catalogue item instead of a heritage.    My friend writes:

[A man tells me] that he attended a Baptist revival once when he was thirteen and didn’t like all the shouting about sin so he never again has had anything to do with Christianity.  Well, once I attended a junior high art show when I was thirteen and didn’t like the pictures there, so I never again have looked at art.  [He goes on, asking whether he should] stop having anything to do with any college or university because six hundred years ago all their astronomy faculties taught that the sun revolved around the earth, and one hundred years ago all their anthropology faculties taught that blacks were genetically inferior [to whites], and fifty years ago almost all … were segregated.  What enlightened person wants to be associated with such institutions?

My friend can recount the bad stories from religious history, as well as the contributions made by religions.  He notes that religious traditions can change, evolve, and even improve.  Those of us who choose to identify with a faith tradition have a duty to make it better, to reform and revive it. We have a duty to embody the values and virtues our tradition espouses.

American Unitarians of the nineteenth century took on this duty. I’d like to tell you about three of them.  In fact, our big three:  William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker.  You could say they were the inventors of “spiritual but not religious.”  To them, religion was not a set of creeds and rules to follow,  it was your way of life.

The first generation of Unitarian ministers in the United States were liberal Christians in Boston-area Congregationalist churches.  Their faith was Bible-based, yet they said we should use our God-given ability to reason when studying Scriptures.  To them, “reason was the friend, not the enemy of faith.”[ii]  Their leader was William Ellery Channing.  You can see a statue of him in Boston’s Public Garden, across from the church he served.

Orthodox Calvinists believed that all human beings were depraved and fallen, and could do nothing to avoid the fire-y fate in hell that awaited all but an elect few.  Channing and the liberals said no.  They believed that all people are created in the likeness of God.  Hence, all could grow toward God’s goodness and perfection, as Jesus had modeled for us.  Channing did not want to fight over points of theology with conservative ministers.  That was a distraction from teaching religion as a way of life.  Yet as the orthodox ministers continued attacking them as heretics, the Unitarians stood up for themselves.  Channing led the charge, giving a sermon as the manifesto of Unitarian Christianity in 1819.

Those liberal ministers got organized in 1825.  They grew in number and influence.  To them, to be religious was to live sincerely and virtuously.  To be religious meant examining your own heart–not for evil, but for the goodness that lives there.  It meant showing the goodness in your actions, words, and commitments.  Those early Unitarians believed every one of us can cultivate our divine potential.  The term used for this approach then was “self-culture.” Nowadays people call this “spiritual growth.”

Sitting in the pews of Channing’s church, and nourished by his preaching, was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a young man whose father had been a Unitarian minister.  Waldo’s parents had died when he was a child, and he was shaped intellectually and spiritually by his aunt,  Mary Moody Emerson.   Channing tutored Waldo privately before the young man entered Harvard’s divinity school.  For its day, it was a liberal school, as Unitarians had already taken over its faculty.  But for Emerson, the divinity school was lifeless.

He entered parish ministry but didn’t enjoy it.  After his first wife died of tuberculosis, at age 19, he withdrew from his colleagues.  Then he resigned his pulpit.  The stated reason was that he did not wish to officiate at the Lord’s Supper, or communion.  He saw it to be an empty ritual.  But for him the whole church thing was empty and cold.

Emerson began lecturing and writing essays.  He was on fire, and brimming with inspiration.  Around him gathered an intellectual circle known as the Transcendentalists.  Most of these people were Unitarians, or had been.  They said it is not necessary to be Christian to be religious.  It isn’t necessary to believe in a supernatural deity to be religious. They emphasized the use of reason, but they celebrated personal intuition more.  They tossed out the Holy Bible, or tossed out the idea that the Bible was the primary source of religious truth.  The primary sources must be your personal experience, your own soul, and the world around you.  They said the word of God is too plentiful and fresh to be bound in one book for all time.

Emerson preached not a religion of the church, but “religion of the soul,” in the words of my colleague Jay Deacon.  Instead of a remote God, Emerson felt and imagined a Power that connects us all, and which comes from within each of us.  He said that in each of us is “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle equally related; the eternal One.”[iii]

In 1838 the graduating divinity school class at Harvard invited Emerson to give the commencement address, and he accepted.  To these new ministers, the ex-minister recounted the corruptions of the Christian church over the centuries, and those of their own church.  Conventional Unitarians still accepted the New Testament accounts of the miracles of Jesus as true—to them the miracles were evidence that Jesus was a messenger of God.  Emerson condemned this as a monstrous idea.  Supernatural tricks have nothing to do with miracle.  A miracle is a flower blowing in the wind, or the roaring ocean waves.

Emerson said we can’t rely on others to tell us what God is, or who we are.  Everyone must get acquainted “first hand” with the Spirit of Life.  He urged the students:  Have your own experience of God, and be brave enough to tell your congregations about it.  Preach a new message, speak your own  gospel.  Don’t rely on old ways or old words of theologians and preachers, even the ones you admire.

He meant only to challenge the complacency of the students and their professors.  According to scholar Gary Dorrien, Emerson meant to light a fire.  Instead he caused a “firestorm.”  One Harvard professor called his address “the latest form of infidelity.”  The scandal of it gave orthodox critics one more weapon with which to attack the Unitarians.

Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for 27 years.  Yet he continued to shape the religious life of the Unitarian churches—and of the nation–as “students, and ministers and throngs of laypeople were reading his essays and going to hear his lectures.”[iv]

Sitting in the audience for the Divinity School Address was the new graduate Theodore Parker. In his journal that night, he wrote that Emerson’s “picture of the faults of the church” was “so beautiful, so just, so true.”  Parker took from Emerson the call to a wider circle of religious concern, and he took it further.  Parker is famous in our history for his radical abolitionism against American slavery and his opposition to the Mexican War and the government’s mistreatment of Native American tribes.[v]

In his day, Parker became infamous after giving an address called “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity.”  This was 1840, 11 years after Emerson’s address, and 21 years after Channing’s Unitarian Christianity sermon.  Emerson had celebrated Jesus as a spiritual teacher, just not the only spiritual teacher.  Parker now said that Jesus was a great soul, to be sure.  But what mattered was not Jesus himself, but the lessons he taught, the spiritual and moral principles he embodied.  Those principles are timeless.  They would be just as good if they had come from a mathematician in Athens as from Jesus of Nazareth.

We need no church, we need no Jesus, to tell us what is good.  We know from our intuition and reason what values are true and lasting, Parker said.  The rituals and forms of Christianity are transient; they will fall apart.  The true spirit will persist.  Rebellious words, for Boston in 1840!

Since Channing’s day, conservatives had been calling the Unitarian church “a halfway house to infidelity.”  Now, orthodox ministers used Parker’s heresy to embarrass the Unitarians.  Under this pressure, many of Parker’s colleagues avoided him, refusing pulpit exchanges with him, some not even speaking to him.[vi]

Consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation as a halfway house now.  What’s our program?  What do we offer?  I think as a halfway house we try to show the way beyond separateness and spiritual isolation, the way to true connection, authentic fellowship, and a sense of belonging.  We encourage every person to self-knowledge and self-expression.  We strive to offer, and we seek to receive, the courage to find our personal calling and purpose in the world, and the courage to live out that purpose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson compared each human life to a ship starting on a journey.  He asked:  “Why should each new soul that is launched out of God into Nature be wrecked at the beginning of the voyage by following the charts of its mates instead [of] the compass, the stars, and the continents?”

For Emerson’s time of stale conformity, rigid social rules and unoriginal thinking, it was good advice.  It still is good advice.  Yet looking at my own life as a journey on the sea, I wonder what I’d be without the wisdom of other people’s experience from their journeys.  Where would I be without the friends who taught the stars to me, the mentors who showed me how to use a compass, the travelers who brought news of continents worth exploring.  Where would I be without, the sailboat skipper who said, “Here, take the wheel,” and then stood by me as I tried it out?  Where and who would I be without them?

I believe the best way to find courage and a sense of connection is by joining with others, joining by our own free will, making our own decision.  In community, we practice our values.  We find that living by our values can take work.  We need support, and the good examples of other good people who come seeking their own purpose and their own sense of connection.

Moral principles and ethical values matter.  Yet values must be embodied for them to make a difference in our world.  Values need structures and platforms.  It is by institutions that values are carried from generation to generation.   Such institutions are families, homes and schools; businesses, governments and unions; congregations and voluntary membership associations of all kinds.  People do challenge their institutions, call them to account, and reform them.  People will even found new institutions to replace the outworn and lifeless ones.    Institutions carry values from one generation to the next.  For better and for worse, religious institutions also embody values and carry principles forward.  Together, here, let us decide to make it for the better.  For the better!  Amen.

Table of Contents

PART 1          About the Author and Abbreviations Used Here

PART 2          Introduction

PART 3          The Philippines:  Geography, History and Religious Context

PART 4          Religious Demographics

PART 5          Unitarian Universalism in the Philippines:  An Overview

PART 6          Unitarian Universalism in the United States:  An Overview

PART 7          Unitarianism and Universalism from New England to the Pacific Coast

PART 8          Universalism in Negros:  Story of An Accidental Apostle

PART 9          Pacific Encounters I:  A Japanese Visitor in 1958

PART 10        Pacific Encounters II:  Quimada’s Travels and Guests

PART 11        The Road to Admission to the North American Denomination

PART 12        Pacific Encounters III: An Accidental American Missionary, 1985

PART 13        Pacific Encounters IV:  From Sri Lanka to the Philippines, 1991

PART 14        Faith in Action:  Philippine Forms of UU Leadership

PART 15        Theological Similarities and Differences:  Are You Christian?

PART 16        International Relations:  The Pacific and Beyond

Appendix I:     Unitarian and Universalist Churches on the Pacific Coast in the 1800s

Appendix II:  Partner Church History—UU Church of the Philippines and North America

Appendix III:  Is It Christian?  Historical Details on American Unitarianism

Appendix IV:  Reflections on Colonial Involvement and Post-Colonial Distance

Notes and Bibliography

We affirm to promote the welfare of the environment and support for a just and economic, social and spiritual connection that will lead to build an open mind for a wholistic life.

We affirm to uphold an equal and peaceful relationship to every person and to every religion because we are here as One Big Family!

–Mission Statement

Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines

(from the constitution, amended 1999)