First Unitarian Church of Rochester

thumb|400 px|right|Sanctuary of First Unitarian Church of Rochester

The First Unitarian Church of Rochester is located at 220 Winton Road South in Rochester, New York, U.S. The congregation is one of the largest in its denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association. The non-creedal church conducts programs in the areas of spirituality, social concerns, music, and arts. This church is one of two Unitarian Universalist congregations in Monroe County, the other being First Universalist Church of Rochester.

The church was organized in 1829. Associated with social reform movements from its earliest days, it began attracting a group of reform activists from Quaker backgrounds in the 1840s, one of whom, Susan B. Anthony, became a national leader of the women's suffrage movement. After the first women's rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, a follow-up convention, the Rochester Women's Rights Convention, was organized two weeks later at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester. Abigail Bush was elected to preside at this convention even though the idea of a woman chairing a public meeting was considered too daring even for some of the leaders of the emerging women's movement who were present.

Concern with social issues has been a recurring theme in the church's history. In the late 1800s the church provided evening classes and other activities for children in the church's low-income neighborhood. At the turn of the century, church members played leading roles in the campaign to open the University of Rochester to women and in the local, state, and national campaigns for women's suffrage. In the 1930s the church provided office space for Planned Parenthood when other accommodations were difficult to find. In 1988 the church began providing classroom support to Rochester city schools. In 2006 the church initiated a program to improve the quality of life in a small township in Honduras. In 2009 it established a talk line to offer non-judgmental support to women who have had abortions.

First Unitarian's building was designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1962. It was described as one of "the most significant works of religious architecture of this century" in 1982 by Paul Goldberger, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning architectural critic.

Congregation, beliefs, and programs

The First Unitarian Church of Rochester in Rochester, New York, U.S., is one of the largest in its denomination, the Unitarian Universalist Association. Its senior minister is Rev. Shari Halliday-Quan, and its assistant minister is Rev. AJ van Tine. The church conducts two weekly worship services on Sundays and an occasional Saturday service.

The church is non-creedal, having, in the words of its web site, "No single religious text. No ten commandments. No creed to which you must agree ... This respect for individual particularity and openness to diverse sources of wisdom means our community is packed with a wide array of perspectives and beliefs." The church's mission statement is: "Through spiritual connection in community, we listen deeply to others and ourselves, open to wonder and transformation, and serve together with love and humility."

The church operates on a Policy Governance system by which the board of trustees focuses on the long-term goals of the church while the parish minister oversees its operation. The board specifies the results expected from the parish minister and sets limits for his or her activities. The board does not specify how those expectations should be achieved, but it does evaluate the results. Officers of the church are elected by annual congregational meetings.

In the 1970s the church developed a task force system to coordinate its activities in the area of social concerns. Members interested in a specific activity gather signatures to qualify as one of the church's task forces, which, if approved by the congregation, will be eligible to receive funds from the church budget. Oversight is provided by the Social Justice Council, which is composed largely of representatives from the task forces. Through this system, the church sponsors projects that provide classroom support for Rochester schools, temporary shelter within the church for homeless families, free Sunday suppers at a Catholic Worker program, improvements to the quality of life in a small township in Honduras, and other projects that focus on such issues as peace, reproductive rights, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender concerns. The Council also oversees grant programs that provide financial support to community organizations.

The church's music and arts programs include a choir, a house band, a handbell choir, a drama group, a chamber music series, a coffee house, and an art gallery. Interest groups sponsored by the church include Soul Matters groups that focus on monthly worship themes, several types of meditation groups, Wellspring groups with programs of daily spiritual practice, Buddhist groups, qi gong, tai chi, book discussion groups, and several types of support groups.

History

Early years

The First Unitarian Church of Rochester was organized in 1829. The American Unitarian Association, the Unitarian national body, was also young, having been formed in 1825 by Christians who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.

thumb|left|200 px|Myron Holley

Rochester Unitarians operated in the early years without a settled minister and, except for a brief period, without a church building. Informal leadership was provided by Myron Holley, a former Commissioner of the Erie Canal and one of the founders of the Liberty Party, which advocated the abolition of slavery. An early church history gave Holley primary credit for the church's establishment.

In 1842 Rufus Ellis, at the age of twenty-two, agreed to come to Rochester to be the congregation's minister for a one-year period. Ellis lodged at the home of Dr. Matthew Brown, president of the congregation. Brown, who earlier was a member of the First Presbyterian Church, was one of Rochester's founders. Along with his brother, he had developed Brown's Race, the canal that delivered water power to Rochester's factory district. He also served as the first chairman of the board of supervisors of Monroe County, in which Rochester is located. Brown was an opponent of slavery; on the day in 1827 when slaves in New York State were emancipated, a delegation of African Americans visited Brown to thank him for his work to secure that legislation.

Funds were raised under Ellis' leadership for a new church building that was dedicated in 1843. In a letter to his brother, Ellis noted that "Forty-five of the pews are already sold or rented, and are occupied by 'correct' people." During Ellis' ministry the church approved a seal that contained an image of the Bible and the words "our Creed". This group soon changed its name to the Friends of Human Progress and ceased to operate as a religious body, focusing instead on organizing annual meetings in Waterloo, New York that welcomed anyone interested in social reform, including "Christians, Jews, Mahammedans, and Pagans". In July 1848, a month after the split, four women associated with the Quaker dissidents met in Waterloo with anti-slavery activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and issued a call for a Women's Rights Convention to be held a short distance away in Seneca Falls, thereby launching the modern women's rights movement. Organized on short notice, it nonetheless drew about 300 people, largely from the immediate area.

thumb|left|Plaque commemorating the Woman's Rights Convention at First Unitarian in 1848

Momentum from this event led to the organization of another women's rights convention two weeks later at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, about west. The Rochester Convention took the significant step of electing a woman to preside, an idea that seemed so radical at the time that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two organizers of the Seneca Falls convention, opposed it and left the platform when Abigail Bush took the chair. She performed her duties without incident, and a precedent was established.

The convention at First Unitarian was organized mainly by a circle of activists in Rochester led by Amy and Isaac Post, who had resigned from their Hicksite Quaker congregation in the mid-1840s when opposition to the Post's abolitionist activities was raised in the Quaker congregation. Several members of this circle had participated in the Seneca Falls convention, including Mary Hallowell, Catherine Fish Stebbins, and Amy Post, who convened the meeting at First Unitarian. Some of the organizers of the Rochester convention were also associated with First Unitarian, including Hallowell, Stebbins and Post.

Of these families, the Anthonys were particularly significant for First Unitarian. Daniel Anthony was born a Quaker but married Lucy Reid, a Baptist, a violation of Quaker rules for which he was required to apologize to his congregation in central New York.

thumb|right|Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony, another Anthony daughter, was teaching school in central New York at the time and had little involvement with any of these activities. When she returned to Rochester in 1849, she found her family attending worship services at First Unitarian.  She joined her family there, making it her church home

Susan B. Anthony is best known as an organizer and campaigner for women's rights, but she promoted other social reforms as well. In 1851 she helped sponsor an anti-slavery convention at First Unitarian. In 1852 she helped bring 500 women to Rochester to create the Women's State Temperance Society, of which she became the state agent. and also became upstate New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Anthony's reform work, especially in the national campaign for women's right to vote, led her to spend most of her subsequent years on the road until advancing age required her to cut back on traveling and settle once again in Rochester. A history of the church written in 1881 notes that some of its members during that period "were persons of extreme and pronounced opinions, sharply opposed to each other on political and social questions," with slavery a key item of contention. and one of whom went on to become a chaplain in the Confederate Army.  In Rochester he worked closely with Susan B. Anthony, writing the call for the Women's Rights Convention she organized there in 1853 and playing a leading role in it. He wrote one of the two appeals that Anthony circulated as part of her women's suffrage work in New York state.

Channing was important to the Anthony family. Mary Anthony said "The liberal preaching of William Henry Channing in 1852 proved so satisfactory that it was not long before this was our accepted church home." Anthony expressed the latter thought in these words: "Work and worship are one with me. I can not imagine a God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great.'"

The church declined afterwards, sometimes finding it difficult to pay its ministers, none of whom served for long. In 1859 the church's building was destroyed by fire. Rochester Unitarians were once again without either minister or building, a situation that was not resolved until after the Civil War." served a term as president of the Rochester Academy of Science

Mann supported the idea that the Bible has a human rather than a supernatural origin in A Rational View of the Bible, written in 1879, saying that a rational approach to the Bible makes it more appealing by giving it "a purely human quality which quite atones for all the mistakes it contains."

In 1870 Mann was invited to give an evening lecture at Temple B'rith Kodesh, Rochester's oldest and largest synagogue. This interfaith event, the first of its type in Rochester, contributed to a formal split between reformers and traditionalists within B'rith Kodesh and, according to The Jewish Community in Rochester by Stuart Rosenberg, "shook the Jewish community in America and even had reverberations abroad." First Unitarian and B'rith Kodesh held a joint Thanksgiving service in 1871, and Rabbi Landsberg and Rev. Mann began the practice of exchanging pulpits, with each delivering the sermon for the other's congregation. A history of B'rith Kodesh describes the relationship between the two congregations during this period as "extremely close". In 1874 First Unitarian, B'rith Kodesh, and the First Universalist Church of Rochester began their continuing tradition of holding annual Union Thanksgiving services. In 1884 Landsberg occupied the pulpit at First Unitarian for seven weeks while Mann was ill, attracting visitors from other denominations and, according to an early Rochester history, leading to speculation about the development of a universal church. The congregation of B'rith Kodesh used First Unitarian as a temporary home in 1909 after their building was destroyed by fire.

In 1878 the annual meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which was founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, convened at the First Unitarian Church of Rochester on the thirtieth anniversary of the first Women's Suffrage Convention in Seneca Falls. William Channing Gannett himself had gained prominence as a leader of the successful movement within the denomination to end the practice of binding it by a formal creed, thereby opening its membership to non-Christians and even to non-theists. While pastor of a Unitarian church in Wisconsin before coming to Rochester, he had served as vice president of that state's women's suffrage association.

Mary Thorn Lewis Gannett, Rev. Gannett's wife, was "very nearly his co-pastor," according to a church history. In Rochester, however, she was active in the First Unitarian Church and assisted in the formation of several community organizations.

The Gannetts focused their energy on social issues. Urging the congregation to be "a seven-day instead of a one-day church", Rev. Gannett encouraged it to become more involved with its downtown neighborhood of low-income immigrants.

400px|thumb|left|Advertisement for Gannett House, the church's parish house and the home of the Boys' Evening Home

The Gannetts accordingly initiated the Boys' Evening Home, which opened in 1890 in the church's parish house. The secretary of the Social Topics class, which examined social problems of the day, was Emma Sweet, a member of First Unitarian who was Susan B. Anthony's secretary.

In 1889 Mary Gannett established the Woman's Ethical Club, an interfaith organization that discussed the ethical aspects of social topics and campaigned for the admission of women to the University of Rochester. By the middle of the 1890s, the Ethical Club was attracting several hundred women to its meetings. and was also deeply involved with the campaign for women's rights. In 1885 a group of women gathered at her home to establish the Women's Political Club, later known as the Political Equality Club. This group of about forty women achieved several breakthroughs, including the appointment of Rochester's first police matron, the placement of women doctors on the city's health staff, and the appointment of women to state institutional boards. Mary Gannett was a member of the club for over twenty years and held various offices.

In 1891, at the age of 71, Susan B. Anthony decided to limit her work that required travel and to settle into the house she shared with her sister Mary in Rochester. She resumed routine attendance at First Unitarian, Later that year she was invited to speak at the annual Union Thanksgiving service, which was held that year at First Unitarian. Its theme was "The Unrest of the Times a Cause for Thankfulness". Anthony spoke on the women's movement.

thumb|left|Mary and Susan B. Anthony

In 1893 Susan B. Anthony became the main force behind the formation of the Rochester branch of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, which worked for the educational and social advancement of women. Mary Gannett presided at the founding meeting and became the chair of its Legal Protection Committee, often becoming personally involved in protecting working women from dishonest employers. In 1911 she became president of the organization.

In 1893 Mary Anthony became corresponding secretary of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. During the statewide drive that year for the right of women to vote in New York elections, the Anthony home was converted into campaign headquarters, with public offices in the parlor and other activities throughout the rest of the house.

In 1898 Susan B. Anthony called and chaired a meeting of 73 local women's societies to form the Rochester Council of Women, later known as the Rochester Federation of Women's Clubs. When the Anthony sisters traveled to Berlin in 1904 for the founding of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Susan B. Anthony was declared its first member and Mary Anthony its second. which "emerged as Rochester's leading journal of progressive reform" according to Affirming the Covenant: A History of Temple B'rith Kodesh by Peter Eisenstadt.

Frank Doan became the minister of First Unitarian in 1922. Formerly a professor at the Meadville Unitarian seminary, he was one of the originators of the religious humanism movement within the denomination. He retired in 1925 at the age of 48 because of ill health and died two years later.

David Rhys Williams was minister from 1928 to 1958. In 1933 Williams became one of the 34 signers of the Humanist Manifesto, which, among other things, declared the universe to be self-existing and not created, rejected the duality between mind and body, and called for religion to be reformed in light of the scientific spirit.

Williams was an advocate of family planning and served on the executive committee of the local Birth Control League.

In 1940 Time magazine gave the church national publicity with an article about its ordination of James Ziglar Hanner as a Unitarian minister in an unusual ceremony that included two rabbis. Rabbi Phillip S. Bernstein of B'rith Kodesh gave Hanner his pastoral charge, basing it on the Hebrew text The Ethics of the Fathers. The service closed with the singing of Yigdal, the hymn that had been translated from Hebrew to English in 1883 by Rabbi Landsberg of B'rith Kodesh and Rev. Mann of First Unitarian. Rev. Hanner began his ministry in Massachusetts.

In 1953, during the McCarthy period, Williams' brother, Albert Rhys Williams, was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of having supported the Communist Party from 1919 to 1929. Rev. Williams supported his brother and criticized his attackers. Thirteen members of the congregation accused Williams of being soft on Communism and attempted to have him dismissed from the pulpit. When the issue was put to a congregational vote, the only votes against Williams were the thirteen who had made the accusation, all of whom subsequently left the church. A prominent member of First Unitarian who supported Williams during this controversy was Frank Gannett, founder of the Gannett newspaper chain, who had campaigned for the Republican nomination to run against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential elections.

New building by Louis Kahn

thumb|right|300 px|Louis Kahn's First Unitarian Church building

In 1958 Williams announced his intention to retire after 30 years of service. Three months later, while searching for his replacement, the church was informed that a project to build a downtown shopping mall would require the space occupied by their building, forcing the church to deal with two major issues at the same time.

The church voted to sell their building to the Midtown Plaza developers in January 1959 with the understanding that they could continue to occupy it until July 1961. Construction activity nearby, however, soon weakened the building, forcing the congregation to move in September 1959. The church held Sunday services at the Dryden Theatre of the George Eastman House until a new building could be constructed. The congregation voted to hire Louis Kahn in June 1959 to design their new building, which was completed in 1962.

Mid-1900s to present

In 1961 the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America merged to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.

In 1964 rapid growth in membership led the church to begin offering two Sunday worship services and church school sessions, with classes for older children relocated to the Harley School to ease crowding. During the 1970s Gilbert was a member of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a group of ministers and rabbis who helped women find safe abortions at a time when it was still illegal.

In 1982 church member Joyce Gilbert called a meeting that led to the formation of the Unitarian Universalist Musicians Network. She and Ed Schell, First Unitarian's Minister of Music, served first as members of the organizing committee and then as presidents of the new organization. With a membership of several hundred, the organization played a major role in producing the denomination's new hymnals.

In 1988 the church volunteers began providing classroom support to Rochester city schools in a program called the UU/Schools Partnership.

Kaaren Anderson and Scott Tayler arrived as Parish Co-Ministers in 2004. part of which was used to initiate the church's Honduras Project, which works to improve the quality of life in a small Honduras township.

In 2007 the church originated Wellspring, a program of spiritual deepening that has since been adopted by other Unitarian Universalist congregations.

In 2009 the church's Reproductive Rights Task Force began the process of establishing a talk line to offer "support without judgment" to women who have had abortions.

Because of growth in membership, in 2010 the church began offering a Saturday worship service in addition to the two Sunday services.