About East Shore Unitarian Church
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We are brave, curious, and compassionate thinkers and doers. We are diverse in faith, ethnicity, history and spirituality, but aligned in our desire to make a difference for the good. We have a track record of standing on the side of love, justice, and peace.
We have radical roots and a history as self-motivated spiritual people: we think for ourselves and recognize that life experience influences our beliefs more than anything.
We are Unitarian Universalist and draw from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Humanist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, atheist and agnostic, believers in God, and more.
We currently serve more than 500 adults and 100 children and youth through worship, life-long education, fellowship, social justice, and community outreach.
Our congregations are self-governing. Authority and responsibility are vested in the members themselves. Each local congregation—called a church, society, or fellowship—adopts its own bylaws, elects its own officers, calls its own ministers, and approves its budget.
We welcome you: your whole self, with all your truths and your doubts, your worries and your hopes. Join us on this extraordinary adventure of faith.
Our Mission
We practice love, explore spirituality, build community, and promote justice. (approved March 2017)
Our Vision
Practice Love
Offer a loving, welcoming environment for children and adults, inspired by appreciation and acceptance of all people.
Practice and expand our capacity to love, nourish, and inspire as we encourage each other to explore and grow through worship, group activities, education, and deep conversation.
Heal and connect as we share life’s transitions, celebrating our joys and mourning our losses, embracing the rhythms of life and of the Earth we have mutually inherited.
Explore Spirituality
Explore spirituality through worship, classes, and activities that integrate diverse spiritual traditions and build connection to something larger than one’s self, grounding the free expression of our values and faith in the outer world.
Inspire spiritual depth through worship services that incorporate thought-provoking messages of hope from the pulpit, music and other arts, and diverse sources of creative inspiration.
Dedicate space, time, and energy to providing spiritual sanctuary – places and events that offer opportunities for reflection, centering, emotional nurturing, and shared experience.
Build Community
Provide opportunities to grow our capacity for loving community through connection with each other, including covenant circles, topical/interest groups, connections teams, church governance and committee work, and through the covenanted practice of spiritual and loving ways of addressing our conflicts and differences.
Engage congregation-wide participation in exploration of personal, societal, and institutional expressions of racism and oppression through deep listening, compassionate communication, and understanding of systems of oppression, promoting multicultural, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive competencies that expand our communal culture and leadership.
Collaborate to extend our compassion and love into the larger community by providing sanctuary and support for those in need.
Promote Justice
Listen to the voices of those in our communities who are in need, in distress, or in other challenging circumstances, and engage in active outreach to partner with and empower them, visibly demonstrating that “service is our prayer.”
Partner with earth and social justice-related organizations to promote racial, economic and environmental justice through education, direct action, and advocacy.
Voice and live our UU values through sponsorship of educational and artistic earth and social justice events at East Shore for the larger community, serving as a beacon of moral awareness and action.
(approved June 2017)
