Details for this Sunday's service and religious education opportunities can be found in the calendars listed at left. For a map to the church click on How to Find Us. When you arrive, look for the Visitors Table and make a nametag. Please help yourself to a packet of information about BUC.
We are not bound by any formal doctrine. We trust each person, in his or her conscience, to be the final authority when it comes to religious truth. We also believe that each of us changes and grows over time. Therefore, we are a theologically diverse group. If you ask a member of our congregation to put a label on her or his theology, you may get any of the following responses: liberal Christian, Jew, humanist, pagan, atheist, mystic, and any combination of the above -- just to name a few! To cite an old Universalist maxim, "We do not need to think alike to love alike."
Our diversity is reflected in other ways, too. Among us there is a diversity of age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, marital status, occupation and political affiliation. At any given service you will find single parents, widows, gays, never-marrieds, blended and multi-racial families.
No record indicates that lions and lambs have ever sat together in our church, but Republicans have rubbed elbows with Democrats, vegetarians have broken bread with steak-eaters, managers have sipped coffee with union members, men in jackets and ties have ushered with women in tee shirts and jeans, surgeons have sung hymns with weavers, and those in military service have sat side by side with pacifists.
Our services have readings from secular and various sacred sources, meditations, singing, live vocal and instrumental music and they center on an address, or sermon. In the service we explore life's deeper issues with compassion and, at times, bit of humor. Click here for a typical Order of Service. Click here for some recent sermons.
The lone religious symbol gracing our beautiful sanctuary is a Flaming Chalice. Some say it goes back over 500 years to a Czeck religious reformer named Jan Hus. Hus was a priest who insisted on doing the Mass in Czech rather than Latin so that the people could understand it, and he passed the communion chalice to the congregation as a symbol of inclusion. These were both democratic symbols reflecting Hus' conviction that the church and religion were for the people, not the priesthood. Hus was burned at the stake for these reforms. Thereafter his followers combined the flame of the fire with the communion chalice as a symbol of Hus' democratic reforms.
Whether it goes back that far is open to question. For us it began during World War II when our Service Committee needed a symbol so that refugees would know that ours was a place to go for help regardless of race or religion. We commissioned a young Austrian artist, himself a refugee, to come up with a symbol and he came up with the Flaming Chalice. Since then it has been adopted by most Unitarian Universalist congregations and the Unitarian Universalist Association.
