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The mission of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Chelmsford is to be a welcoming, inclusive and nurturing environment for worship and spiritual growth. The church community promotes and encourages respect for each individual in his/her search for truth and development of personal values; learning through an open-minded exchange of ideas; and compassion for and commitment to each other and the world.
First Parish is a liberal religious community; we do not hold one another to any creed or doctrine. All develop their own beliefs and are encouraged to spiritual growth. We honor the truths in all the world’s religions. We respect Jesus as he is found in the Gospels, and other great teachers. We strive for a world community founded on ideals of human kinship, justice and peace. We encourage cooperation among people of goodwill in every land, and we encourage respectful relationship with our natural environment.
Voices of a Liberal Faith - Unitarian Universalists (YouTube Video):
Updated August 24, 2008
We, the members of First Parish of Chelmsford, covenant together to sustain and strengthen our beloved community by:
Honoring and celebrating the Spirit of Life
Nurturing all souls in our search for truth and the sacred
Caring and being present to one another in our joys and sorrows
Bearing witness through service to justice and peace
And being good stewards of our congregation, our heritage, our Unitarian Universalist Principles, and our earth.
Covenant is at the heart of Unitarian Universalism. Our Principles and Purposes are the covenant that binds all of our individual Unitarian Universalist congregations together. In our tradition, we do not gather around a creed, or a set of stated right beliefs that one must adhere to in order to be accepted into membership of the congregation or church. Rather, we gather around covenant or the promises we make, after discussion, about how we wish to walk together in religious and spiritual community. Individuals make the choice to freely enter into covenant with one another and the congregation as a whole, to make and receive the commitments offered therein.
While our congregation has had several covenants over our 350+ years, we have not had an explicit covenant for a long time. After a couple of years of learning about covenant through my sermons, education offered to the congregation’s leadership, and two adult religious education courses led by me, the congregation began to engage seriously in discussions about our commitments to each other, to First Parish, and to our larger world.
Our first all-congregational discussion was held during the first weekend of April 2006 at a retreat led by the Rev. Dr. Larry Peers, a consultant on congregational life from the Alban Institute. At this retreat, we reviewed the history of our congregation, we talked about the ideas, values, and issues that meant the most to us as individuals and as a congregation. At the end of the retreat, we came up with a list of agreed commitments:
We are a congregation that is committed to:
These commitments were read during the Welcome and Announcements of our worship services for 2006-2007 and have been printed on our orders of service since 2006.
In March 2008, Larry Peers returned and we reconvened for another all congregational retreat on creating a covenant. During that retreat, we reviewed our commitments in small groups and completed a series of small group activities about covenant. We combined lists from all the groups to complete the phrase: "At First Parish Chelmsford, we promise to…" All these lists were collected and typed up by John Fisher. I asked for volunteers to write a covenant, based upon our commitments and these lists.
On May 10th, the group of us met: Emma Buckley, Carla Corey, John Fisher, Don Hayden, Sarah Manning, Carlene Merrill, Mickey O’Connor, Tim O’Hara, John Schneider, , Sally Seekings, Rev. Ellen Spero, Larry Willette, and Wendla Windt. First, we read through covenants written by other UU congregations and individuals over the long history of our tradition. We listened for what we liked and did not like. We brainstormed themes and verbs that we heard again and again. We made a couple of decisions: 1) we liked short and simple; 2) we liked ones that were poetic and spiritual in nature, that tried to capture the spirit of the congregation and that would work well in worship, rather than a long laundry list of things we feel we have to do (this felt more like a creed); 3) we didn’t see any reason to repeat our UU Principles and Purposes but agreed they should be mentioned; 4) we want the children and youth to be able to understand it; and 5) that membership matters and that being and becoming a member is intentionally being in covenant with the congregation, so that the covenant should read "We, the members…".
We then reviewed the commitments and the lists from the all-congregational retreats and again picked out repeated ideas and themes. These themes fell into several categories: 1) living out our UU principles and speaking about our commitment to social justice in the world; 2) listening, caring, and walking with one another in times of joys and sorrows; 3) care for the earth; 4) support one another in our spiritual journeys; 5) being good stewards of the church and the larger community; and 5) to listen, share, nurture, accept, support one another across generations in a spiritual community. We decided to work from a draft covenant that John Schneider had written based on our commitments from 2006. We expanded it and worked in the themes and ideas from the 2008 retreat. We then agreed to offer feedback to the draft we created via email and to meet again for final go-over and discussion of next steps on May 31st. John Fisher once again tracked and organized all the feedback and redrafting over email. We brought it all together in the version presented above. Below is a kind of line-by-line annotation of how we came to it:
We, the members of First Parish of Chelmsford, covenant together to sustain and strengthen our beloved community by:
Honoring and celebrating the Spirit of Life (a recognition that worship is the central defining act we do as a community, and that we are here for something larger than ourselves, even if we have different names understandings of it. Spirit of Life is a way to describe the sacred in a way that is well-known and well-used across UUism, and is in the song we sing every Sunday, that our children and youth sing in the chapel services.)
Nurturing all souls in our search for truth and the sacred (all souls means everyone and from every generation, recognizing our differences and our different individuals paths)
Caring and being present to one another in our joys and sorrows (this is the nurture and care for piece)
Bearing witness through service to justice and peace (living out UU principles, bringing our UU voice into the world)
And being good stewards of our congregation, our heritage, our Unitarian Universalist Principles, and our earth. (making the commitments of time, talent, and/or treasure to sustain and strengthen all of the above!)
Going forward:
We brought the covenant to the Standing Committee and discussed how to incorporate into the life of the congregation. We initially discussed holding a congregational vote but realized that that felt like we were treating the covenant as a by-law rather than as spiritual and poetic expression of who we are as congregation. We don’t want it to be seen as tool of governance, a "law" or "creed". Rather, we see it as an expression of the spirit of the community, who we are and who we hope we can be. We would like to use the covenant in worship every Sunday. We hope also that committees and other church groups will consider using it as a centering for their meetings.
We published this covenant and this article in the last June newsletter and are doing so again now. In addition to incorporating the covenant into Sunday worship, we will focus on it specifically at the September 14th worship service and celebrate it at our "State of the Society" meeting on September 21st.
As Rebecca Parker wrote, the words of a covenant are the icing on the cake. The true covenant is the one we live, the one we practice. Part of the covenantal process will be to keep having the conversation. This covenant is not meant to stand for all time. It takes the central practice of our tradition—covenant or promise making—and puts it into our own words. Our hope is that we revisit our covenant every few years or so, to ensure that it is indeed part of an on-going conversation and expression of who we are now and in the generations to come.
First Parish is a democratic society. The church members determine the budget, call the minister and elect officers, including the church’s governing board which guides the business affairs, administration and policy of the church. The society is funded by pledged contributions and fund-raising activities by the congregants.
Membership is open to those in general agreement with the aims and principles of the society. While we hope that friends of the church will want to join us by signing the Book of Membership, they are welcome to participate in all activities as friends except voting in a parish meeting.
For further details, see the Church Bylaws.
Our cooperative church school encourages all parents to contribute by teaching, speaking or playing music for children’s chapel services, serving on the R.E. Committee, or helping plan and carry out special activities.
Church school for children from age two through high school is held at the same time as the church service. The children begin the hour with 15 minutes of worship, either in the chapel or with the adults in the sanctuary. A nursery is provided for children under two years of age.
The Junior and Senior Youth Groups were combined as of Fall, 1999, but are once again two separate groups. A Coming of Age Program ushers teens into young adulthood and understanding of their Unitarian Universalist heritage. See also: Religious Education for Youth (REY)
We participate in local interfaith services and activities. The church building is used by several community groups, including Girl Scouts,12-step recovery groups and a group of Muslims who worship and hold education classes here. Groups and individuals support and work with several organizations providing services to others:
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ServicesWe welcome you to our meeting house and cordially invite you to join us in the vestry downstairs for refreshments and conversation following the Sunday morning service (or in the Alliance Parlor during the summer). Services are usually conducted by the minister or ministerial intern, sometimes by our lay Worship Committee. Children often join the adults for the first 15 minutes of the service. We have five choirs - Senior, Intermediate, Junior, Carol, and a Bell Choir. |
The church has a library, opened in 1999. It is open on Sunday mornings, until the end of Social Hour. There is a full index in the library cabinet. Categories for both adults and children are included.
Any group interested in making use of the building should contact our sexton, Leila Pelosi, pelosi@comcast.net, 978-256-6923.
Building Use Rules & Procedures
This religious society began as the Church of Christ in Wenham in 1644. In 1655, at the request of the early settlers in Chelmsford, the minister, Rev. John Fiske, with most of his church, moved to Chelmsford to establish the First Parish. As the first, and for many years the only, church in Chelmsford, its history is inextricably connected with that of the town. For nearly 200 years, the Chelmsford town meeting and the First Parish meeting were one and the same, and it was not until 1831 that the church elected its own officers distinct from town officials.
The present building is the fourth on the same site. In the first meeting house people were seated according to age, rank and estate, by a committee of citizens. In 1712 the second meeting house was erected, and privately owned pews began to supersede benches. The third, built in 1792, burned down on the evening of February 13, 1842, and was replaced by the present structure. At that time the Universalist Society joined the Unitarian Society to form the United Parish - more than a century before the continental merger resulting in the Unitarian Universalist Association. By the 1870s the church had evolved into a primarily Unitarian Society.
The town built the brick basement, which was used as a town hall until 1880. The present Sunday School and office area and the Chapel, were added at the rear of the building in 1956.
For more historical information, see First Parish Facts. For information about our building maintained by the Chelmsford Historical Society, click here.
