The Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) is a Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregation without borders or walls.
Our members and friends live all over the world, and includes those who are physically or otherwise isolated from local UU congregations, religious professionals serving other UU communities, and people looking for a congregation working for the liberation of all of us. More than half of our membership is incarcerated. Together, we search, learn, and grow, becoming better people and leaving our world a better place.
Our Mission
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.
What We're About
We believe that the diversity of humanity is worth celebrating.
We welcome people of all racial, ethnic and national backgrounds. We welcome people of all gender identities and sexual orientations. We welcome people of all abilities. We welcome people from diverse economic and class backgrounds.
A Brief History of the CLF
19th Century Roots
CLF traces our history back to the 19th century, when both Unitarian and Universalist congregations began publishing and distributing tracts to people who lived too far from existing congregations to attend, but who were served by the US Postal Service’s Pony Express.
The original Unitarian “Post Office Mission*” was started by Sallie Ellis, a lay Unitarian from Cincinnati, whose disabilities meant she could not preach herself but who was dedicated to spreading the good news of her Unitarian faith. Other congregations also provided similar ministries.
By the early 1900s, these ministries by mail had grown into a global network. Rev. William Channing Gannett, a Unitarian minister, decided to organize these scattered Unitarians into a formal congregation. He launched the Unitarian Church of All Souls in 1904, and for forty years he mailed a monthly pastoral letter and a sermon to people around the world.
20th Century Growth
This ministry became the Church of the Larger Fellowship in 1944, organized as a Unitarian congregation that was also a department of the American Unitarian Association (AUA). Under the leadership of Frederick May Eliot, the AUA sought to reach out to American armed forces stationed overseas and their families, and combined this outreach with Gannett’s ministry. With the support of the AUA, this ministry sent out worship services, religious education materials for children and youth, adult discussion courses, and pastoral letters to its members around the world.
When the AUA consolidated with the Universalist Church of America (UCA) in 1961, the growing CLF merged with its counterpart at the UCA (founded in 1947) to become a Unitarian Universalist congregation without walls, still a department of the new Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).
Our ministry to incarcerated UUs began in 1965, when someone incarcerated at San Quentin prison joined our congregation. Word of our liberal religious commitments to the inherent dignity of all people spread in prison systems, and this ministry became our Worthy Now Prison Ministry in 2016.
CLF was incorporated separately from the UUA in 1970, and while we remain close partners in the liberatory call of Unitarian Universalism (our office is at UUA headquarters in Boston), we are now an independent congregation. We do not receive direct monetary support from the UUA–in fact, we pay annual dues just like any other UU congregation.
21st Century Technology
Over the years, our “ministry by mail” evolved to embrace e-mail, the Internet, live web broadcasting, podcasting, and Zoom.
Today, we worship together online via Zoom, and also individually through our worship archive. We gather in an online community forum, a private social media network just for our members and friends. We see each other in classes and groups over videoconferencing. We share inspiring music through Spotify.
Our weekly talk show, Voices of Unitarian Universalism (The VUU), is available to watch live on Thursdays at noon Eastern time. It and our weekly worship are also made available as podcasts.
As technology has changed our ministry, the work of Worthy Now has remained largely reliant on the old-school snail mail that CLF began with; this is also slowly changing. More and more prison systems are issuing tablets to incarcerated people and allowing access to podcasts, online courses, and email. Once again, we are adapting to new ways of keeping our ministry relevant and present to all who need it.
As our Minister Emerita the Rev. Meg Riley would put it, CLF is “always in Beta.” We expect this will be the case long into the future.
