Our Vision And Mission

We are Friends Congregational Church (UCC), a progressive Christian community.

Our Vision is to offer God’s extravagant welcome to all.

Our Mission is to seek a deeper spirituality, and to help transform God’s world, one act of love at a time.

Our Church History

We are part of the United Church of Christ (UCC)—a denomination that was formed in 1957 by the union of the Congregational Christian Church and the Evangelical & Reformed Church. However, our roots go back much farther.

We were the Pilgrims. We came over on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Plantation.

We founded college after college, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Yale and Dillard. In Texas, we founded Huston-Tillotson College. More colleges, seminaries and other educational institutions were founded by the UCC than by any other denomination. We hold that spiritual growth needs intelligent and creative thought and ongoing learning.

Our commitment to social justice runs deep. We were the first denomination to ordain women; we have worked for racial justice and economic justice. We believe that God calls us to live justly together as stewards of this creation.

We look to the bible as a guide, but each of us interprets it after our own conscience and insight. We believe that God calls us to dialogues together so that truth might emerge from the wisdom that the Holy Spirit speaks to each individual heart and soul.

Perhaps because we were once persecuted, Congregationalist are concerned with the disenfranchised of our society. We were abolitionist 150 years before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. We helped run the underground railroad, and one of our number, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all of which once slowed our growth as a denomination throughout the South.

Women and men serve equally in leadership positions within our church and throughout the UCC.

We are an “Open and Affirming” (ONA) church. This means that we welcome gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people into the full life and ministry of our church, just as we welcome heterosexual people into that life and ministry.

We are also a “Just Peace” church, committed to working for global peace and justice.