Who We Are as Unitarian Universalists
Living our deepest values, out loud.
About the Fellowship
The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough is a vital religious community that comes together to explore life’s questions and support each other in living with meaning and purpose. We welcome all who enter in friendship.
We offer a wide range of programs, including Sunday services, religious and spiritual exploration for all ages, social justice initiatives, music, small group ministry, a non-fiction book club, and social functions and community.
About 250 people are involved in the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough, including about 60 children and youth.
Our Purpose
Grounded in love, the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough (UFP) strives to be a welcoming community that embraces life with wonder and inquiry.
Dedicated to our Unitarian Universalist principles and inspired by our interconnection with all that is, we foster personal transformation and act for a just and sustainable world.
Sundays at the Fellowship
Our Sunday services begin at 10 am and end at approximately 11:15 am from September through mid-June. At this point in the pandemic, all services are offered both in-person with Covid precautions and online via Zoom. We expect this to continue until further notice.
We connect after the service for conversation, or in small breakout groups online.
We also offer Religious Exploration activities for children and youth.
Our summer services (July and August) offer something different. As we did last year, we participated with four other congregations in co-presenting and sharing online services, and hosting watch parties at the UFP on Sunday mornings.
We balance reason and belief
Unitarian Universalist (UU) religious and spiritual perspectives balance reason and belief, intellect and intuition, mind and spirit.
We are committed to spiritual and ethical values and to the celebration of life. We seek to empower our members to live their lives with integrity, to work for justice and peace in the world, and to respect the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
We’re united in covenant
Ours is a faith of covenant. We are bound together by the promise we make to walk together in love. This means that we do not require affirmation of any particular belief or belief system for membership or participation. Rather, we promote religious freedom and respectful understanding of our differences.
It is our sense that the universe is of such scope — magnificent, vast, and mysterious — that no-one and no one religion can hold the whole truth. We stand in wonder and awe before the beauty of our world, hoping to do justice to this gift of life by learning to think and act well, working for social justice, and sharing with one another the insights and truths of our hearts.
We’re not all the same
We are an intentionally diverse spiritual community. We embrace and include theists, humanists, agnostics, atheists, freethinkers, Buddhists, pagans… — in other words, persons of many different spiritual paths and traditions. What we share is a desire to grow spiritually and to learn, serve, and celebrate together.
We welcome all who share this desire, regardless of gender, age, race, education, socio-economic status, or sexual orientation.
LGBTQ2+
We are a “Welcoming Congregation” — which means that our church has voted to actively welcome people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, and has undertaken a number of commitments to support this effort. If you are lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, or if you think you might be, you are welcome here. Come, be as you are.
Our History of Support
Unitarian Universalism is strongly supportive of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender (BGLT) people and their families, and has officially welcomed this community since 1970. We believe that our first principle, respecting “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” applies equally to people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
Unitarian Universalism is one of the few religions that ordain openly Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender people. We encourage our BGLT clergy to participate as fully in our faith as our heterosexual clergy.
In addition to welcoming BGLT people into our religious community, we also work to protect the civil and legal rights of BGLT people and families across the country. Unitarian Universalists have been at the forefront of the same-sex marriage debates, advocating for the right for each person to marry the partner of his or her choice.
We’re international in scope
Unitarian Universalism is an international faith tradition with centuries of history. Nationally, we are affiliated with the Canadian Unitarian Council (CUC), and internationally with the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU).