Washington, D.C.’s lost congregation

Today, the District of Columbia has three congregation members of the Unitarian Universalist Association, each quite distinct from the others, but none is what you’d call new.

There was, for a while, another: the Sojourner Truth Congregation. I’ve only hear bits and pieces about it. It was born in the Internet era, but it was effectively gone by the time I moved to Washington in 2000. It met at William Penn House, on Capitol Hill, co-incidentally the same place where the Capitol Hill Friends worship group I mentioned in the last post meets.

An archived copy of its website remains.

There was – incorporated at least — another:  the Edgewood Community Church, Unitarian Universalist, but though I can guess a few things about it from the name, know nothing for sure about it. Today, the Unitarian Universalist presence in the Edgewood neighborhood is the noteworthy Beacon House ministry, and any church I’d start would include it among its priority ministries.

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

1 comment

  1. There’s a web page about Sojourner Truth Congregation. The UUA paid half of the salary of the minister. The minister left for a job in education in 1996. At that point, the board, which had been traditional (treasurer, secretary, etc.) transformed itself into four clusters. Many people thought that the clusters were too decentralized, so they left. K. Messenger became a “part-time” (lay) minister in 1997. The Dark Flame Coven took over the cluster in charge of programming at about that time, and it ran the services and religious education until the congregation dissolved.

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