It is quite common for the Unitarian Universalist Association to get compared to the United Church of Christ. Both have common roots in the congregationalist tradition and both have a tendency towards cultural, political, and theological liberalism. So, it is with interest that I read Anthony Robinson’s piece “An Obituary for the United Church of Christ?”
Robinson’s piece, based on research by Ryan Burge, a demographer affiliated with Washington University’s Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, is a brutal assessment of the UCC’s six decades of decline from “a genuine powerhouse” to fading religious relevance. The UCC was formed in 1957 as result of a merger between the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Between 1960 and today the denomination has lost close to 70% of its membership and almost 50% of its congregations. Sixty-some years ago it had 2.25 million members and 8,000 churches. The most current data available has it reporting 683,936 members and 4,485 churches.
A Different Trajectory for the UUA
Contrast this with the demographic data from the Unitarian Universalist Association. While it also paints a picture of decline it is a far less dire one. The UUA, like its cousin the UCC, was crafted from a merger between the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. In 1961, at the time of the merger, the UUA had 1,035 congregations and an adult membership of 151,557. In 2024, the last year a full set of data was available, it had 1,000 congregations and an adult membership of 130,265. This represents a very different trajectory than the UCC, only a 14% decline in membership and a mere 3.5% decline in congregations.
The picture gets more complicated when a closer look at the data is taken. The UUA has not experienced steady decline, like the UCC, but rather various periods of decline and growth. Peak membership was in 1968 (177,431), which was followed by steady decline until 1980 (136,192). From 1981 to 2009 (164,684) membership grew slowly and steadily until it began to decline again in 2010. The big drops in membership came in 2021, 2022, and 2023 with the pandemic. Membership seems to have stabilized since then and, though the UUA hasn’t yet compiled the numbers, I have made an effort to do so using the data set that the UUA will presumably use. It suggests that there was actually modest membership growth last year, of somewhere around 2%.
A Strategy for Growth: Leaning into Difference
All of this points to big differences between what UCC and UUA affiliated congregations are providing their members. This suggests a good start to a strategy for intentional growth for the UUA. The UUA should study the ways that it is similar to and different from the UCC. Then it should do what it can emphasis those differences while it downplays those similarities.
A real analysis along those lines would constitute a significant research project, probably something on the level of a dissertation, series of academic journal articles, or a monograph. I would love to see the UUA hire a researcher or team of researchers to undertake it. In a thorough study, comparisons with other religious traditions and denominations would be warranted.
Growth: What Hasn’t Worked and What (Probably) Has
Such thoughtfulness might lay the ground for real growth. Some clues already exist on growth strategies from the UUA’s recent past. They also connect to my own experience as a parish minister. I have seen the UUA mount efforts at growth three times during my professional life. The first was to try and plant large churches. The second was to create multi-site congregations. The last was a marketing campaign advertising Unitarian Universalism as “the Uncommon Denomination.”
The large church planting and the effort to create multi-site congregations were both unsuccessful. They were also each inspired by evangelical Christian strategies for growth.
The UUA attempted two large church plants. One resulted in a small congregation. The other in a mid-sized congregation. Neither created anything like the mega church the UUA was hoping to see brought into being. The UUA also encouraged a number of larger congregations to merge with smaller congregations to create multi-site congregations. This did not go well. All of the large congregations involved, with one exception, lost significant numbers of members. None of the smaller congregations that merged to become satellite campuses experienced any meaningful growth. Several ministries involved in the effort ended in negotiated resignations.
I happen to serve a congregation that was part of the multi-site effort. I will save the details for elsewhere. Suffice to say neither the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston nor the congregations it temporarily serviced as satellite campuses grew as a result of the multi-site experiment. All are smaller today, in 2026, than they were in 2011 before it began.
In contrast, Houston area Unitarian Universalist congregations do appear to have experienced growth during the “Uncommon Denomination” campaign. It was held in 2005 and coincided with the biggest periods of congregational growth in the twenty-first century. Between 2003 and 2007 the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston grew by 15%. Note that this campaign attempted to do exactly what I am suggesting the UUA think about doing more of, it leaned into Unitarian Universalism’s differences with various Christian traditions.
Theological Pluralism: A Significant Difference
I will leave it for others, or another time, to try to tease out some those differences. One big difference that I can easily name is Unitarian Universalism’s embrace of theological pluralism. Susan Ritchie has argued that theological pluralism and interreligious theological exchange have hallmarks of the global Unitarian tradition since long before the advent of the UUA. Samira Mehta has observed how important it is for many of the families that join Unitarian Universalist congregations today. In my forthcoming book for Brill on contemporary Unitarian Universalist theology, I argue theological hybridism has been a major component of the Unitarian part of the Unitarian Universalist movement since the sixteenth century.
A Last Note: Congregational Size
There is one final piece of data that Robinson lifted up which I want to comment on. He notes that the UCC has entered “the age of the ‘micro-church’.” 66% of its congregations have a Sunday morning attendance of less than 50. Only 3%, or about 135, have an average attendance of over 150.
This suggests that in terms of the number of congregations with sizable memberships the UCC and the UUA are probably about even. The UUA stopped publishing attendance information during the pandemic. But in my twenty years of ministry I have found that a rough rule of thumb is that in most congregations have Sunday morning worship attendance of about 2/3s their adult membership. There are currently around 165 congregations in the UUA that report having more than 227 adult members (i.e. the number at which 2/3s of the membership = 150 or more). If that estimate is accurate it actually suggests that there are more largish UUA affiliated congregations than UCC affiliated ones (though we still have no congregations that resemble the UCC’s very largest ones).
