About Unity Church of Christianity
Unity Church of Christianity—Unity on Greenville—has been the home of positive, practical Christian spirituality serving the Dallas metroplex since 1942. Our Sunday services, weekly classes, workshops, and prayer and study groups are life-enriching, informational, warm, and inspirational. Since we are currently experiencing major growth in attendance and thus programs and ministries, Unity Church of Christianity is certainly a place for you to contribute your talents and spiritual gifts. Experience the joy, peace, and supportive atmosphere at Unity on Greenville..
When you come to Unity on Greenville, you will feel right at home. Our spirited congregation is more like a family than a membership. Our Sunday morning Worship and Celebration Services at 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. provide an atmosphere of worship and celebration with soul-touching meditations, uplifting music, and purposeful, inspiring lessons--a great way to start your week!
You are welcome to join us at any time!
Our Mission
Our Mission is to be a loving and supportive community for understanding our oneness with God. We practice the universal spiritual principles of love, abundance, wholeness, and happiness as taught by Jesus Christ.
Unity’s Statement of Diversity
We believe that all people are created with sacred worth. Therefore, we recognize the importance of serving all people within the Unity family in spiritually and emotionally caring ways. We strive for our ministries, publications, and programs to reach out to all who seek Unity support and spiritual growth. It is imperative that our ministries and outreaches be free of discrimination on the basis of race, color, gender, age, creed religion, national origin, ethnicity, physical disability, or sexual orientation. Our sincere desire is to create spiritually aware community that is nondiscriminatory and supports diversity.
What is Unity?
Our Core Identity
Unity is a spiritual movement based on the teachings of Jesus offering a unique, positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity.
Unity respects and honors all other religions and spiritual paths.
Unity Village, Missouri. http://www.unityonline.org/
Founded in 1889, Unity is a worldwide educational and religious organization founded in Kansas City, Missouri. With over 1,000 churches in the United States, Unity offers a practical philosophy for living and an extremely positive approach to life. Unity seeks to accept the good in people and all of life--unabashedly focusing on and celebrating the "original blessing." Unity has no strict creed or dogma but offers a comprehensive teaching to all who are seeking a deeper understanding of their spiritual nature.
God
God is Spirit, the loving source of all that is, and greater than all that is. God is divine energy, continually creating, expressing, and sustaining through all.
God is the one power, all good, everywhere present, all wisdom. In God, we live and move and have our being.
In Unity, we also speak of God as:
- Life, Light, Love
- Principle, Law, Universal Mind
Nature of Humankind
We are each unique expressions of God. Our essential nature is divine and inherently good.
Our purpose is to express our divine potential as fully realized and demonstrated by Jesus and other master teachers.
How fully we express God depends on the level of awareness of our divinity.
Jesus
We believe that Jesus fully expressed his divine potential and sought to show humankind how to express ours as well.
We see Jesus as Our Way Shower, Elder Brother, and Master Teacher. He taught universal truth.
Traditionally in Unity we use the term “Christ” to mean the divinity in humankind. Jesus was a perfect demonstration of the Christ in expression.
The Bible
Unity co-founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, studied the Bible as history and allegory, and interpreted it as a metaphysical representation of humankind’s evolutionary journey toward spiritual awakening.
Today, Unity recognizes that the Bible is a complex collection of writings compiled over many centuries. We honor the writings as reflecting the understanding and inspiration of the writers at the time they were written. It continues to have meaning for us today.
Teachings
Unity encourages every person to realize we are unique expressions of God. Living from that awareness transforms our lives and the world.
Unity emphasizes the creative power of thought in our life experience. We refer to this as the Law of Mind Action. When we take personal responsibility to choose life affirming thoughts and words, we experience a more fulfilling and abundant life.
Unity teachings continue to evolve by identifying, embracing and applying the spiritual implications of scientific and psychological discoveries.
Prayer and Meditation
Affirmative prayer is the highest form of creative thought. Meditation is resting and listening in the silence.
We use prayer and meditation to experience the presence of God and to remember our oneness. These spiritual practices transform us.
Youth and Family Ministry
Unity recognizes that there are many expressions of family life. All are welcome.
Unity creates an affirming environment that fosters positive self image, personal responsibility and unconditional love and acceptance.
Unity...
- Beholds all children as whole and perfect expressions of God
Empowers children to fulfill their divine potential
Teaches children to meditate and pray
Invites children to experience a loving God
Unity provides a strong spiritual foundation for children’s lives.
Spiritual Action
In Unity, we feel a sacred responsibility, individually and collectively, to make a positive difference through active service in our communities and in our world.
God is Love and Only Love! Unity teaches that God is good and God's will for us is good--happiness, health, harmony, and abundance. As children of God, our purpose in life is to express our divine potential. God is seen as having many attributes, the most important of which is that God is Love. Unity stresses that God is Spirit, every where equally present, the one and only Spirit and Power behind, in, and through all things, visible and invisible.
Daily Word - Millions of people have been introduced to Unity through its periodicals, particularly the Daily Word, published at Unity World Headquarters in Missouri. Millions of others are familiar with Unity through its prayer ministry, known as Silent Unity, which has maintained a round-the-clock vigil of prayer for more than 100 years. Thousands of people around the world call the silent prayer ministry each day and receive comfort and prayer support (800-669-7729 or online at http://www.unityonline.org/pray_main.htm).
Unity breaks from tradition in that it has no creed, dogma, or ecclesiastical garb. Unity chooses to believe that there is good in every religion. Different religions are like spokes on a wheel with the hub being God. They may be set apart by a variance of beliefs and approaches, but they are all seeking one God as the hub of all life. Consequently, Unity does not deny anyone the right to his or her own beliefs.
Unity sees worship as serving God by uplifting and glorifying God's Spirit in humankind in positive, joyous ways. Unity welcomes people of all races, colors, sexual orientations, religions, social backgrounds, and economic levels in dignity and love.
From: A New Christianity for a New World
Valerie from Elgin, IL writes:
" I grew up ECLA Lutheran. My mother was raised Mennonite, which contributed pacifist beliefs. My father was an ordained Methodist minister but worked in a different profession. I married into a Lutheran family and my parents now worship at the United Methodist Church.
I tried very hard to 'make it work' in mainline Christianity. I read, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism and that started me on the path of questioning everything. I've been working my way through all of your books and enjoying them quite a bit. Some of your sentences are so finely crafted and beautiful in their content. My mother and I constantly discuss your work. It is very difficult, however, to reconcile our newfound awareness with our Sunday morning experiences. Certain statements, hymn lyrics or rites have to be outright rejected or translated in my mind. (I refused to allow the Creed at my daughter's baptism!)
I understand your desire for people to stay and fight for change within their particular churches, but that is like trying single-handedly to turn the Titanic around. I have only one life to live. I need to go where my soul is fed. I have recently found the Unity Church and started attending services. I am interested to know what your opinion is of the Unity Church.
P.S. I highly respect your opinion, but please do not feel that I am waiting for your answer in my decision to attend services. I do not mean to imply anything of that nature. "
Dear Valerie,
Thank you for your letter and for your kind words. I am glad that you have found Unity. I think it is one of the most exciting movements within Christianity in the world today.
I had never heard of Unity until about ten years ago. While on a lecture tour of Alaska, I received an invitation to speak at the Unity Church of Anchorage. My response was that "these people don't know how to spell Unitarian!" I had, however, already spoken at the Unitarian Church in Anchorage, meeting there the Rev. Dr. Richard Gay who was, and is, one of the finest clergy I have ever encountered, so I was in some wonderment about what Unity was. I went and that was the first of many enriching experiences I have had with the Unity Movement across the United States and throughout the world.
Unity traces its roots to Mary Baker Eddy and what we once called the Christian Science movement. It has, however, evolved well beyond its origins. It is distinctively Christian but they have managed to escape the traditional Christian obsession with sin, guilt, rescue and control. They teach the goodness of God's creation, the capacity of human beings to grow spiritually and they avoid dated concepts like sacrifice and the sacredness of shed blood.
I have found their clergy to be bright, well trained, open and positive. Their Spiritual Center and Training School is in Lee's Summit, Missouri. The things that attract me to Unity are their dedication to education; the consistently high quality of their music; their commitment to affirm their children rather than to make them feel inadequate; their care for one another and the joy that permeates Unity worship. I don't know that Unity will be the future of Christianity but I do believe that the Christianity of the future will have many of the marks of Unity within it. I find that many people are like you, they discover Unity when they awaken to what Christianity can be and compare it to what they experience in many churches on Sunday morning.
I remain committed to reforming the church of my birth but I am deeply grateful for what Unity has done for me and for the way that Unity has enriched my life.
I wish you well on your journey. -- John Shelby Spong
John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, for more than twenty years and is one of the leading spokespersons in the world for an open, scholarly, and progressive Christianity. Bishop Spong has taught at Harvard, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkely, California. He has also lectured at universities, conference centers, and churches in North America, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. He is the author of 15 books including the bestselling Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin, Liberating the Gospels, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his latest book The Sins of Scripture. History will recognize him as one of the major change agents in modern Christianity.
More on Basic Unity Principles
Adapted from The Quest: A Journey of Spiritual Rediscovery
First: We believe that there is only one Presence and one Power in this universe--God, the good.
This truth is at the very heart of Unity. There is only one Presence. There is only God. Therefore, God is omnipresent. This universal presence is an aspect of God. Since God is all, there can be nothing outside of God. There can be no place where God is not. Everything is part of God. Therefore, God is more than omnipresent; God is Omnipresence! "There is only one presence and one power active in the universe and in my life, God the good, omnipotent."
- You can only know the God of your own experience.
- Knowing God is a very simple and natural experience.
- There is only one Presence and one Power: God, and God is good.
- God is Omnipresence, Omnipotence, and Omniscience.
- We don't make divine order happen. It is already established in our lives.
Second: Human beings have a spark of divinity within them, the Christ spirit.
Their very essence is of God, and, therefore, they also are inherently good. Thus, God is individualized in each person and in the universe as the Christ.
- As a wave is part of the ocean, you are part of God.
- You have been created to be the hands, the feet, the voice, the eyes, the ears, and the heart of God.
- You are spirit (the divine part of you), soul (mental and emotional you), and body (physical you).
- Your spirit (the Christ within you) is your true identity.
- The soul is where you do the work, where you make the changes.
- The soul is pivotal and can look within as well as without.
- The conditions of your life mirror the condition of your soul.
Third: Human beings create their experiences by the activity of their thinking.
Everything in the manifest realm has its beginning in thought. God operates in the universe according to this law of mind action: "Thoughts held in mind produce after their kind."
- Everything begins with an idea.
- Your thoughts are the blueprint for your life.
- Your thoughts today create your world of tomorrow.
- Change your thoughts and you will change your world.
- Through the power of your thinking, you are continuously drawing kinds of events into your life.
- You have absolute control over your reactions.
Fourth: Prayer is creative thinking that heightens the connection with God-Mind and, therefore, brings forth wisdom, healing, prosperity, and everything good.
- Prayer is talking to God. Meditation (the silence) is listening to God.
- Times of prayer provide you with sustenance and renewed strength.
- The reason for praying is more important than the method.
- Your whole life is a prayer, and life-prayers are always answered.
- Miracles are natural outworkings of the law. Having your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions all "in sync" is your strongest prayer.
- The highest use of prayer is the announcing of your intention to open yourself to God's will.
- Prayer is a way to express your thanks for past, present, and future blessings.
- Prayer is not to change God. It is to change you. In meditation, in the silence, you meet God and you listen to God.
- In the stillness, you move beyond the intellect into the realm of spiritual knowing.
Fifth: Knowing and understanding the laws of life, also called Truth, are not enough. A person must also live the truth that he or she knows.
- We must walk the talk using the spiritual tools of release and affirmation during daily prayer and meditation.
- God can work best when you show your willingness by moving into action.
- Truth teachings must be applied to every situation in your everyday life.
- A desire without a deed is a dead end.
- Once you receive your guidance, it is time to move into action. Spirit will show you the path, but you must walk that path.
MORE ON UNITY BELIEFS ABOUT JESUS
A STAR TO FOLLOW
Unity focuses on the teachings of Jesus, on the life-transforming discoveries He made. Why? Because when we study Jesus' life (instead of worshiping Jesus the man), we see a perfect example for us to follow. After all, was there ever anyone more spiritually centered? Was there ever anyone whose words and actions so exuded love? Was there ever anyone more at peace with Himself and with His life than Jesus? That is why His life and teachings are the examples we can learn from in the quest for the transformation of our own lives.
Business students study the lives of great entrepreneurs so they can emulate their successful careers. Actors study other great actors to find more creative techniques. Writers read other great writers to improve their own writing skills. It is only natural that many on a spiritual quest turn to the study of Jesus' life and teachings. Many of these people call themselves Christians, but the word Christian is not important. The object is to reconnect with the divinity within--to find God. The divine relationship between us and God is the only thing that counts.
JESUS THE MAN
So much attention has been paid to Jesus' divinity that we have overlooked His humanity. He was born fully human, just like the rest of us. He was fully a man. He was tested in the same ways that all of us are tested, but He transcended His humanness and opened the way to self-mastery by recognizing His oneness with God.
Evidence seems to suggest that this self-mastery was a progressive unfoldment, always growing, always expanding. One can see it in His reluctance to begin His ministry at the marriage feast at Cana (Jn.2:4), in His working through His anger in the temple (Mt.21:12), and in His initial snub of the Canaanite woman who asked help for her daughter (Mt. 15:22-28). It is apparent that Jesus was always working to identify and experience His own spirituality. His teachings and healings are ample testimony to the continual expansion of His consciousness.
WE CAN DO IT, TOO
Jesus audaciously insisted that whatever He did each of us could do. "He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do" (Jn.14:12).
That's a crucial statement, absolutely central to your transformation because it tells you that you can experience the same spiritual insights that Jesus had. He is promising you conscious communion with God if you will search the spiritual depths within yourself as He did.
JESUS THE "CHRIST"
Jesus is saying to follow His way and discover the secrets of your inner-Self--the Christ in you--as He discovered the Christ in Himself. Christ is not Jesus' last name. The word Christ comes from the Greek word Christos, meaning "the anointed." Christ is a title reserved for anyone who becomes aware of and fully realizes the depths of his or her divine possibilities as Jesus did.
Even more importantly, Christ is God individualized in each of us. It is the name of the divinity within us. It is our pattern for perfection. Christ is not the name of someone born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. (That was Jesus.) The Christ is an aspect of God. It has existed since the beginning of time. It is the identification of our highest degree of spiritual potential.
The "real" you is your Christ self--your spirit. Jesus was so aware of this presence of God in Him that He became one with It: "I and the Father are one" (Jn. 10:30), and so we call Him Jesus the Christ or Jesus Christ. He was not God made man. He was man becoming more Godlike. When we talk about Jesus, we are talking about a soul so highly evolved that He became the perfect example of the God potential in each of us. That is what Jesus was, and is, all about: finding unity with God and thereby discovering the Christ power within. That's what you are all about, too. That is what our journey of spiritual rediscovery is all about.
--Adapted from The Quest: A Journey of Spiritual Rediscovery
MORE ON UNITY BELIEFS
The Place of the Bible in Unity
The Bible is Unity's basic textbook. It is accepted as a body of history, a moral and ethical teaching, and a great literary work. Beyond this, Unity finds deep significance in the Bible through its metaphysical interpretation, wherein names of places and people and their experiences symbolize the unfoldment of human consciousness. Through the study of Unity, the Bible is made more meaningful to individuals as a helpful guide in their lives. We believe that the Bible reveals the spirit of Truth and the word of God. Our final authority is the Holy Spirit working through us.
- Metaphysical lessons lie camouflaged in the characters, events, and symbols of the Bible.
- Beneath the obvious lesson there is always the hidden meaning for you, personally.
- The Bible is the story of your own spiritual unfoldment and growth.
Unity Teachings about Sin and Salvation, Heaven and Hell
Sin is our separation from God in consciousness, caused by our belief in the "devil" or a power other than God, the good. This belief leads to our unwise use of our God-given powers and abilities. Salvation is now--not something that occurs after death but whenever we turn our thoughts (repent) from fear, anxiety, worry, and doubt to thoughts of love, harmony, joy, and peace. The "fall of man" takes place in consciousness whenever we fall into negative habits of thinking.
Heaven and hell are states of consciousness, not geographical locations. We make our own heaven or hell here and now by our thoughts, words, and deeds.
Sin (self imposed nonsense) is error thought caused by our separation from God in consciousness.
- Heaven and hell are states of mind.
- The kingdom of heaven is within you.
- You create your own heaven or hell.
- The anguish of a personal hell can serve to strengthen you if you will let it.
Does Unity believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?
Yes. Unity teaches that the spirit of God dwelt in Jesus, just as it does within every person and that every person has the potential to express the perfection of Christ, as Jesus did, by being more Christ-like in everyday life.
Does Unity look for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ?
Unity understands the Second Coming as the individual expression of the Christ consciousness. This is not an event to be anticipated in the future, but it is happening here and now through prayer, meditation, study, and the application of Truth in our lives.
Does Unity practice Baptism and Communion?
Yes, symbolically. Whereas baptism by water represents the cleansing of the consciousness, spiritual baptism signifies the inflow of the Holy Spirit. No person can truly baptize another; a mental and spiritual process takes place within the individual consciousness. Spiritual communion takes place through prayer, and Unity practices communion by appropriating, or partaking of the spoken word.
In Unity services, ritual is de-emphasized, as a general rule, so that full attention may be devoted to the teachings and their practical application.
What is the significance of the Crucifixion?
Unity teaches that the cross symbolizes the crossing out of all false beliefs. Here again, the emphasis is on life and living through resurrection by claiming our oneness with God. Jesus died and resurrected to demonstrate the triumph of spirit over body.
Does Unity accept the virgin birth?
Unity accepts the virgin birth as an experience in the unfoldment of the individual consciousness and finds in it a deep metaphysical significance. The virgin birth is interpreted spiritually as the birth of the Christ consciousness (the awakening of the awareness of God's Spirit within) in the purified soul.
How does Unity regard the Trinity?
Unity interprets the religious terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit metaphysically as three aspects of mind action: mind, idea, and expression--the process through which all manifestation takes place.
--The Association of Unity Churches, International
http://www.unity.org/webelieve.html
"Unity is a link in the great educational movement inaugurated by Jesus Christ. Our objective is to discern the truth in Christianity and prove it. The truth that we teach is not new, neither do we claim special revelations or discovery of new religious principles. Our purpose is to help and teach man-kind to use and prove the eternal Truth taught by the Master."
Charles Fillmore, co-founder of Unity