Universalist Church of America
The Universalist Church of America was a Christian church in the United States that merged with the Unitarian American Unitarian Association to form the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961 .
The church represented a Christian universalism which , in the sense of universal reconciliation (apocatastasis), rejected the eternal damnation of man and instead assumed the possibility of all-encompassing redemption .
history
North American universalism developed in the 18th century in a predominantly Protestant environment. Influences came from the Anabaptist movement and Pietism , for example with regard to an individual approach to faith or the claim of a religion of the heart as formulated by Zinzendorf . The mid-Atlantic states formed a first regional center . Among the first leading universalists are George de Benneville and Elhanan Winchester . Benneville was in contact with Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania, founded by German emigrants, and tried to translate the universalist work The Eternal Gospel by Georg Klein-Nicolai from Germany.
In 1779, the first universalist church was organized in Gloucester , Massachusetts. The British pastor John Murray , who (together with Hosea Ballou ) is also regarded as the founding father of American universalism, played a decisive role . Annual meetings were held in New England from 1785 onwards, and from 1804 they were known as The General Convention of Universalists in the New England States and Others . In the following years regional structures such as the Philadelphia Convention in Pennsylvania were established in other states . The universalists mostly adopted a liberal point of view on social issues. One example is the women's rights activist Olympia Brown , who was one of the first female pastors in North America. In 1866, the Universalist General Convention was finally formed , which was renamed Universalist Church in America in 1942 . In 1899 there were first discussions about the possibility of joining forces with the North American Unitarians of the American Unitarian Association . In 1961 the two churches finally merged to form what is now the Unitarian Universalist Association , in which Christian universalism, however, was marginalized in the course of the 20th century by a more pantheistic - humanistic view.
In 2007, the Christian Universalist Association was founded in North America, a new independent Christian universalist association.
