Welcoming Congregation

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Sunday Mornings
10:30 AM Coffee
11:00 AM Service

Full Moon Schedule
is available

Our Continuing Story...

Though in many ways, what we do is rather new - we've been around for quite a while.

In November of 1966 a group of people from First Unitarian Church of Dallas started meeting in a room at the Lone Star Natural Gas Company in Richardson. It took a little while to get organized, get to know each other, write bylaws, get incorporated and jump through the hoops the UUA has for new congregations - but in April of 1968 the Unitarian Universalist Association formally welcomed Richardson Unitarian Church as a member congregation of the UUA. We bought a former Church of Christ building at 210 Abrams and in May called our first full time minister, Rev. Billy Nichols. And by that fall RUC was a rapidly growing liberal religious congregation in North Texas.

Rev. Nichols was a former Southern Baptist minister who had questioned his former faith and decided to become a Unitarian minister. He is remembered as a great public speaker and someone who would not settle for easy answers to moral questions. Controversially, he advocated the consideration of open marriage and drug use from the pulpit. Despite this - or perhaps because of this (it was the 60's after all) the congregation continued to grow reaching around 200 members by the early 1970's.

In 1974 Rev. Nichols got himself into hot water with the congregation bad enough that there was a vote to remove him.  Rev. Nichols got all his kids to sign the membership book and when the vote was called to remove him - the motion failed, by one vote. So half the membership left and started a UU church in Plano, that is now Community UU.

While half the membership left, it was more than half the pledge base - so over the next few years they lost the minister and their church building. RUC spent the last half of the 1970's and all the 1980's in a variety of office parks and hotel meeting rooms. Membership varied from 30 to near 100. Services were layled with a wide variety of guest speakers and a volunteer run kids Religious Education program. 

In 1990 we called our second full time minister, Rev. Rod Debs and a few years later bought a building at 1347 Pleasant Valley in Garland. No longer located in Richardson, it made sense to change the name of the church - so in 1993 the congregation changed its name to Pleasant Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.

Also starting in 1989, RUC got an upsurge in members who self-identified as Pagan or Wiccan. This lead to the church starting  a CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapter in 1990. Their minister, Rev. Rod Debs was elected to the national board of CUUPS in 1993. Church members were also active in the push to get Earth-centered spirituality added as a Source to the UUA Principles and Purposes which was finally secured in 1995 after coming before four different General Assemblies.

Congregational financial troubles required that Rev. Debs was cut to part-time in 1994 - and then found full time employment with a UU Church in Iowa later that year. With his absence the church was primarily lay led making occasional use of UU seminary students.
In 1998 PVUUC had a student minister who advised that if the congregation wanted to grow that it should suppress any outward expression of Earth-centered religion. This did not sit well with the Pagan identified members - who by that point comprised about half of the membership. In the Spring of 1999 a board was elected that was almost entirely Pagan in its make up and then on October 31st, 1999 the church president formally declared the congregation as an Earth-centered UU Church.

Around this time we sold the building on Pleasant Valley and in March 2000 PVUUC bought a smaller building on Main Street near downtown Garland. (It's present location.)

In recent years, the congregation picked up some Earth-centered religious programs at use in other UU churches. First wasExcellence in Ritual which put more of a focus on how we do our church services and how to constantly improve them. Secondly, we adopted the idea of an annual congregational Patron thru a two-part Patron Auction. This not only raises funds for the church but the diety selected provides a touchpoint on our programming and focus for the coming church year. We also adopted a strategic plan on implementing these (and other) ideas. Starting in 2008 we actively worked on improving our facility, getting rid of clutter in 2008 and putting in new flooring in 2009, in 2010 we are planning to install a new, energy efficient HVAC system. These changes have had results that were largely positive with more people, more programs and more funds. We welcome your added participation to this community and hope to see you add to this positive feedback thing we've got going!

As you might have guessed the latest change was - we changed our name again. It had been over 8 years since we were located on Pleasant Valley - in January 2009 we decided to change our name to something not "geography dependent." So, the congregation unanimously adopted the name Sacred Journey Fellowship: An Earth-Centered Unitarian Universalist Congregation.