Our slogan is, "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you're welcome here."

Our local congregations offer a friendly welcome to visitors and newcomers. Many of our church buildings offer beautiful settings for weddings and a caring ministry to young couples. Babies are baptized as infants (we're happy to baptize young people and adults who affirm their faith and who have not previously been baptized). Children are warmly included in the life of our churches, many of which offer a children's story time during worship as well as educational programs for all ages.

The Southwest Conference has an active summer camping program for children and youth, as well as annual retreats for junior high and senior high.  There is also an annual "Thanksgiving Alive!" service project held in different cities every year, where 150 youth from around the conference will gather to do such helping ministries as repairing low income houses, cleaning or painting a shelter for abused families, and sort food in a food bank.

We welcome the leadership of both men and women - we've been ordaining women to be pastors since 1853, the first US denomination to do so. The United Church of Christ has voted at its national meeting, the General Synod, to try to become a more truly multi-cultural and multi-racial church.

The United Church of Christ welcomes all people without regard to racial or ethnic background or sexual orientation. Being in the Southwest, many of our congregations have a large number of active, interesting retired persons as well as singles and families.

For an example of how welcoming our churches can be, please see the Open and Affirming Statement written by Desert Palm United Church of Christ in Tempe, Arizona, but use your browser's back button to rejoin us here!

For a list of churches who have adopted Open and Affirming statements, or for further information on ONA, click here.

We are a church for seekers, for people on a spiritual journey, for people wanting to be open to the movement of God's Holy Spirit in their lives. We don't require anyone to assent to a particular creed in order to belong; in fact, in the United Church of Christ we often say, "Our Statement of Faith is never a test of faith, it is always a testimony to our common faith."

Our Statement of Faith begins with the words "we believe" instead of "I believe," emphasizing the faith of the community of faith and the way each individual person interprets that faith for himself or herself.

Local congregations frequently offer faith discussion groups, Bible study, and prayer support groups. Our new and highly acclaimed church school curriculum (Seasons of the Spirit) helps all ages study the same scripture reading which is often also the subject for the Sunday morning sermon.

Some of our ancestors, the Pilgrims and Puritans from England, came over on the Mayflower and founded villages, churches, schools and colleges (even Yale University!) in New England. These churches were called by the name Congregational.

Our other forebears came from Germany, settling first in Pennsylvania, and later along the Mississippi River bank. They founded two denominations which eventually merged into the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Some of the giants of Protestant theology of this century came from that background, Paul Tillich and Reinhold, Richard, and Hilda Niebuhr. Other ancestors of ours created a church called simply Christian, an indigenous American mix of religion that bubbled up around the time of American independence.

All of these forebears of ours believed in following Jesus' example of prayer and action, teaching and healing, of helping people in need, of putting your faith into action in order to create a better society and to make life better for the average person.  So they founded hospitals and colleges and encouraged education for both pastors and people in the pew.
 

Very early on, they sent out missionaries to make life better for people in far-away places and to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. In 1957 all these folks got together to form a new denomination which took for its motto the prayer that Jesus prayed, "That they may all be one," and which took for its name the "United Church of Christ" because they believed in Christian unity.

Many of our churches in the Southwest have been established in the past 30 years, responding to the population growth, like our  "new church starts" in the greater Tucson area, Good Shepherd United Church of Christ in Green Valley/Sahuarita and Oro Valley United Church of Christ, both founded in 1991 and our newest church, Yuma UCC in Yuma,  Arizona.

Even our very oldest congregations, like First Congregational in Prescott, Arizona (1880), and First Congregational in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1880), are very new compared to the churches back East. We have small but vibrant communities of faith in small towns (such as Valley Community Church in Silver City, New Mexico) as well as large institutions which have grown up giving leadership to growing cities (Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix, for example, with its Beatitudes Campus retirement facility).