The fellowship movement Sixty years after Unitarians began
encouraging the formation of lay-led congregations, a look back
at the movement that transformed Unitarianism. Between 1948 and
1967, the main growth strategy of the American Unitarian
Association (AUA) and its successor, the Unitarian Universalist
Association (UUA), was to plant small, autonomous, lay-led
congregations just about everywhere ten or more religious
liberals could be brought together. This large-scale experiment
in church growth was both unique in the American religious
landscape and controversial. In researching my new book, The
Fellowship Movement: A Growth Strategy and Its Legacy, I found
that about 40 percent of the hundreds of little lay-led
congregations planted from Cape Cod to Alaska and from Minnesota
to the Virgin Islands survive in some form. Thirty percent of
the UUA’s current congregations—323—started as fellowships
during those two decades. Some are still small and lay-led.
Others have evolved into full-service congregation