James Freeman Clarke’s Congregational Reforms Still Shape Unitarian Universalist Practice

James Freeman Clarke’s Unitarian church in Boston was radically unlike the other Unitarian churches in the city. Two hundred years after his birth, his ideas about congregational life still shape Unitarian Universalist practice, according to the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Johnson, senior minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock in Manhasset, New York. Johnson is presenting this year’s Minns Lecture Series on Clarke’s bicentennial legacy. Although Clarke, a Unitarian minister, was influential in comparative religion, education reform, women’s suffrage, and antislavery, Johnson said his greatest legacy was his work to reimagine church life.

Clarke was born on April 4, 1810, in Hanover, New Hampshire, the third of six children. He was named after his paternal grandfather, the Rev. James Freeman, the first Unitarian minister of King’s Chapel in Boston. Clarke graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1833 and was ordained by the Second Church of Boston.

Clarke first served a church in Louisville, Kentucky, where he sought to spread Unitarianism on the frontier. He wrote, “If I could make converts in a community where my belief was unpopular, I should be convinced of its adaptation to human needs.” During this period he helped found and edit The Western Messenger, which aimed to spread the ideas of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism in the West.

In 1839 Clarke married Anna Huidekoper, the daughter of the founder of Meadville Theological School. The source states that the marriage gave him the financial freedom to pursue his plan for a new model of congregations. By then he had concluded that Unitarian churches outside New England would need to reorganize church life in order to grow and thrive, and he believed the best way to achieve this was to lead by example.

In 1841 Clarke returned to Boston and founded the Church of the Disciples, based on his vision of an ideal church organization. Johnson said the church drew as many as 700 people on Sunday mornings from the start. Its funding model set it apart. Expenses were covered by voluntary subscriptions, similar to today’s annual canvass, rather than by pew rentals, which were the standard practice at the time. Johnson said this removed any class basis for seating. “He wanted everyone to feel welcome and be able to participate regardless of wealth,” Johnson said. “Clarke believed the pew system really discouraged the poor from coming into the community.” Dropping pew fees meant that people without means could take a seat, a practical act of neighbor-love (Matthew 25:35).

The second of Clarke’s reforms was what he called the “social principle.” He held that members needed to know one another through activities beyond Sunday worship, including weekly discussion groups, social action, charity work, and other programs. The third element was to involve the whole congregation in worship. He encouraged sermons by laypeople, decision-making by congregational committees, and open communion. The source notes that, drawing on their Puritan roots, most Unitarian churches of the time limited communion to church members. Members of Clarke’s church formed committees to set church policy, plan charity work, oversee the Sunday school, and choose hymns.

Clarke was absent from the congregation from 1850 through 1854 because of a sabbatical and illness. In 1859 he was elected secretary of the American Unitarian Association, and in 1865 he helped establish the National Conference of Unitarian Churches. He was also a prolific writer.

In 1885 Clarke outlined his “Five Points of the New Theology,” which summarized beliefs commonly held among Unitarians in the late nineteenth century. He listed “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of human development in all worlds, or, the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.”

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