History of Our Church

The following history of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County was written by the 5th grade Travel in Time class during our church's 50th Anniversary Year.

Our Church was founded in 1952, starting out as a Unitarian fellowship with only about twenty-two people. We first met in the Llanarch firehouse in Germantown, Pennsylvania. At that time, we were the first Unitarian or Universalist Church existent in Delaware County since 1865.

Later we moved to a Quaker Meeting House where we met at night. There were 10 children in the church at the time and they met at the various members' homes. Eventually we bought a church on Old Eagle Road and there some people from our church got together and dug a basement beneath it for the children to have Sunday School. Later we bought another building for religious Education.

The first minister that the Unitarian Society of Delaware County (Yes, that is what we called ourselves then. In fact, that is STILL our official name!) called to serve was Herb Vetter. The second minister was Dave Kibby. He was very Social Actions minded and took the church out to participate in marches for the Civil Rights movement. He was our minister for seventeen years!

In 1961 the Unitarians and the Universalist joined together to form the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. Our church was slow to make an official name change and never really did - not officially. Over the years however, we became publicly known as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Delaware County. Some people wanted to change the word "church" in our title, but this idea was voted down and the title church has remained with us ever since.

As our church society grew, we became too large for our small church building on Eagle Road, so we built a new church on our current site. What is now our Fellowship Hall, used to be the whole church. It was dedicated in 1966.

We had an interim minister, Rev. Morris Hudgins for a while, and then in 1979, the Rose Tree Day School was started! After Rev. Hudgins left, we ran things without a minister for a while.

In 1988 we welcomed Rev. Judith Downing as our settled minister. She was with us for 11 years. During her time with us we changed our principles & bi-laws to officially make ourselves more inclusive of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, calling ourselves a Welcoming Congregation. We also started to put together a mission statement and talk about building a larger space in the 1990s. We finally completed what is now our new sanctuary and church building in 1998.

After Judith left, we had another interim minister, Elizabeth Kerman, and we took a whole year looking for another permanent minister.

At the end of that year, we called Rev. Kerry Mueller to serve as our minister. While Rev. Kerry was with us, we began to welcome other groups to meet here in our church, some Muslims, the Metropolitan Community Church, some pagans. We also have a beautiful memorial garden where people who have been part of the church community may lay to rest, should they choose, after their death.

Click here for a more detailed version of our church history.

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