In September of 2001, a group of people who were the “founding mothers and fathers” of what would later become All Souls Community Church, gathered in public parks in the Grand Rapids area to investigate the nature of their spiritual fellowship, and to explore what it would mean to be a spiritual community. By the end of that fall there was expressed by the group a desire to be “gathered” into a Unitarian Universalist Church. However, during the fall meetings, first in public parks and later at Fountain Elementary School, several things stood out.

First, the experience of “gathering” was designated by the name of the “Vision Quest.” This group saw its meetings to be part of a larger journey of fellowship and discovery. The meetings in the fall were not “worship” per se, but meetings for a different (though related) purpose. The group chose to structure the time during the “Vision Quest” Sunday meetings, on the basis of the “BRANCHES experience” Dr. Brent Smith had developed at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1990’s. These readings were approved (and later edited) by a Steering Committee. Individuals were chosen to respond to the chosen readings, and this was the presentational form of the “Vision Quest” Sunday meetings. Small group discussion took up the rest of the “spiritual” time, while some time was used on Sunday morning to decide institutional and organizational matters.

Second, the kind of fellowship that would characterize the group would be “spiritual,” broadly understood; that is, that there was no need to “define precisely” what spiritual meant, but that it was a kind of fellowship that included deep, personal growth on the part of the individuals that made up the group.

Third, it was eventually agreed that the community was aimed towards the establishment of a Unitarian Universalist church; that is, that the spiritual character of the fellowship that defined the group would be out of the Unitarian and Universalist faith traditions, and that the church would affiliate with the Unitarian Universalist Association rather than be a non-denominational community. This gave a particularity to an understanding of “spiritual” that rooted the emerging church community in faith traditions that bore distinctive understandings and language. It was out of these traditions that words and ideas like, “walking together,” “covenant,” “liberating and cultivating the spirit,” “liberal religion,” and other terms became crucial to understanding the nature of the newly-formed community. It also gave an organizational form to the group, “institutionalizing” the group’s congregational polity, the form of governance in Unitarian Universalism.

And finally, the founders of the church developed a “Declaration of Purpose” which defines the result of the study and discussion done all through the fall of 2001, and represents what those founders aspired to create. That Declaration is quoted in full here:

The BRANCHES “Vision Quest” experience is a form of small group study which aims to deepen the spiritual life of its members by placing them “in conversation” with the theological and philosophical ideas of Unitarian Universalism. The BRANCHES group experience uses primary and secondary source material from Unitarian Universalist and related theological, philosophical, and social history. In reading and discussing that material as a group, each individual in the group is encouraged to understand his or her “spiritual walk” as part of a larger journey of faith through history. The participants also engage the primary ideas and concepts that are foundational to Unitarianism and Universalism as distinctive faith traditions. And finally, the participant, in doing this with others of the congregation, comes to understand how our church stands within a larger faith tradition, and how the mission of that church is fulfilled through learning and reason.

Thus, it could be said that All Souls Community Church was founded on the “spiritual walk” as the form of community fellowship; and, that the gathering mothers and fathers of the church shaped the spiritual nature of the community through the readings they used as foundational to the “Vision Quest,” and the responses they gave to those readings. In effect, they had codified the ideas and concepts – theological, philosophical, and historical – that came to shape their particular community embodiment of the larger tradition in which they stood, Unitarian Universalism.

It was out of the “Vision Quest” that the BRANCHES first year experience at All Souls Community Church was structured and its purpose arose. We hope that through the BRANCHES experience the participant gains a greater sense of his or her spiritual journey and identity by standing within the “conversation” that forms the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition in which both the individual and church stands.

The purpose of the BRANCHES experience at All Souls Community Church is to liberate and cultivate the spirit through an educational journey. The form that experience takes is small group learning that simulates the founders’ “Vision Quest” experience as the paradigm of community formation and individual spiritual identity formation.

The initial phase of the BRANCHES experience consists of the group going through the readings determined by the Covenant Board (and the earlier steering committee) to represent the key concepts used to form the church initially. These readings characterize the distinctive understanding of the Unitarian Universalist faith tradition embodied in All Souls Community Church, its covenant, and organizational structure. Each BRANCHES group also simulates the original covenant process itself, in order to experience the community formation that shapes our identity as a church.

It is important as a shared experience for each new member as well as for the common character of the congregation, that this initial phase be undertaken with reflection and understanding. For this reason, at the end of the ROOTS class, when participants are invited to consider moving into the BRANCHES experience, the minister characterizes the first commitment made as “serving All Souls in study.” Part of the aim of our church is the spiritual growth of its members in “liberating and cultivating the spirit”, especially by learning. By providing within our community an experience that fulfills that aim, the church itself is strengthened.

In this way it could be said that initially the purpose of the BRANCHES experience at All Souls is what other churches call “membership assimilation,” or what is known historically as the “halfway covenant” issue in Unitarian churches. Thus, in simulating the original “Vision Quest” in form, structure, and content, the BRANCHES experience is meant to give a new member an experience akin to the gathering process that brought about the formation of the church: its organizational form, its covenant, and the direction of its spiritual walk. Thus, the new member comes to “walk alongside of” longer standing members with an equality of purpose and “ownership” in the covenant of the church.