UUCV is a community of many stories, beliefs, identities, generations, and ways of experiencing the world. We don’t have to believe the same things to belong here. What brings us together is a shared commitment to Love and to the values of our Unitarian Universalist faith.

We are a community that worships, wonders, learns, serves, celebrates, and grows together. We ask big questions without expecting easy answers. We make room for joy and grief, doubt and hope, tradition and change. And through it all, we seek to create a place where people can bring their whole selves and know they belong.

We also believe our faith calls us beyond our walls. We work for justice, care for our neighbors, protect the earth, and strive to build a world where every person has the opportunity to flourish.

We won’t always get it right. We will disagree. We will make mistakes. But we covenant to keep showing up—to listen, learn, repair, and begin again in love.

This is UUCV—an enduring liberal religious community transforming lives, caring for the world, and becoming together.

In the Unitarian Universalist Tradition, a covenant is a voluntary, mutual promise of shared values and behavior rather than a strict adherence to a shared creed. It acts as a “thread that joins congregations together,” guiding how members treat one another in love, respect, and right relationship.

We, the Unitarian Universalists of the Cumberland Valley, covenant to embody the shared values through:

• RESPECT – being patient, listening carefully, and communicating directly by speaking truth with compassion
• ADVOCACY – challenging privilege, dominance, and majority opinion; wherever we encounter them
• CELEBRATION – working and playing together with enthusiasm and joy; knowing the call back into covenant is the essential act of a joyful community of faith. When we fall short of our ideals, we will seek forgiveness and call one another lovingly, but firmly, back into the community; reminding one another of our shared mission and purpose.

Our History

UUCV’s story began in the summer of 1994, when members and friends of the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg began gathering at the Baird-Ruby farm. What started as an alternative to traveling to Harrisburg soon became something more: the dream of a Unitarian Universalist community rooted here in the Cumberland Valley.

Over the next several years, that dream took shape. The growing community began meeting in Carlisle, chose the name Unitarian Universalists of the Cumberland Valley, and expanded to weekly worship. On March 15, 1998, 82 charter members officially formed the congregation.

In 1999, UUCV found a permanent spiritual home in the former Otterbein Methodist Church in Boiling Springs. Since then, our congregation has continued to grow and change, deepening our commitment to worship, religious education, LGBTQ+ inclusion, justice, service, and care for one another.

More than three decades after those first gatherings on a farm, UUCV remains a community shaped by people willing to imagine what might be possible.

Rooted in our history and centered in Love, we continue becoming together.