• UUFM News

  • Upcoming Events

    • Sat 5/19/2012: Yard and Bake Sale
    • Sat 5/19/2012: Yoga with Kalai
    • Sat 5/19/2012: Cioncert with Karren Pell and Friends
    • Sun 5/20/2012: Faith Harvest Service
    • Sun 5/20/2012: UU Service
    • Sun 5/20/2012: 2nd Hour
    • Sun 5/20/2012: New Life Service
    • Mon 5/21/2012: Co-Counseling Group
    • Mon 5/21/2012: Meatless Monday
    • Tue 5/22/2012: Choir

  • Sunday Services

    Our services begin at 10:00 a.m. Children are always welcome in our services. We have a nursery available for children birth to 3 years who would prefer to play. After our Story for All Ages, children and youth are invited to community time with our Director of Religious Education.
    Following the service, there is social time with coffee and snacks. At 11;15, we have religious education for all ages.

  • May 20

    Re-Thinking Jeff Davis with Rev. Paul

    Paul is using the occasion of the upcoming state holiday celebrating Jefferson Davis to explore the question whether or to what extent we should be holding up others as heroes and heroines.

Rev. Dr. Paul Britner Rev. Dr. Paul Britner: It’s been my pleasure and honor to serve UUFM since September, 2005. Together, we are creating a shared ministry that aspires, in the words of our Unitarian Universalist Association, to nurture the spirit and heal the world.

My father was a United Methodist minister, but I never really took to Methodism, preferring at an early age for rational alternatives to supernatural claims. I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and graduated from the Indiana University extension campus there in 1981 with a liberal arts degree majoring in history.

My spirituality is the product of all the parts of my life. The seeds that would become my UU faith were planted during the three years I lived in Grand Canyon National Park working, among other jobs, as a tour guide. That’s when I started to appreciate what I’ve come to know as awe, but it would be a long time before I could really articulate how that experience changed me. Not long after leaving the Grand Canyon, I went to law school at the University of Arizona and then served in civil service positions in Washington, D.C. for approximately 10 years.

While in law school, I began attending a 12-step group for people with eating disorders, and I’ve been a 12-stepper ever since. At one meeting, a friend invited me to the UU Church of Rockville (Maryland). I was in my mid-30s at the time, and I never had heard of Unitarian Universalism. At my first service, I felt like I was coming up for air for the first time after a life spent under water. The more I read, the more I kept saying to myself, “I’ve been a UU all my life and just didn’t know it!”

Over time, I found myself eager to leave work to get to some activity at my church. Eventually, with the help and encouragement of friends, I made the decision to prepare for the ministry. I stuck my toe in the water by working for 18 months for a community ministry, and then I decided to plunge full-time into seminary. I enrolled in the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana in August, 2001 and graduated in May, 2004. Earlham is affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, and my spirituality continues to be influenced by their testimonies of peace and simplicity. After seminary, I served for one year as a chaplain resident at a hospital in Anderson, S.C. and then began my ministry here in Montgomery. I received my Doctor of Ministry degree from Meadville Lombard Theological School in May, 2011.

I live with my wife, Karen, and our two dogs, Sam and Annie. Karen has three grown children, Kristin, Victoria, and Bobby.