Unitarian church rebuilds with "green" building

NEW ORLEANS (AP) Six years after Hurricane Katrina forced a small Lakeview church to rebuild from scratch, its members have done so in a way few other congregations have matched, creating an ambitious, environmentally green building that embodies the congregation's very theology.

The members of Community Church Unitarian Universalist of New Orleans have a tight, bright church of 4,200 square feet designed from day one to consume as little fossil-fuel energy as possible.

And now comes something like a certificate of success: March's electricity bill totaled $48.83.

The Environmental Protection Agency says the Lakeview congregation's new home is the first house of worship of its kind in the country.

The Unitarian Universalist rebuilders in Lakeview are the spiritual and ethical heirs of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the 19th century New England Transcendentalists.

Famously liberal and pluralistic, big-tent Unitarian Universalism describes itself as a creedless religion devoted to seven broad ethical principles. Generally, the denomination celebrates human dignity, equality, peace, social justice, democracy, the right to conscience and each individual's search for truth.

An old joke Unitarian Universalists tell on themselves: "Why did the Unitarian Universalist cross the road?"

"To support the chicken in its search for its own path."

But another unifying principal and the underpinning for the Lakeview church is "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."

"We have in this congregation people who want to walk the way they talk," said the Rev. Jim VanderWeele, the pastor of Community Church since 2002.

Original post:
Unitarian church rebuilds with "green" building