Unity Worldwide Ministries

Unity Worldwide Ministries belongs to the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian family of churches.

Governance: association.

Unity Worldwide Ministries reports 578 congregations in the United States (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020).

Listed as "Unity Churches, Association of".

The Kansas City movement born from Myrtle Fillmore's healing — Daily Word on the nightstand, Silent Unity answering prayer requests around the clock.

Heritage

Unity began in Kansas City in 1889 with Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, after Myrtle attributed her recovery from tuberculosis to affirmative prayer — I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness. From their prayer ministry grew Silent Unity, which has received prayer requests continuously for over a century; the Daily Word devotional (since 1924); Unity Village, the movement's Missouri headquarters campus; and Unity Worldwide Ministries, the association of Unity churches and centers.

Theological family

New Thought Christianity by self-description — Unity calls its teaching practical Christianity: God as omnipresent Spirit, Jesus as wayshower whose Christ nature is humanity's own potential, prayer as affirmation rather than petition, and thought as formative of experience. Trinitarian churches confess Christ otherwise; this record reports the difference and adjudicates nothing.

Who decides what

Association: self-governing member ministries with credentialed ministers, served by Unity Worldwide Ministries and the separate Unity World Headquarters at Unity Village.

What a first-time visitor would find

A Sunday service with upbeat music, meditation and an inspirational message, commonly closing with the Prayer for Protection — the light of God surrounds us — written by Unity poet James Dillet Freeman; classes and prayer chaplaincy run through the week.

What it has always cared about

Prayer as a ministry industrialized in the gentlest sense — Silent Unity answers by phone, mail and now online, without charge; publishing as outreach; healing and prosperity taught as spiritual practice.

Its gift to the wider church

Daily Word and Silent Unity have quietly served millions far beyond Unity's own membership — countless mainline and evangelical households have kept the little devotional on the nightstand without ever asking where it came from.

Commonly confused with

With Christian Science, constantly — an older, organizationally unrelated body with a different textbook and polity; with Centers for Spiritual Living, its New Thought sibling; and with the Unitarian Universalist Association, related in neither history nor teaching despite the similar-sounding name.

Range of views inside it

Ministries range from explicitly Christian in idiom to broadly interfaith-spiritual; music and liturgy vary widely; the shared center is affirmative prayer and the Fillmore teaching lineage.

A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific ministry, including how Christian its idiom is. RCMS 2020 counts 578 Unity congregations in the United States, listed there as the Association of Unity Churches. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Unity ministries typically…" and yield to the ministry's own materials.

Sources: Unity — the five basic principles and history (Unity, Unity Village MO) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press) · 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ASARB)

Where Unity Worldwide Ministries churches are on the map

19 Unity Worldwide Ministries congregations appear on The Church Map, across 12 states.

More of the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian story · Find these churches on the map