Our History

Although a small congregation until the 1950s, the church and its members have regularly been engaged with the wider community. 

The church’s founding president, Peter Bertram, was president of the Dundas Board of Trade and later secretary of the Citizens League in Hamilton. 

The church’s second minister, Rev. John Long, was a founding member of the first Canadian Club in Canada, in Hamilton, in 1893. 

Church women created the sixth branch of the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada in 1946 that collected public donations sent to refugees in post-war Europe. 

In 1965, Minister Rev. Robert Hemstreet was among seven Hamiltonians who joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama. 

Our congregation helped launched one of the first rent banks in Ontario, Hamilton’s Housing Emergency Loan Program, in 1999.

Like all Unitarian churches, the congregation has no official creed or dogma, trusting members to work out their own beliefs. 

The first of our 20 ministers were liberal Christian but, since the 1940s, most have been humanist. Congregants have a range of viewpoints. 

There are about 200 members today who are active in worship, education programs of children, youth and adult religious education, seniors programs, music, and social justice. We regularly provide the well-respected Unitarian Universalist Association Our Whole Lives program of values-based sexuality education. 

Our social justice work focuses on partnering with the Eva Rothwell Centre, sexual and gender justice and affordable housing. We have won awards for our Carolinian gardens and were co-winners of Hamilton’s 2013 Greening Sacred Spaces Award. Our musicians and singers are central to church life.