Lauren Smith

Just before the start of Black History Month, Lauren Smith was ordained as a minister of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) in a ceremony at the Arlington Street Church on Boylston Street. Participating in the Jan. 27 ceremony of Smith, one of growing number of Unitarian Universalist ministers of color, was the Rev. William G. Sinkford, the UUA’s first African American president.

“In what has been a predominantly white denomination, we now find ourselves blessed with more than 50 seminarians or recently fellowshipped ministers of color,” said Sinkford.

Currently serving as an assistant minister in California, Smith is a fifth-generation African American UU, with family ties to First Parish Cambridge, Follen Church Society in Lexington, as well as First Church Roxbury, a UU congregation rooted in the heart of the black community.

Arlington Street Church, Smith’s home congregation since 1997, has been deeply involved in issues of social justice over many decades, including civil rights, anti-war activism, and women’s and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) rights.

In a letter to the Arlington Street Church’s congregants prior to her ordination, Smith reflected on her unique role as a minister of color.

“The ministry to which I feel called is a marriage of two great religious traditions. The black church has always had as one its core purposes the reconstitution of black selfhood and community,” she wrote. “From the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to Malcolm X, black spiritual leaders have led the community in discovering pathways to spiritual survival in the face of oppression. Our UU faith has its own legacy of liberating theology, grounded as it is in the notion that every human being is an expression of the divine.”