Unity of Las Vegas, formerly Unity Church of the Desert, is a non-judgmental, spirit-filled Christian community where anyone can come and feel at home. Now when we say "Christian," we ask that you put aside all your assumptions about what that word means and look to your heart in order to get in touch with its original intent.
Christianity, as we see it, is the movement of people who are actively practicing the Christ principles as set forth by the Master Teacher, Jesus Christ. He was the son of God just as we are all the sons and daughters of God. The Christ presence spoke through him just as the inner Christ speaks to us in meditation, prayer, and stillness. Jesus was exceptional, but he was not the exception. Each one of us is called upon to live a Christ life, just as he did. That is the Christianity that Christ intended.
What we call the inner Christ could also be referred to as our connection to God, Spirit, intuition, the inner voice, higher self, Buddha nature, the Tao, universal energy, and so much more.
Unity is more then a religion, it is a Christian movement. That means we practice the teachings of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus. Christianity is our spiritual path just as Buddhists have The Eightfold Path. On this spiritual path we use the Bible as a resource to discover what Jesus Christ actually said and did in his life, and we recognize those actions and words as a reflection of what we can do in our own lives today.
What we see when we read the words of Christ in the Bible:
There is no sin - There are only uninformed choices and missteps.
There is no devil - There are no outside forces acting upon us - only the results and outcomes of our own failed thinking.
There is no hell - Hell is a state of consciosuness we expereince in our lives when we are living in seperation, anger, envy, doubt, greed and many other negative states of thought.
Heaven is now - Not once did Jesus Christ refer to heaven as an after-death experience. It is an expereince to be had in this life on earth in the here and now.
God is within - The outdated idea of the external judgmental God no longer serves the modern intellectual nor does it align with modern science. We recognize God as an internal power that unites and moves all things towards goodness. It is real and experiential.
All are welcome - If Jesus taught us one thing, it is to stop judging others. He embraced people from all walks of life, from all religions, and excluded no one based on their gender, sexual prefernce, religion or beliefs. He epitomized the word Unity in his actions and teachings. Unity sees everyone as one, there can be no separation.
Though Christianity is our path, we never limit spiritual Truth to a single location or ideology. We recognize all religions (including but not limited to New Thought, Religious Science, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, Native American Spirituality, and Islam) as having a path to spiritual growth...that is why we are called Unity. Instead of focusing on the differences that separate us, our goal is to find the similarities that unite us.
This new understanding of Christianity, the Unity movement, was founded by Charles & Myrtle Fillmore in the early 1900s and is headquartered in Unity Village, Missouri. Our founders experienced and believed in a greater power at work in their lives and in the universe. This power has been called many things in many different belief systems, but they chose to use the word God, and so do we. But in Unity we do not limit our understanding of God to the traditional definition, but rather see God as an ever-present power, divine energy, continually creating and sustaining all creation through love. We know that we are each individual expressions of God in a physical experience on earth. Our essential nature is divine and therefore inherently good. Our purpose is to express our divine potential as realized and demonstrated by Jesus Christ. He expressed his divine potential and used his teachings to show humankind how to express ours as well.
In Unity, our teachings are based on 5 basic principles:
God is the source and creator of all. There is no other enduring power. God is good and present everywhere.
We are spiritual beings, created in God’s image. The spirit of God lives within each person; therefore, all people are inherently good.
We create our life experiences through our way of thinking.
There is power in affirmative prayer and meditation, which we believe increases our awareness of God.
Knowledge of these spiritual principles is not enough. We must live them.
For more information about the Unity movement and its co-founders, please visit: www.unity.org