Rev. Gregory Guice is 58, but he can readily call to mind the names of those who reached out to him in his youth spent in inner city Detroit. Mr. Shepherd. Father Moran. Father Cunningham.

“I was always the recipient of those men in my community who organized baseball teams, field trips,” says Rev. Guice, senior minster at Unity Church of Lake Orion, Michigan. “Seeing their modeling gave me encouragement.”

For Rev. Guice, they were his first examples of spiritually inspired social action. His other early teachers: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and, of course, Jesus Christ.

“Jesus said, ‘Go and feed my sheep,'” Rev. Guice says. “He didn't say, ‘Go out there and sit in a temple and worship me.' He said ‘Go out into the community and do something. Demonstrate these principles of truth.'”

In recent years, Unity has called this type of service “spiritual social action.” Defining what that means—and what Unity's role should be—has been the cause of some discussion within the movement.

“I understand that Unity traditionally teaches us to improve ourselves from within,” says Suzanne Scott, a member of New Thought Unity Center (NTUC) of Cincinnati, Ohio. “In doing so, we will improve our relationships with others and the world around us. However, I feel that Unity Worldwide Ministries recognizes the need to be progressive and proactive. In order to fulfill the wants and needs of today's society, we need to be involved in spiritual social action. It is what people desire in their lives and serves our need to develop as spiritual beings.”

NTUC, she says, has a well-established EarthCare team that has been active since 2006. As part of the program, the center implemented recycling programs to collect cell phones, batteries and ink cartridges. The center also collects and distributes hats, mittens and coats; organizes participants to volunteer in an adult education program at a local social service organization; and hosts lunches for Habitat for Humanity volunteers.

Sharon Bakke, a member of Unity Center of Peace in Woodinville, Washington, is working with Shelley Mackaman, the center's youth coordinator, to establish a spiritual social action team there.

“My initial reason was a simple desire to help people and offer something positive to the community,” Bakke says. “I also had a sense that social justice was a cornerstone of peace and wanted to expand a consciousness of peace and oneness to the larger community.”

The center has already been doing some “charity” work, but Bakke and Mackaman want to grow those efforts beyond making donations of money, clothing and food to being of personal service to others. They also want to tap into the youths' interest in service and social justice. As they establish their team, they are educating themselves about spiritual social action and “asking ourselves in what ways our contributions to the congregation and the larger community are ‘spiritual' and how they can remain so.”

What Is Spiritual Social Action?
To define spiritual social action, Bakke references an article written by Jane Simmons, former chair of the Spiritual Social Action ministry team at Unity Worldwide Ministries. According to Simmons, spiritual social action has these components:

Empowers each individual rather than invites dependency.
Creates sustainable living, allowing the receiver to give back.
Honors the wholeness of Spirit within all beings, no matter what the outer appearance may be.
Comes from a consciousness of love and compassion.
Moves us from the role of “benevolent giver, handing down to a needy receiver,” to a conscious realization of the privilege of being of service to the Divine.

To Rev. Guice of Unity Church of Lake Orion, defining spiritual social action isn't all that important. Living it is. He's taken that message to his congregations since becoming an ordained Unity minister in 2000.

“Spiritual social action, to me, is a necessary component that helps our communities,” he says. “You show up and do and be a living demonstration.”

Rev. Guice says he's always felt Unity should do more to “be an active player in our communities.” That philosophy was reinforced during his early education at Unity Urban Ministerial School in Detroit.

“I knew without a doubt that ministry for me involved extending a helping hand back to the community—not just the physical but to help uplift the spiritual consciousness, to help people understand there's a divine presence within you.”

At Unity Church of Lake Orion, that meant building on the “Look for the Good” campaign launched by Unity Worldwide Ministries during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The campaign encouraged people to pay attention to “political positives” and ignore negative campaigning. It inspired Rev. Guice's congregation to encourage at-risk youth to write essays about what was working in their lives instead of dwelling on what wasn't. That effort, started in late 2008, is still going on. It's carried out in other actions: knitting mittens for Pontiac elementary school students and donating to food pantries, for example.

Love In Action
“It's the natural inflow and outflow of God's love in action,” says Guice.  “We breathe into our own church community. We gain principles through which our members spiritually self-actualize, and then the outbreath is that it goes out into the community through Spiritual Social Action. Everything we do should be going outward into the community.”

At The Light Center, an alternative Unity ministry in Baldwin City, Kansas, outreach efforts extend near and far. Through its “Lovelight” outreach program, volunteers from The Light Center participate in various projects in South Africa. The projects range from Grandmothers Organized in Global Oneness (GOGO—also the Zulu word for grandmother) through which grandmothers make handcrafted items that can be sold (or given as gifts) to help support women in creating their own enterprises to generate income … to creating a greenhouse to grow food to sell … to the Children's Sanctuary, a safe halfway house in Riviersonderend, the small village they adopted, where at-risk children can receive meals, homework support and clothing.

Licensed Unity teacher Robin Goff, spiritual leader of The Light Center for 16 years, says her definition of spiritual social action has expanded over the years. “I have come to believe that we must show up with no answers or solutions to the devastating questions that abound on our planet,” she says. “We come as equals, as brothers and sisters in one united family seeking better ways to live on the earth today. We are all about growing hope in the world, and that may not show up as visibly as building a school or a greenhouse.”

In Kansas, The Light Center is focused on becoming an ecovillage based on the same principles in their outreach efforts. They grow organic vegetables; offer programs that promote healing the body, mind and spirit; mentor young people through camps; and complete service projects. They are exploring creating energy-efficient buildings and alternative energy sources.

“We are learning and modeling new ways to live in greater harmony on the earth and as a global family. What we do in South Africa is much the same as what we do in Kansas. Our motto this year has been ‘Hope grows here.'”

About 25 years ago, when she started her licensed Unity teacher training at Unity Village, she was told there was no missionary  program in Unity. Since then, Goff has tried to challenge that notion and “redefine missionary with a Unity consciousness.”

“I am so thrilled to see so many Unity centers organizing outreach projects. I believe that Unity folks do want to be of service and have been hungry for opportunities to serve in projects that are compatible with our beliefs.”

While it is widely believed that Unity founder Charles Fillmore eschewed social action, Rev. Kathy Harwood Long, associate minister at Peace Unity Church in Clarkston, Michigan, maintains Unity's founders were involved in social action from the start. As an example, she points to the story of Charles, a devoted vegetarian, nailing hotdogs to trees if they were brought to picnics and he and his wife Myrtle establishing a vegetarian cafeteria in downtown Kansas City, the heart of beef country. Myrtle, she shares, was also active in the temperance (anti-alcohol) movement of the time.

“These are the actions of socially conscious people who took action. They did not seem to have a need to tell others how to act. They understood God as unconditional love and followed their consciousness, which directed them in their actions.” She also points to Unity ordaining gays and lesbians.

In the future, she hopes all Unity leaders will address and overcome fears of bringing up social and environmental issues. “We do not tell people what to do; in Unity we create a safe space to learn the tools of direct inner contact with God, accessing the answer to every challenge.”