A Unitarian Universalist minister serves a congregation within a tradition formed by the 1961 merger of the historically separate Unitarian and Universalist movements, both of which had, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rejected specific mainstream Christian doctrines, the Trinity in the Unitarian case and eternal damnation in the Universalist case, while continuing to identify as Christian for much of their earlier history before evolving, particularly across the twentieth century, into an explicitly non-creedal tradition affirming a shared set of principles and sources rather than a fixed theological doctrine, drawing on Christian, Jewish, humanist, earth-centered and other religious and philosophical traditions without requiring congregants or ministers to hold any single specified belief about God or the divine.
Ordination requires seminary education, typically a Master of Divinity degree, and a formal process of ministerial fellowship granted by the Unitarian Universalist Association after review of the candidate's preparation and formation, a credentialing process that gives UU ministry a recognized professional structure comparable to mainline Protestant denominations even though the tradition itself imposes no fixed doctrinal test; a UU minister's specific theological views, which range across the tradition from Christian to humanist to explicitly atheist, are understood as the minister's own individual position within a shared covenantal community rather than as a denominationally mandated creed the minister is ordained to teach and defend.