Unity (Unity School of Christianity)

Unity traces its origin to a specific claimed healing: Myrtle Fillmore, suffering from tuberculosis in Kansas City in 1886, attributed her recovery to a practice of prayer and affirmation she developed after hearing a lecture on divine healing, rather than to conventional medical treatment, and she and her husband Charles built an entire teaching and organization outward from that single experience over the following decades.

The theology that resulted reads much of the Bible as metaphysical allegory rather than as literal history, treats God as a universal principle of good present within every person rather than a separate being to be petitioned from outside, and explicitly rejects both original sin and a substitutionary theory of atonement, positions that place Unity within the wider New Thought family of American religious movements alongside Religious Science and Divine Science rather than within either Protestant evangelicalism or liberal mainline Christianity. Charles Fillmore brought organizational and business capacity to the partnership, running the publishing and administrative side of what became a substantial operation, while Myrtle's own healing testimony remained the story the movement continued to tell about its own beginning, retold in Unity literature well beyond her lifetime.

Silent Unity, the prayer ministry Myrtle Fillmore began, has answered written and telephoned requests for prayer continuously since the 1890s, a genuinely unusual institutional longevity that makes it one of the oldest continuously operating prayer request services of its kind anywhere in American religious life, staffed today by a rotating team who pray over each request received rather than simply filing it.

The Fillmores built a publishing operation alongside the prayer ministry from early on, and Unity's periodicals and books, including the long running Daily Word devotional, carried its teaching to a readership considerably larger than its formal congregational membership at any point in its history, a pattern typical of the New Thought movement generally, whose influence has often travelled further through published material than through organized congregations.

Present day Unity congregations are coordinated through Unity Worldwide Ministries, with a publishing and retreat centre maintained at Unity Village, Missouri, the movement's administrative and spiritual home since the early twentieth century. Unity has generally positioned itself as compatible with continued Christian church membership rather than as a replacement for it, and a considerable number of its adherents historically have described themselves as remaining members of a mainline denomination while also drawing on Unity teaching and literature, a dual affiliation the movement has not discouraged.