“Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere;

Its temple, all space;

Its shrine, the good heart;

Its creed, all truth;

Its ritual, works of love;

Its profession of faith, divine living.”

– The Rev. Theodore Parker

PITTSFIELD – A year ago, the youth group from a Boston church stumbled onto something they hadn’t expected to find on a hike at Moxie Falls: another Unitarian Universalist.

They were so excited when they spotted a UU bumper sticker on a car in the parking lot, the teenagers asked everyone who came off the trail, “Are you UU too?”

“We got a lot of blank, confused looks,” Caitlin Colgrove, 17, of Needham, Mass., said Sunday as the group wound up a return trip to Maine. “But then we found Tom and his dog.”

Thomas C. Brown was the man they were looking for. Brown, 74, of Pittsfield is a member of the Unitarian Universalist church in that town. The young people from Theodore Park Church in West Roxbury, Mass., exchanged phone numbers and e-mails with Brown and promised to keep in touch.

This year, the teenagers culminated their annual river-rafting trip by conducting the service Sunday morning at Brown’s church in Pittsfield. While the service drew about 40 people – a big crowd for the small congregation – Brown wasn’t able to attend because of a family commitment.

The youth group, composed of five girls and one boy, all 17, re-created a service they had performed at their own church, the Theodore Parker Church, Unitarian Universalist, in West Roxbury. It included a history of the congregation’s namesake, a transcendentalist minister whose friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.

Many in the Pittsfield church knew Parker was one of the denomination’s leading clergy during the first half of the 19th century. Parker’s writings are included in UU worship guides and publications, but few knew details of his work at what was originally the Second Parish Church of Roxbury.

Parker, it was revealed in Sunday’s service, was born Aug. 24, 1810, in Lexington, Mass., the 11th child of John and Hannah Parker. John Parker, a farmer and mechanic, had commanded the militia of Lexington on April 19, 1775, when the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.

After graduating from Harvard Divinity School and teaching in small congregations, Parker was installed in 1837 as the seventh minister of the church that would bear his name from 1965 on. Parker served there until four years before his death in Florence, Italy, in 1860.

His sermons in Boston drew sharp criticism from more conservative Protestant pastors for stating that Christianity as it was practiced had strayed too far from the teachings of Christ. He also said that believers were not saved directly by belief in Jesus “but by the Christ we form in our hearts and live in our daily life, that we save ourselves, God working with us, both to will and to do.”

The ensuing backlash and the growing abolitionist movement, in which Parker was a leader, turned the pastor into a 19th century celebrity minister. His sermons at the Boston Music Hall, where he preached against slavery and for women’s suffrage, drew crowds of 3,000 on a Sunday.

Parker was indicted by a federal grand jury in 1854 for violating the Fugitive Slave Act for helping two ex-slaves escape to England. The indictment was quashed the next year on a legal technicality.

Although, the teenagers focused the service on the past, recent events in their hometown also were on their minds. Meredith Gallogly of West Roxbury lit a candle for two West Roxbury firefighters who were killed last week fighting a fire at a restaurant two blocks from her church.

After the service, members of the Pittsfield church said they enjoyed the history lesson and were grateful that the young people went to the trouble last year to track down the owner of the car with the UU bumper sticker.

“I was so not expecting to sit in a pew afterward and be crying,” said Deborah Fletcher, 52, of Pittsfield and a student at Bangor Theological Seminary. “To hear that message of truth spoken by youth and to hear Theodore Parker’s words spoken in the present knowing they were written more than 150 years ago just moved me and gave me hope.”

Members of the youth group plan to return next year for another raft trip and to seek out their fellow Unitarian Universalists on the trails and rivers of Maine.