Second Parish in Hingham

Our Minister

Rev. Paul Sprecher, our new minister, comes to us from careers as a teacher, a computer programmer, and an executive working on Wall Street. He served his ministerial internship last year at the Arlington Street Church and the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Look for recent sermons on the left; you can also listen to many of our sermons from the Sermon Archives link.

Paul is available for pastoral counseling and for visits; please call the office (781-210-2016) to schedule an appointment. Copies of all of our Paul's sermons are available in Cushing Hall at coffee hour. You can also listen to them on CD. We have started sending out sermons. Anytime you'd like us to mail one, let us know.

Our Mission

Second Parish is an inclusive church that values worship as a source of inspiration.
- We encourage each person's spiritual, ethical, and moral development, and we respect each person's search for truth.
- We are a multi-generational community that unites to provide mutual strength and support.
- We encourage service for the betterment of our congregation, our community, and our society.

Our Covenant

"With love for each other, and with respect for each person's search for truth, we unite--in the spirit of Jesus--for the worship of God and the service of our neighbors."

About Second Parish

The Second Parish in Hingham is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association of North America and is an ethical and liberal religious community dedicated to promoting the ongoing search for truth and to affirming the inherent worth of the individual.

We understand reality through human experience, enlightened reason, scientific method, and the democratic process, and we find the central source of power and goodness within the human heart, mind, and spirit. Individually and collectively, we assume responsibility for our future, our community, our children, and our interdependent world.

Our growth and actions as thoughtful, compassionate, and ethical human beings advance our humanist vision of a world of peace and love, dignity and equality, freedom and justice.

History of the Second Parish in Hingham

For over 250 years, the Second Parish in Hingham has been responding to religious needs of its members and friends.It was founded in 1746 as one of the churches of the "Standing Order" of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans who settled the colony in the 1630's had dreamed of establishing a Biblical Commonwealth, a theocratic state which would be to Christians what the theocracy of Moses, Joshua, and Samuel had been to the Jews in the Old Testament days. Insofar as it was feasible, the Puritans wanted to live in a state which was governed-from general legislation down to the smallest details of everyday life-by their understanding of scripture. Farthest from their minds was the idea we later would call the separation of church and state. The meeting houses were built and maintained, and the salaries of the ministers were paid by taxes levied upon the citizens.
Hingham's First Parish Church had been gathered in 1635 and its members met for worship in downtown Hingham, the first section of Hingham to be settled. Gradually, there came to be a large enough number of residents in South Hingham to warrant the formation of a new church and the construction of a new meeting house. The meetinghouse was raised in 1742 on land belonging to Theophilus Cushing, and the legislature of the colony was petitioned to allow the founding of a new parish. On March 25th, 1746, the parish was formally set off from the First Parish by order of the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the Third Parish or Third Precinct, (the present town of Cohasset was the original Second Parish of Hingham prior to Cohasset's incorporation).