History & overview · every faith gets one
Church, minus the God bit, plus a live band.
A network of secular congregations started by two comedians in a deconsecrated London church in January 2013: pop songs sung together, a talk from someone who knows something, a reading, a moment of quiet, tea afterwards. It has a charter and no doctrine, spread to dozens of cities within two years, and then lost roughly half of them — which makes it the best available evidence about how hard the congregation is to build without the theology.
Why it is filed this way
A movement rather than a philosophy: it makes no claims about the world at all, and what it actually offers is a form — an hour, a room, a running order. That is deliberate, and it is also the thing critics inside organised atheism objected to, since a congregation with no doctrine cannot take a position on anything.
Sharply contracted from its peak. Around seventy chapters existed at the high point and roughly half have since closed or gone dormant; assemblies were established in forty-eight locations as of December 2019. Sunday Assembly in America, Inc. is a registered 501(c)(3) and the network continues to run conferences.
The founding
Two stand-up comedians on the way to a gig worked out that they both wanted something like church without God in it. The first assembly was held in January 2013 in a deconsecrated church in Islington and more than three hundred people came, which surprised everyone including the founders and set off two years of very fast growth.
Its founding is bound to Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans — 2013 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Naturalistic by default, and deliberately unlegislated.
The divine. The Assembly says it does not do supernatural, and in the same breath that it will not tell you that you are wrong if you do. That is a governing constraint rather than a fudge: the charter commits it to having no doctrine and no set texts, so there is nothing anyone is required to disbelieve. What occupies the place of a god is the congregation itself and the fact of being alive at all, which the charter names as wonder..
Death and after. None asserted. The stated frame is that this is the one life we know we have..