Scam Sites

[murphzlaw1]

Be careful.  Over the past several years, several scam web sites have popped up on the Internet, which have nothing to do with the real Universal Life Church. They use misleading statements or outright deception to claim they are affiliated with, or even that they are the Universal Life Church.

The real Universal Life Church remains in Modesto, California, where it was founded by Kirby Hensley in 1959. His son, Andre Hensley, is the current president. The official web site for Universal Life Church online, authorized by the Modesto church since 1997, is www.ulc.net. You should bookmark this site, because if you Google search, you will likely be misdirected to any one of several bogus and fraudulent sites.

You can use Google Street View to see what is located at the address of church headquarters in Modesto:
https://www.instantstreetview.com/@37.631948,-121.002752,192.37h,-13.11p,0.96z

You can use the same tool to look up the address of any other organizations and see what exists there.

One reason this is a concern, apart from the ethics of deceptively using someone else's name and reputation for their own benefits, is that at least one of these sites, which enjoys a very high ranking in Google, has been found to be doing things that make their entire process of ordination invalid.  Including forging documents with the signature of officials in Modesto, and backdating documents based on whatever date is supplied to them by ministers who say they were ordained by Modesto.

Outside of Modesto Headquarters, no one has access to the confidential church records, and these other groups do not report their ordinations to Modesto for recording there, so it is not possible for them to issue valid documents attesting to ordination with the genuine Universal Life Church or for dates that precede a person's ordination with their (confusingly similarly named) church.   So any such documents are invalid and subject to legal challenge.    

If you are unsure whether you were ordained with the genuine church in Modesto, simply submit an ordination application at ordain.ulc.net.  If a duplicate ordination is found for you, the new application will be merged to your existing record.  It may not pop up immediately, because the ordinations are done manually, involving cross-checking by at least two different people.  But that way you can be sure you are legally and ethically ordained!

 

Edit: Original Post was edited 02/17/2017 by Brother Kevin to update information and remove a dead link.

 

Edited February 18, 2017 by BrotherKevin
Updated information and removed dead link