The Independent Church of Christ, commonly called Universalists Meeting, was organized ca. 1791 and incorporated in 1801. It was to this simple church that Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) came in 1796, when he was not permitted to preach when he was not permitted to preach the Unitarian creed elsewhere and a Unitarian Church in America had not yet been founded. In 1842 the title of the organization was changed to "The First Universalist Church."

Opened in 1793, the church itself probably differed little from the late colonial meeting houses erected for nonconforming congregations all across the city. A passageway led from Lombard Street to the graveyard in the rear. According to one of its pastors, "when the house was first occupied for worship, the walls were without plastering, and the only seats, plain benches. I was told that the first pulpit was a rough platform made by a mast-maker and a shoemaker."

In the mid-nineteenth century there were several building campaigns to embellish and expand the church, although the author of a newspaper account in 1872 remarked, "grandeur has not been attempted in [the church's] appearance, but it is a very neat and church-like building. With its heavy stone cross over the entrance door, it might reasonably be mistaken for a Catholic Chapel."

In the 1880s the congregation built a new church at 17th and Master Streets, selling the old building in 1889 to Congregation Chevra B'nai Jacob, whose early membership consisted primarily of Russian Jews. As a precondition of the sale, the bodies in the churchyard were removed from the burial ground and reinterred at Fernwood Cemetery in Delaware County; the "heavy stone cross" was taken down and used to mark the new grave site.

Today, the congregation is the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration in Mount Airy.