Worship: The Collective Practice of Meaning Making Fall 2025 Wave Cohorts

Cohort Details

Worship is an essential act of religious community. Worship engages the liberating Spirit of Life so that we might be transformed, and thereby transform our communities. In this Wave Cohort, which is grounded in the work of previous Waves in the Spring of 2025 and at General Assembly 2025, we’ll build a greater shared understanding of the needs of our people, and cultivate a useful approach to crafting worship that meets those needs.

Facilitators

Grounding Assumptions: If…/Then

  • If Unitarian Universalists are spiritually hungry… then we need to increase our fluency in creating/leading ritual and spiritual practice, within worship, that invite transformation.
  • If worship Leaders are over functioning and can’t always access “the river” as a life-giving source… then we might need to renegotiate the way we allocate our time–including the space and time that renew us.
  • If crafting worship entails holding tension between The Prophetic and the nourishing of souls… then our planning process needs to include faithful discernment about how to hold this tension.

Proposed Topics

  • Planning: either week to week or season to season, how do we respond to the horrors of the day while continuing to tend to people’s souls, and provide them with tools for faith formation?
  • Ritual: communal practices, rooted in Unitarian Universalist theology, that ground, heal, and build up the Body for its work in the world
  • “Going to the River”: What would change if worship planning were regarded as a sacred act? How do we get to the deep places that allow us to channel life-giving goodness?
  • (BONUS: How might we create a series of monthly worship themes—not assigned to months, but moveable—that highlight strands of our UU “good news”?)

How to Join

  • Participation in this Wave will be by application, available here through Sunday, December 14. Applicants are asked to review the input received from GA’s Second Wave cohort (embedded within the application). This feedback centers on Challenges, Opportunities, “Fairy Godmother” wishes, and other themes offered by our nearly 200 participants.
  • Revs. Byron and Erika will choose participants from among applicants, and will notify applicants of their decision during the week of December 15.
  • We’ll convene our first meeting in early 2026, and will continue meeting every other month through the 2025-2026 congregational year.

Past Cohort