Media Contact:
Suzanne Morse
Ph: 617-948-4650
Email: pr@uua.org

Boston, Mass. (September 30, 2025) – As the 2025-2026 church year begins, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is releasing its new, innovative virtual hymnal, “Sing Out Love” to Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations across the country and around the world. “Sing Out Love” is designed as a digital subscription service, where subscribers will have access to digital song files and material that will help them adapt songs in the UU tradition for their services.

More than 60 new songs have been added to the hymnal and because it is a virtual, subscription-based service, the UUA’s song selection team will currently add roughly five new songs per month. These join the nearly 150 songs in the collection which had previously appeared in print hymnals.

“Unitarian Universalism is a faith that continually changes to meet the world’s challenges. The enthusiasm for an updated hymnal reflected the collective longing of UUs to both sing our living, evolving values and to weave in emerging gifts of more composers,” said Rev. Erika Hewitt, the UUA’s Minister of Worship Arts and project lead on the hymnal.

“From our first meeting in early 2023, the Virtual Hymnal Task Force engaged UUA staff, volunteers, and the community of UU professional religious leaders in meeting this challenge: to build an accessible, high-tech container robust enough to hold the abundance of music that’s been called forth by our faith community. Today, 249 years after the first Universalist hymnal was created, Sing Out Love allows us to sing our living tradition, carrying it forward to the twenty-first century.”

Subscriptions are offered monthly, annually, and on a three-year basis. Among other information, subscribers will receive mp3 files to help congregations learn the songs, PDFs of sheet music, biographies of the composers and lyricists, song context, and meter information. Additionally, the new hymnal aligns with the UUA’s commitment to accessibility — it is screen reader accessible and offers Braille compatible lyrics.

New songs will be added to the hymnal multiple times per year. The UUA is welcoming submissions by music composers, who can submit two songs per quarter through a submission form. The Sing Out Love Song Selection Team is evaluating songs based on five categories: Mind, Body, Heart, Spirit, and Gut. Those interested in learning more about the hymnal can do so at the Worship Web section of the UUA’s website, and those who wish to learn more about the song categories or how to submit songs for evaluation can do so at the UUA’s website (PDF, 3 pages).

“As a lifelong church musician, contributing to Sing Out Love is a meaningful milestone to me as a living composer and to my loved ones, in that I am joining the long legacy of Unitarian Universalist hymnody and appearing in a published hymnal of my denomination,” said songwriter Soren Austenfeld, Music Director at First Parish in Malden, Massachusetts. “As we welcome diverse experiences and practices in worship and pursue critical ongoing justice work in our communities, it is important that new music and consistent accessibility resources are a priority across the denomination. Sing Out Love helps us to share our collective wealth of musical inspiration and logistical prep work, which allows us to get to the good part faster: music ministry, connection, and community.”

“Unitarian Universalism is a living tradition. As we continue to evolve, like in the adoption of our shared values, it is helpful to have new music to help contextualize that evolution,” said Washington, DC-area songwriter David Burrows, who contributed two songs to Sing Out Love. “At the same time, it is really helpful to have a hymnal that will help to distribute songs and make sure that more congregations have access to them. There’s a soundtrack in our lives that goes along with our history, and Sing Out Love helps Unitarian Universalists connect with songs that assist them in putting the times in which we are living in context.”

“Music is central to – and sacred in – the Unitarian Universalist tradition,” said Carey McDonald, the UUA’s Executive Vice President. “As a musician myself, and the child of a church musician, I can attest to the power of the shared musical experience in our faith. ‘Sing Out Love’ respects our foundations as Unitarian Universalists while also celebrating the present and the future. We are thrilled to offer this innovative new resource that highlights our shared values as a denomination.”

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About the UUA:

The UUA is the central organization for the Unitarian Universalist (UU) religious movement in the United States. Our faith is diverse and inclusive and the UUA’s 1000+ member congregations are committed to shared values and principles that hold closely the worthiness and dignity of each person as sacred, the need for justice and compassion, the right of conscience, and respect for the interdependent nature of all existence.