Celebrating Ingathering

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray: Ingathering 2020

Ingathering is celebrated in Unitarian Universalist congregations to mark the beginning of a new congregational year in the fall. Other rituals celebrated in the first worship service of the year can include Water Communion, where congregants bring small amounts of water from places of significance to them and combine them together while sharing something about the meaning it holds.

Themes often used in ingathering rituals include: interconnectedness, reunion; re-gathering; re-covenanting as a community of faith; hospitality; returning home to the church community that holds us; hope; looking forward with excitement to church year. The service may be intergenerational in whole or in part.