Worship Themes for 25/26 Church Year

Seek Inspiration: Exploring Thematic Worship in the New Church Year

For this church year, our Sunday services will once again be grounded in monthly themes that guide the worship experiences throughout the year. Thematic worship invites deeper reflection during and after a Sunday service. We’ll be using resources from Soul Matters Sharing Circle, a UU based organization, as our foundational themes each month. And while many folks are familiar with the Soul Matters topics through our small group ministries, exploring the themes in worship creates a shared experience for everyone, whether or not they are in a Soul Matters group.

What will this mean for Sunday mornings? Do you have to attend every Sunday to understand what’s happening each week? No, of course not! Rather, each week will still be its own service with a specific topic, but connected to the larger theme with shared resources, images, music, and opening words. We’ll also have resources such as books, songs, poetry, podcasts, and other media as suggested material for people to explore the themes on their own or with others. The themes and the message series for this year are

September:  Building Belonging
Belonging is a core human need and vital to our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual thriving. Part of our mission at UUCUC is to “Build Community” which implies creating a sense of belonging for the seekers who find their way to our doors. We’ll explore the gifts and challenges of this necessary spiritual work.

October:  Cultivating Compassion
The root of the word compassion comes from Latin phrases that mean to bear, suffer. Holding compassion for ourselves and others inherently means we bear each other’s pain and are moved to alleviate it. We know intimately our private pains and the world’s collective struggles and in this message series we’ll explore the spiritual teachings that help us move with compassion and tender hearts.

November:  Nurturing Gratitude
Regular practices of gratitude can have profound impacts on our over-all wellbeing. And many cultural and religious traditions embed gratitude as a core value, including Unitarian Universal. One of stated values is Generosity, by which we mean that “we cultivate a spirit of gratitude and hope.” For November, we’ll examine how we do that and why it’s so important in the world right now.

December:  Choosing Hope
Lots of people across time and cultures have written about hope, in poetry, songs, long form essays, books, and entire lectures series. Is hope a thing with feathers, a sprouting seed, a light at the end of the tunnel? An inward journey? An outward force? Does hope serve any useful function in this current world? We’ll explore these questions in December and invite deep reflection for if and how we experience hope in our lives.

January:  Practicing Resistance
When we speak of resistance in these days, we often mean resistance to oppression and rising authoritarianism. And while resisting those forces are important for our democratic processes to thrive, practicing resistance also calls us to deep spiritual work: to resist apathy and despair, to resist turning to isolation and hatred, to resist closing ourselves from possibilities and new ways of being: these acts of resistance take time, intention, and community. As we start a new calendar year, we’ll build our spiritual muscles with resistance practice.

February:  Embodying Resilience   
Resiliency is our ability to adapt to and bounce back from difficulties. But we know that trauma lives in our bodies in unseen and unexpected ways, and sometimes our calls to be resilient are actually calls to ignore our bodies needs. This month, we’ll explore embodied practices that help us build true resilience that deepen our relationships and understanding of others and ourselves.

March:  Paying Attention
“What we pay attention to grows.” Writer, activist, poet, and seer adrienne maree brown wrote, summing up ideas from many of her teachers. What are we paying attention to at UUCUC and what do we want and need to pay attention to in the months to come? Growth can mean many things and articulating a vision for our growth can direct our attention to what we most need.

April:  Embracing Possibility
Nelson Mandela once said, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” What ideas have we shied away from because we were told it’s impossible (or improbable)? While facing the realities of the world with clarity is important, so too is dreaming of transformations that lead to mutual thriving. Let’s embrace possibility this month and dream together of what may be.

May: Awakening Curiosity 
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Historian and educator Daneil Boorstin said that in an interview in 1084 and it rings true today. So often, we move through this world thinking and behaving as if we have all the answers. Yet, our
Unitarian Universalist faith is one that welcome the questions and the search for meaning. That search calls us to move with curiosity and wonder. In the month of May, we’ll let our curiosity guide us to embrace what we don’t even know that we don’t even know.

​June:  Flourishing Together
Interdependence is a core value of Unitarian Universalism, and is central to our mission at UUCUC, where building community, seeking inspiration, promoting justice, and finding peace are done by each of us, but not alone. We are in this work of life together and it is together that we will flourish and thrive.

​July and August : Creativity and Connection
For our summer months, we’ll explore the many ways we can spark our creativity and strengthen our connections to each other, to our community, and to all life.