On June 14, please join us for our Religious Exploration Sunday Service at 10am.  This is an all church service where we honor our teachers and our graduates.  Following the service there will be an opportunity to visit the ART SHOW and the CHURCH PICNIC.

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On this Heritage Sunday, as the congregation gathers for its annual meeting, we honor the enduring legacy of Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist thought — a tradition that has always held reason and compassion at its center. In a time of political chaos and global uncertainty, we remember that our faith was born from both courage and curiosity — from people who believed that truth and love could transform the world. This service invites us to reflect on how our heritage calls us to think deeply, act boldly, and keep the flame of justice alive.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

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In a world that prizes certainty and control, we pause and honor the sacred unknown and the spiritual practice of letting go—of setting down our relentless curiosity long enough to feel the wonder that holds us. We’ll consider how mystery softens our hearts, deepens our compassion, and opens us to beauty beyond explanation. Drawing on voices from science, mysticism, and poetry, the service celebrates the courage to live without all the answers—and the grace that arises when we do.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

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Join us this Sunday for a special service led by our own Kathleen Nagy, “The Sound Lady,” who will invite us to join her in an exploration of the healing properties and possibilities of sound and music.  Kathleen leads the UUCW Bell Ensemble who will also participate in this special service. 

About Kathleen

I’m a classically trained orchestral French hornist, aka The Sound Lady. I’m a Master Sound Healer and Teacher of our Body’s Musical Systems. I offer to the LGBTQ+ community, as well as Highly Sensitive People and those who struggle with Anxiety and PTSD, a customized vibrational path to reclaim their natural harmony and rhythm.

I’m the Director of the LGBT Hand Chime Ensemble of Massachusetts, which creates Soundscapes of harmonic overtones fostering relaxation, expanded consciousness, self-forgiveness, and soul integration.

As a Practical Mystic and author of the book Humming for Health I also teach how to use the restorative power of your voice to trigger your body’s self-regulating systems.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

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In a world often ruled by anxiety and judgment, this service invites us to explore curiosity as a spiritual antidote. Through reflection, music, and words shared, we’ll consider how curiosity opens the heart—transforming fear into wonder and criticism into compassion. Together, we’ll practice seeing the world not as something to control or evaluate, but as something to discover anew.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

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This Sunday, join Rev. Aaron Payson, Religious Exploration Director Robin Mitzcavitch, members of the 2026 Coming of Age Program, and their Mentors as we congratulate them on completing their program this year.  We gather to honor those who have exemplified mothering in our lives, in all the forms it can take. 

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

The post Becoming, Belonging & Beyond first appeared on Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester.

This week we will explore the tension between fear and the call to transformation through the intertwined lenses of the Biblical story of Jonah and Abraham Maslow’s concept of the “Jonah Complex.”

Jonah’s flight from divine purpose mirrors the human tendency to shrink from our highest potential—the fear of greatness, creativity, and responsibility that Maslow described as the Jonah Complex. The service invites reflection on how fear can both protect and imprison us, and how prophetic possibility emerges when we confront that fear with courage and compassion.

During this service, we will also have an opportunity to welcome those who wish to join the congregation formally as members.  Please click HERE for more information about New Member Sunday.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

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This Sunday invites reflection on the sacred work of transformation — personal, cultural, and planetary. Drawing inspiration from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, the service explores how endings can be acts of care: tending to what must pass so that new ways of being may take root. Thus, we honor the grief and grace of transition, embracing the possibility that every ending carries the seed of renewal.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

The post When The Ending Is Just The Beginning first appeared on Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester.

In every age, the soil of the world grows hard with tyranny—systems that choke the tender shoots of truth, compassion, and imagination. Yet even in such seasons, the Spirit calls gardeners. Like Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, we are summoned to cultivate beauty and resistance in unlikely ground. Her nursery rhyme, whimsical on its surface, hides a subversive question: what does it mean to tend a garden when the world prefers conformity?

Today, as power tightens its grip and fear masquerades as order, we are reminded that faith itself is an act of rebellion. To plant seeds of mercy in the shadow of cruelty, to water justice where others sow despair—this is the contrarian work of Love. The garden is not an escape; it is a revolution in miniature. Each act of care, each refusal to bow to cynicism, exposes the lie that domination is inevitable.

The moment demands gardeners who dare to imagine differently—who see the divine not in palaces of political power, but in the cracked earth, not in crowns but in cockle shells. The question before us is not whether the world can change, but whether we will continue to sow when the soil resists.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

The post On Contrarian Gardening: Or, How To Sow Seeds of Revolution first appeared on Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester.

This Sunday, in honor of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), we remember the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust and widen the circle of our remembrance to include all who were targeted by Nazi terror: Roma and Sinti people, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and countless others whose lives were deemed expendable by a regime built on hatred and dehumanization.

“Remembering as Resistance” calls us to hold history with honesty, to confront antisemitism and all forms of bigotry today, and to recommit ourselves to building a world where every life is protected, every identity is honored, and no one is forgotten.

Please CLICK HERE to view this week’s Order of Service.

Audio recordings of Aaron’s Sunday Morning Reflections are now available in podcast form here.

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