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Becky Drozdz was still new to the Unitarian Universalist Community of Charlotte, North Carolina, when she walked through the door of what she would learn was the monthly Community Sunday.
Instead of an hour-long worship, people of all ages attended a twenty-minute service before choosing from four forty-minute activities. Drozdz chose the sound bath, a meditative experience that immerses participants in sounds made by crystal singing bowls, gongs, and other instruments. She enjoyed the meditation, and it gave her something to talk about at coffee hour. Community Sundays “helped me make connections,” she says.
Charlotte’s Director of Member Relations Kelly Greene got the idea for Community Sunday after learning about the UU Fellowship of Redwood City’s intergenerational Action Sundays during a virtual UU Association of Membership Professionals meeting. The initiative there had brought in and retained young families, which appealed to Greene, who also saw her congregation as a generationally stratified community.
After a wave of staff turnover, “and, you know, COVID,” Greene says, “we were ready to try new things.”
In February 2023, UU Community of Charlotte launched Community Sunday, and the congregation of approximately 500 people hasn’t looked back.
Members of the UU Community of Charlotte at an all-ages introduction to drumming.
Today, Director of Lifespan Religious Education Paula Gribble leads the brief Community Sunday services—a reading or story followed by a reflection—and is on the team that develops session ideas and vets proposals, striving for three to five distinct activities. Music and art, dance, spiritual practices, discussions, and simple crafts are frequently offered—all by congregants and staff, which saves money while fostering new community connections.
Charlotte Right Relations Team member Ann Doss Helms, who has led sessions on congregational covenant, says Community Sunday facilitates collective conversation, allowing even a big, serious topic to be handled in a ”small, manageable chunk.” When people are already on site, they can participate in the usual Sunday morning timeframe.
They’re also a way to meet new people, which Helms, a retiree and longtime congregation member, values. At a crafting session, she sat with a young family and a teenager who “was drawing this beautiful thing,” she says, and they had a meaningful conversation.
With adults and kids together—for a drumming workshop, to make solar ovens out of pizza boxes, or for a spiritual practice—older generations really talk with and understand kids, whose depth, Gribble says, is underestimated.
Making music in community: Some congregation members play boomwhackers, and John Herrick, the congregation’s Director of Music, plays flute.
Last fall, Greene facilitated a discussion about being under construction as a human being. People from their twenties to their eighties attended. Once Greene shared her experience, the conversation deepened and flowed. Young visitors said how much they value hearing from older people—and they have come back.
Such connections feel important amid widespread isolation and loneliness in the United States, says the Rev. Byron Tyler Coles, Transitional Lead of the UUA’s Central East Region. The success of Community Sunday shows that “it is possible to do something different in this moment, when many of us are tired and weary,” they say.