Advertisement
“Wholesome, collaborative, and good”—that’s how Lisa Napier describes the Fifth Sunday Fellowship, a joint worship team of five women representing small UU congregations in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest.
The group plans and leads a live, virtual worship service shared by their congregations about four times a year, in months that have five Sundays—hence the name. One member coordinates planning and leading the service, but they all brainstorm in monthly virtual meetings.
For the women involved, it’s been a touchstone and a support.
“Congregations don’t have to do it all themselves,” member Kim Nowack said. “There is so much help for small congregations, and partnering is a wonderful thing.”
In 2021, many congregations were just beginning to resume in-person worship after the height of the pandemic. UU regional staff encouraged Napier to put out a call seeking UUs who wanted to work together to lead worship. The result was Fifth Sunday, which debuted its first collaborative worship in 2023.
The current group is Napier, a UU in Maryland; Shannon Resh, a member of UU of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Nowack of the UU Congregation of Petoskey, Michigan; Susan Weber of the UU Church of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania; and Marie Laberge of the UU Fellowship of Newark, Delaware. The East Suburban UU Church in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, was also involved for a time.
What started as a “way to fill Sundays” for small congregations that felt burdened by planning and leading worship every Sunday is now much more.
“These women have become very important to me,” Resh said. “We talk about hard things, and the world is hard right now, but when we come together, we are among women with very compatible and similar beliefs and morality.”
“The first thing we did was to make our covenant, which was to bring our best to worship, to show up, and to tell the truth in a collaborative way,” said Napier. “It’s special to be in a place where everyone is dedicated to bringing their best, with the understanding that sometimes on a bad day your best isn’t very good.”
Napier believes the group could be a model for other collaborative worship efforts but stressed that it requires commitment and a willingness to be flexible. For instance, the congregations have different technical abilities and worship times, so the person coordinating the service determines both the time and the technical details.
Petoskey, a congregation of twenty-four members on Lake Michigan, has integrated the collaborative model even further. In addition to Fifth Sunday, it also works with Marquette UU Congregation and the UU Bay de Noc Fellowship, both on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to offer a joint worship service once a month. The Triangle Congregations, as they refer to themselves, have also held joint retreats.
“There’s so much help if you reach out, and you don’t have to do this alone,” Napier said.