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Meet the Moment is a mighty wave that is carrying Unitarian Universalists together into the future.
Last year, it was a small wave; since then, it has gathered momentum, rippling out from Unitarian Universalist Association staff to congregations and communities, building energy and shared power that are propelling UUs toward justice and liberation, with love at the center.
Launched in 2024, Meet the Moment is a UU framework of shared practices to help ground our values, discern together, and take hopeful, courageous action in rapidly changing times.
“It’s not a program or curriculum—it’s a set of shared skills and practices we can cultivate to be faithful UUs in the world,” explains Rev. Kierstin Homblette Allen, Meet the Moment’s program manager.
“The world is in turmoil and changing quickly,” says Allen. “We cannot rely on old structures or assumptions. Meet the Moment equips us to face today’s challenges with clarity, courage, and a posture of hope.”
After a successful pilot program within the UUA and a broader introduction at General Assembly 2025, Meet the Moment is now expanding into the wider faith.
“Phase one of the Meet the Moment process was about getting people on the same page: building a shared analysis, understanding the right data and stories to assess the landscape, and doing values-based assessment about our priorities and what our values are calling us to do,” says Rev. Ashley Horan, the UUA’s vice president for programs and ministries and the chief strategist of Meet the Moment. “It was setting the stage to make decisions about where we spend our time and resources.”
In the spring and fall of 2025, topic-oriented wave cohorts organized by the UUA engaged with three core questions; more cohorts in spring 2026 will do the same:
- What is the moment we are in?
- What are the most urgent needs and important opportunities of this moment?
- What do our shared values call us to do in response to this moment?
These questions and the broader framework are intended for use at multiple levels, from congregations and small groups within them, to clusters of congregations, to statewide action networks, and more. Meet the Moment offers a broad set of tools to help the process, including facilitation templates to introduce the concept and recommendations on how to put it into practice. A Meet the Moment newsletter launched in November 2025, and there will be additional programming this year.
“This is not the UUA telling you what to do,” says Horan, who authored an essay explaining the framework. “It’s intended to support thoughtful and aligned skill-building and decision-making about where we as a faith are moving collectively, and moving to a place where folks are deeply supporting each other and engaging in shared work.”
Allen explains, “We want people to understand and recognize what we are doing and be excited about engaging with it. Whether it’s in their congregation, or on a continental level thorough wave cohorts, or as an individual person, you can use these resources in any setting in your lives that is in line with UU values.”
Horan and Allen emphasize that they would love to hear from UUs about how they are using the Meet the Moment framework and resources and adapting them to their own contexts (email MeetTheMoment@uua.org). Meet the Moment will also feature prominently at GA 2026, they add.