On April 22, 2025, we celebrated Earth Day with a special worship service. As Unitarian Universalists, we are positioned to be faith leaders at this critical time in our country’s history. And it can feel overwhelming. Where do we start? We run the risk of becoming quick to act without listening to each other and the communities most impacted by climate disruption.
In this Earth Day service, we hoped to help deepen practices that put Love at the center of our climate justice work. Not to avoid acting, but to prepare us for action. Here is the Order of Service.
On December 19, 2024, we celebrated the Winter Solstice. UU Ministry for Earth (UUMFE) partnered with the UU Service Committee (UUSC) and UU College of Social Justice (UUCSJ) to bring you worship and stories from partners in Kiribati where climate justice is culture justice and disability justice.
Our guest preacher was Rev. Manish Mishra-Marzetti, UUSC Board of Trustees Co-Chair and Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
We celebrated International Day of Biodiversity with Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) who is an Indigenous musician, author, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her multi-genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective, and ecological healing. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
Half of our collected donations went to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. https://www.niwrc.org/
We celebrated Earth Day on the Full Moon, April 23, 2024. We protect what we love.
World Water Day celebrates water and raises awareness that 2.2 billion people live without access to safe water. We were honored to welcome Rev. Dr. Clyde Grubbs and Rev. Karen Van Fossan into a conversation on this important and sacred day. They are defenders and protectors of water; two spiritual leaders in our UU movement who will help us build a heart-centered approach to a right relationship with Mother Earth and her waters.
The Winter Solstice occurs when Earth’s axis tilts away from the sun, making it the shortest day and longest night of the year for those living in the Northern Hemisphere. It also marks the time of celebration that daylight begins to grow to shed more light on us Earth! On this longest night, we featured the work of the Energy Democracy Project and shared a portion of our offering with them. Our service is part of the larger arc of Clean Energy as a Human Right being led by Side with Love.
A recording of our Jazz Vespers Worship Service hosted at Fourth Universalist. The worship and festival were made possible with funding generously provided by the New York State Convention of Universalists. The event was designed through “New York Unitarian Universalist Collaborates,” a working partnership among Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth, and New York Unitarian Universalist Justice, the Empire’s State Unitarian Universalist legislative ministry. Ministers from around the area were involved in the evening service. This is a recording of that service.
