Side With Love Sunday

A bright yellow banner with the UUA logo and "Side With Love"

Side With Love Sunday

Download the worship service (Vimeo, 55 minutes) to use on Sunday!

Learn more from Everette Thompson and Erika Hewitt

We invite you to Side With Love by showing our full video worship service on a Sunday that works best for your congregation.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Who are the worship service participants? Our speakers and musicians are listed in this Order of Service.
  • Do you have a version with captions already burned in? Yes! The link above has captions in a separate SRT file, but this version of the service (Vimeo, 55 minutes) has captions burned in.
  • How else can we Side With Love? Thanks for asking! We've created a Discussion Guide for this service, which we invite you to bring into your covenant groups, small group ministries, and other conversation venues.
  • Why isn't the service available in pieces for us to choose from? Our Side With Love worship team has worked to create a cohesive whole, not "à la carte" selections. Participants in this service have important and powerful wisdom to share about their experiences of being UUs with marginalized identities. The impact of selecting only some material—and choosing to omit other pieces—carries uncomfortable implications about whose wisdom is worthy of attention and whose isn't.
  • Are there transcripts of the reflections? The three central reflections from this service are available on WorshipWeb:
  • Is there a fee to use this service? This worship service is a gift freely given (though the participants are being fairly compensated). Your Unitarian Universalist Association recognizes how difficult the past year has been, and wants to share the labor by offering you this service.* (Should you be curious about supporting our missional work, everything we do at the UUA is possible thanks to contributions from member congregations and individual donors.)
  • What is the service about? In 2021, the annual 30 Days of Love celebration centers 4 themes from a Widening the Circle of Concern, a report from the Commission on Institutional Change, a UUA Board-commissioned group charged with researching, reporting, and making recommendations for transforming white supremacy and other oppressions in the institutional history and practices of the UUA and its 1,000+ congregations and covenanted communities. This Side With Love Sunday worship service lifts up those themes: Living our values, Hospitality & inclusion, Educating for Liberation, and Restoration and Reparations. What if to "side with love" meant making bold, faith-full choices? What if it were even a little bit scary? This worship service brings together worship leaders and musicians from across the country to offer hopeful, moving, challenging reminders about what we, as Unitarian Universalists, are called to do, and BE, in the world.

*Your Unitarian Universalist Association has provided a second worship service, freely given and shared: Loved into Being centers the messages of stewardship and generosity, and features a sermon by Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray.