Contents This document introduces Unitarian Universalist worship theory in the following sections: Introduction Purpose and function Thematic and liturgical worship Vogt's model Other models Worship style Setting and mood What we bring The goal of worship Back to: Resource Library WorshipWeb Home

Common Worship: How and Why
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The goal of worship

The aim of common worship. The aim of all worship is to help order the religious consciousness in the individual and the group. It is to help us know and feel how we relate as individuals to ourselves, to the world, to the totality of being. The aim of common worship is to help us face up to our individual and collective limitations and failures, to open us to sources of creative, healing, transforming, and renewing power. It is to help us discover how that which transcends our narrow individual existence can move us, challenge us, inspire us, stimulate us to think, feel, act, and be. It is to help us declare, celebrate, rejoice in those things we have discovered to be "of worth." The aim of common worship is to help us reorder, reopen, reshape, and reinterpret our experience and to help us find the power to reaffirm again and again in word and deed what is worthy of our ultimate commitment.

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Source: Commission on Common Worship. Leading Congregations in Worship: A Guide. Boston: UUA, 1983.

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