Small Group Ministry as a Religious Practice

By creating an open, supportive, and nurturing environment, Small Group Ministries promotes and facilitates spiritual growth and mutual interactive care for one another.

What is Ministry?

A quality of relationship between and among human beings that beckons forth hidden possibilities inviting people into deeper, more constant, more reverent relationship with the world and one another. Carrying forward a long heritage of hope and liberation that has dignified and informed the human venture over many centuries.

Witnessing to life-enhancing values, speaking truth to power, standing for human dignity and equity, for compassion and aspiration

— the Rev. Gordon McKeeman, former president, Starr King School for the Ministry

In Unitarian Universalism, while we value and celebrate the training, commitment, and leadership embodied by our ordained ministers, this important capacity for healing and hope, for joy and justice is not limited only to the sphere of the clergy.   Rather, it is best expressed through a shared ministry, through using the gifts of both the laity and the ordained ministers.

Intimacy and Ultimacy 

People come to our churches to be lifted out of the ordinary, to be drawn up from the mundane,  and to seek relief from the omnipresent materialism of our culture. People come into religious community to wrestle with life's ultimate questions, looking for a place to seek meaning about living and dying and the spaces in between. People come to our church looking for a way to make a difference in the world, to live a life that matters. In our society of frequent re-locations and diminished family support, people also come to our churches to find friends and community; they come for a sense of intimacy and a safe place in which they can be accepted; they come looking for a place to belong. 

Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams describes this as the search for ultimacy and intimacy. While Sunday worship, committee work, community service, men's and women's groups and other church activities can help us in this search, an organized, coordinated, small group ministry initiative has the capacity to profoundly transform, deepen, and strengthen our lives and the life of our congregation.