Services

Our people

Services are normally held each Sunday at 10.45am.

We welcome families and children.

Our services of worship can be viewed as a celebration of our deepest values. We see our religious beliefs as relevant to all aspects of life including the wider community. They take a variety of forms, but are usually fairly traditional - with a mixture of readings from a huge range of religious and non-religious sources, music, prayers, meditations and hymns.

Many weeks, our Sunday services are conducted by members of our congregation. We also enjoy a wide variety of perspectives from visiting speakers who range from Unitarian ministers from other congregations, atheists, Buddhists, and many others. All visitors and enquirers are made most welcome and are invited to join us for coffee and a chat after the service.



Services over the next few weeks:


Sunday 6th May 2012 - led by Sheila Barwick, featuring Spring poems and readings


Sunday 13th May 2012 - led by Kenneth Robinson


Sunday 20th May 2012 - led by Dori Kirchmaier


Sunday 27th May 2012 - led by Brigitte McCready


Sunday 3rd June 2012 - team service on the theme "Why Am I a Unitarian?"


Sunday 10th June 2012 - team service for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee led by members of the congregation


Sunday 17th June 2012 - team service centred around hymns from the the Purple book




SUNDAY 20TH MAY Guest speaker Dori Kirchmaier will read her short story, RESONANCE at our service. Dori wrote this story for a reading at a literature festival in Nottingham last November and has since read it on various occasions in Nottingham as well as many other places across the UK. 'Resonance' is a 12 minutes long short story about finding and connecting with one's own truth. Wherever Dori has read the story people have resonated with it.


Over the years, Dori has worked and trained in various fields including art & design, complementary therapies and the environment. She writes in her spare time and is in the process of moving into the field of public speaking. For more information please visit her blog: http://dori2k.wordpress.com




Here is a shortened version of a sermon given by Rev Tom McCready to Nottingham Unitarians on 16 May 2010:


Sometimes I almost feel that the Unitarian values we pride ourselves upon so much are not so important anymore. The principles of freedom and tolerance that were so creative and courageous in an age of religious oppression and conformity are, in an age of religious indifference, not enough to make us special anymore, for now they are widely available everywhere.

Yet, if anything I feel a greater sense of trust and commitment to the vision that drew me to the Unitarian Church in the first place. Which is the fact that for all our faults and failures, and for all our conflicts and conceits, this is a church, perhaps the only church where human frailty is not seen as a grievous fault but as the glorious depth wherein God dwells.

It is the value given to the human person and the understanding that if we cannot find God in each other, then we will not find God anywhere, that brought me here and keeps me here.

We sometimes fail in the task of upholding these high ideals in our conduct and in our personal relations; we sometimes fall short of our own high ideals when it comes to the ordinary challenge of living together. Sometimes we are simply not very good at living in peace and we let the opinions that divide us overcome the principles that unite us. But surely if we have learned one thing in all these years of seeking to articulate those principles, it is that we are at our worst when we sit in judgement upon one another from a position of imagined strength, and we are at our best when we love and shelter one another in our weakness.

It is all too easy to label someone with all the faults we do not wish to look at in ourselves, but to look at a label instead of at a person is the act of a lazy mind, for we are all capable of being many different versions of ourselves from day to day. One day we are weak and the next day we are strong, one day we are mumbling and mediocre and the next day we are eloquent and articulate. That is the glory of our human state, that is our glory and our frailty: we are all teeming with untouched potential; we all contain miracles. It is all too easy to label someone as a problem, and to convince ourselves that all would be well if we could get rid of the person we see as a problem; but all will not be well and will never be well until we find the courage and compassion to look beyond the problem to the person, and to see someone just like ourselves reflected there. For when we do fall short of our own high ideals it is almost always when we let our intellectual and philosophical sophistication delude us into thinking that we are somehow spiritually superior to those who are satisfied with a simpler form of belief.

If we still have something unique to say it is that there is no final separation between the human and the divine, between the universal and the personal, between the ultimate and the intimate. We are truly Unitarian in that we are truly unifying: in that we seek to bring together the best of divine inspiration and human imagination; of modern knowledge and of ancient wisdom.

If we still have a fresh spiritual vision to offer to the people of this wonderful and troubled world, it has nothing whatsoever to do with interminable arguments about whether we can use the word 'God' or not, but everything to with the attempt to gently expand the range of meanings that the word can carry. And to hopefully, helpfully and gently suggest that when we say we are made in the image of God it does not mean that God has a physical form like ours, but that we are created with the capacity to create, and to engage, like the great artists, in imaginative sympathy with this wonderful, troubled and utterly beautiful world.

We are all touched by a spark of the Divine; and we all have a tranquil centre where we can touch the Divine. Even when we feel exposed to scorn, torn by conflict and buffeted by fate, there is a place of peace and tranquillity where we can go for help. Even when, in the dark night of the soul we are terribly afraid that, perhaps, we are in reality no more than a deluded dreamer, with nothing to offer and nothing to share and nothing worth saying after all; when we have nothing left of ourselves in which we may take pride, and we feel bowed down by failure, at the centre of our being, in the Holy Core of the Heart, there is peace, the peace of God that lives at the deepest level of who we truly are; that God is not only peace within but a place within where we can go and where we will always be welcomed and strengthened.

We can be frail and flawed and yet truly at peace with ourselves. We can be troubled, yet touched by something tender and true and transforming. A loving, forgiving and renewing light shines brightly in each one of us, in everyone who passes through these doors and everyone who passes by these doors. In every human one of us. You can call it the love of God or the light of inner peace, the reason we are here is to help and encourage each other to uncover that light and to know that love.

This inner goodness where peace is found and hope restored is what drives us and defines us, is what human beings are made of, and that is the greatest strength we have: the glorious redeeming depth of our common human frailty.

The Oversoul By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us; that the sources of nature are in our own minds. As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins. I am constrained, every moment, to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us. Every moment when the individual feels invaded by it is memorable. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. The soul's health consists in the fullness of its reception. For ever and ever the influx of this better and more universal self is new and unsearchable.

Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is related; the eternal One. When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.