I was cleaning out my mailbox from the holiday break earlier today, and someone had left a NYTimes article about the growth of the minyanim movement. The minyanim are small groups (20 to 200) of young Jewish urbanites who gather each week for self-led worship without the assistance or approval of any established synagogue. (I gather from the article that they’re a big deal here in Atlanta.)

I’m also fascinated by the emergent worship movement in post-evangelical Christianity. Emergents practice a future-ancient style of worship that retrieves ancient forms of worship and gives them a postmodern edge. (Think labyrinths and lots of candles.) Anything younger than five or six centuries seems to be suspect.

I’ve yet to go to a worship service in either tradition. (And self-organizing pagans may be yet another model to draw from.) And still I really want to see this put into practice by UUs.

Dan Harper is trying to start up an ongoing online conversation about “emergent Unitarian Universalism.” Dan captures the need very well:

Now it’s time for us to take the next steps. It’s time to let go of our dependence on the forty-year-old liturgical forms we got from second-wave feminism; and perhaps it’s time to question our basic Reformation forms of worship and become more aware that our Christian religious roots allow us to tap into a rich array of liturgical resources, dating back thousands of years. It’s time to let go of our over-dependence on hyper-rationality, and allow the possibility of trans-rational (yet not necessarily supernatural) ways of thinking and being.

To add your voice to the conversation, drop a line at Dan’s blog or write a blog post with the tag “uuemergence.”