Advent 2025 resources offer paths for ‘awaking and preparing, expecting and dreaming’

As the 2025 Advent season nears, new United Church of Christ resources invite people to engage with past prophets, abolitionists, and wisdom in order to make a way forward – carrying hope and expectation through difficult times.

Below, find worship resources and devotional offerings from Sermon Seeds and Worship Ways, Racial Justice Ministries, Pilgrim Press, the Pension Boards’ Christmas Fund, Bread for the World, and UCC Movement for Palestinian Solidarity.  

‘A blessing of peace’

While the words “peace be with you” are commonly spoken when passing the peace, this year’s Worship Ways and Sermon Seeds resources for Advent and Christmas carry a little extra with the theme “Peace be within you” from Psalm 122:7-9.

“When Jesus greeted the disciples following the resurrection, he offered them a blessing of peace. As we remember, re-imagine, and participate in the incarnation again during this Advent season, we long, hope, and work for peace, understanding that it starts from within,” writes the Rev. Cheryl A. Lindsay, UCC minister for worship and theology, about the series.

Advent liturgies are now available on Worship Ways, including a Blue Christmas service and Christmas Eve reading. These were written by author Maria Mankin. Sermon Seeds will be published ten days ahead of each Sunday it references.

“We will journey with the wisdom, insight, challenge, and encouragement of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. These voices spoke to the challenges and possibilities of their time. Their story will inspire us to reflect upon the human story continuing to be written in our time,” Lindsay said.

‘The New Old Story of Freedom’

This season’s Abolition Advent Calendar will center on “The New Old Story of Freedom: Practicing New Worlds into Life.” Coordinated by the UCC’s Racial Justice Ministries and Join the Movement Toward Racial Justice, this year’s Advent Calendar brings together quotes from Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Advent scripture readings, stories of past and present abolitionists, and visionary practices drawn from Andrea Ritchie’s book Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies.

“As we approach the season of Advent this year, many of us find ourselves vacillating between feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, faced with rapidly changing political and social landscapes not unlike the ones Octavia Butler imagined.  Yet, Advent’s stories of awaking and preparing, waiting and longing, expecting and dreaming, offer us visions to move us, values to ground us, and practices to empower us to bring love to birth in this world,” writes Sharon Fennema, Join the Movement Curator.

Each week of Advent will offer scriptures, abolitionist profiles, and action steps grounded in visionary practices and reflection. People can sign up to receive daily emails where is year’s information will be added once finalized. Selections will be shared on UCC social media, and daily posts will be on the Join the Movement website during Advent.

In a Nov. 24 webinar, Abolition, Advent, and Apocalypse, contributors to the Abolition Advent Calendar will share about their work to reach into the wisdom of scriptural and abolitionist pasts and make a way out of no way – into hope.

‘Soon and Very Soon’

The Stillspeaking Writers created this year’s Advent Devotional with the theme Soon and Very Soon to acknowledge a need for radical hope and encourage the task of preparation for God’s best. Each day includes a scripture reading, reflection, and prayer, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent through Epiphany.

Alongside the very affordable devotional, available in print or pdf, the Pilgrim Press website offers additional Soon and Very Soon worship resources with candle-lighting liturgies and Advent sermon theme ideas available as free downloads.

Stellar nurseries, cosmic dust

The Christmas Fund’s Advent worship resources include liturgies shaped around the weekly themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, and a Christmas Eve liturgy. Each one offers prayers, responsive readings, a litany of the Advent candle, and a children’s moment, created by the Rev. Elyse Berry, associate for advocacy and leadership development at The Council for Health and Human Service Ministries (CHHSM).

Berry’s playful and delightful artwork accompanies each children’s moment, which delve into celestial topics like cosmic dust, stellar nurseries, and dark constellations.  

Resources include promotional materials for the Christmas Fund special mission offering.

‘Being hope’

This Bread for the World weekly devotional, Advent People in Uncertain Times, addresses how Christians, as a community focused on advocacy, show up in a period of uncertainty. Each weekly devotional message approaches this question through the lens of the traditional Advent themes of peace, love, joy, and hope.

UCC General Minister and President Karen Georgia Thompson created the week four reflection on “being hope,” where she offers the reminder of hope in God’s presence within each person. Thompson is a member of Bread for the World’s board of directors.

‘A new kind of liberatory love was born’

The UCC Movement for Palestinian Solidarity has created worship resources for incorporating themes of Palestinian liberation, solidarity, and justice into Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany worship services.

“The Nativity story that we collectively steward takes place in the very location where an ongoing genocide has extended decades of oppression of the Palestinian people,” the MPS Liturgical Resources Team writes. “It is always time to speak up and speak out about what is happening in Gaza, but it is even more relevant during this season of expectation and epiphany in the same land where our tradition tells us a new kind of liberatory love was not only born but protected, personified, and pushed toward a future where all would be free.”

The worship resources, available through the UCC MPS substack, offer a prayer for each Sunday and an Advent communion liturgy.

---

Content on ucc.org is copyrighted by the National Setting of the United Church of Christ and may be only shared according to the guidelines outlined here.