Welcome to the Ring of Voices website

We are two Unitarian women, Myrna Michell and Louise Rogers, who love to sing, and love to explore music as a spiritual practice. 

Active participation is something we encourage and this extract from the UUA (the US Unitarian Universalist Association) website for its music ministry course sums it up nicely:

When singing a hymn or song together, we become participants rather than observers of worship.

Singing gives us an opportunity to make ourselves really and truly present – to “step into the room” and take an active part.

We started online sessions in June 2020, in response to the corona virus pandemic, with a weekly, online hymn-singing session, Uni-Sing!. As life returned to more in-person meetings, we reduced the frequency to twice a month and included more people in the leadership team.

We now have three musicians and ten readers who lead sessions, they choose the hymns and the readings and determine how each session will run.

As we are on Zoom geography doesn't matter too much - Myrna and Louise live 200 miles apart. We've been happily meeting old and new friends from far and wide, and offer a warm welcome to all newcomers. We have been exploring the rich treasury of our Unitarian hymns - mainly those found in Hymns for Living (the Green Book) and Sing Your Faith (the Purple Book). We also include inspirational readings.

In 2021 we held some sessions focused on other songs and learning how music can be enhanced to support worship. These sessions were on Monday evenings (three times a month) and called Voices in the Air. This enabled those who could not attend the Saturday sessions to explore some online Unitarian music-making, and provided more music-making for those who do attend on Saturdays.

In 2023 we are starting quarterly, new hymn sessions. We are hoping that our UK-based hymn writers will join us to talk to us about the hymns they have written which cannot be found in our hymn books. We will then sing these, often unfamiliar hymns. We hope you will take them back to your congregations.

We will also be starting a hymn-wiki. This will ultimately have something written about each of the hymns in our Green and Purple books. As it's a wiki anyone can add content.

Please have a look at what we do (see the menu at the top right-hand corner of the page) and contact us if you would like further information. 

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