Secular gatherings
Regular non-religious meetings that do what congregations do.
Congregation-shaped community exists without worship. Sunday Assembly, started in London in January 2013 by comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans under the motto "live better, help often, wonder more", spread to dozens of cities with talks, singing, and volunteering in place of liturgy. Local humanist and secular groups, and campus communities served by humanist chaplains, offer the belonging that congregations provide elsewhere.
Several movements have tried to provide what congregational life provides without the belief: regular meetings, singing, a talk, and people who notice when you stop coming. Sunday Assembly is the best-known attempt.
The results have been uneven. The parts that transplant easily are the singing and the talk; the parts that do not are the pastoral infrastructure and the multi-generational continuity, which turn out to be the harder things congregations do.
Other secular gatherings do some of the same work without framing themselves this way at all, from mutual aid groups to recovery meetings, and the last of those has by far the longest track record.
Does it have a text?
No liturgy and generally no fixed text, which several of these movements treat as a feature and some later come to see as a difficulty.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Non-religious and spiritual
- Moments of silence — A held pause marking a death or a disaster, with no religious content.
- Humanist ceremonies — Funerals, weddings and namings conducted without religious content.
- Gratitude practice and secular grace — Naming what is good, at a table or in a notebook, without addressing anyone.
- Reflection and secular meditation — Attention practices taught without the religious frameworks they came from.
- Presence and condolence language — What to say to someone grieving when neither of you prays.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.