Originally from opposite coasts, Teri and I have lived in Chicago for eight years and have been married for nineteen years. We have two delightful children: a thirteen-year old, Jay, and ten-year old, Matthew. Jay is incisive, funny, and full of energy. They loves to read, to swim, to make art and meet up with friends. Matthew is creative and hilarious and a dedicated Minecrafter. The four of us humans live with our four(!) cats and one absolutely enormous dog.
When we’re not doing ministry or parenting, we like reading, cribbage, folk music, and bicycling. Teri and I have a dedicated date night once a month and dedicated weekends away quarterly. I spend a lot of time with our kids: we play together, go on adventures together, read together, make art together, go to their concerts and school events. I typically limit church meetings or events to two weeknights a week and six total per month.
Whatever church I serve, I will someday move on—but my kids will be my kids for the rest of my life. A wise mentor once said: remember the order of your vows. I am committed to my higher power, to myself, to my partner, to my kids, and to my congregation—in that order. I sincerely hope that this would be the case for any minister you consider.
I am a lifelong UU, formed by my religious education classes and church experience. I warmly remember my grade school RE teachers who were committed and caring, encouraging me to ask big questions. They took my childhood spiritual experiences seriously, culminating in the Coming of Age program.
I sang in the youth choir at Follen Church Society–Unitarian Universalist for seven years, and the Christmas candlelight service is one of my earliest memories of spiritual experience. The low light, transformed the plain sanctuary, filled it with breath and warmth and mystery. After the last reading, we sang together: a plainsong chant more than 800 years old, a hymn to the mystery and wonder and immensity of life. In that moment, I was filled with love—for the kids around me, for the whole congregation, for the simple, plain holiness of the thing. Every year it was the same: a marker in the wheel of the year, and year after year we passed through it, until in my memory the years merge.
I was not thinking of ministry, then, but that experience and so many others like it—in church, in conversation, in nature—are foundation of my call, a sense of being in the presence of the Holy at all times and all places, needing only to remember It.
I entered Tufts University in the fall of 1997. In that first semester of college, I took a course on Islam and immediately fell in love with the study of religion.
Halfway through college, a mutual friend introduced me to Teri and I fell in love with her right from that first conversation—something I didn’t really believe could happen until it did! We spent countless nights in college talking late by phone, email, and instant message. We were both considering Divinity School and woven amidst our falling in love was deep discussion of our own stories and histories, our spiritual experiences and hopes for the future, and wonderings about ministry. We joyfully married in the summer of 2001.
I also discovered alcohol in college and in a few short years went from casual drinker to full-on alcoholic. The story of my drinking career is at its heart the same as every other alcoholic: first fun, then fun with problems, then just problems. My last drink was March 8th 2001—I got sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, hard work, a supportive partner, and a great deal of grace.
Addiction for me is partly a disease of isolation, of separation between myself and other people. When I walked into an AA meeting and wholly identified with the other women and men, when I heard them tell their stories which could as well have been mine, it was a life-changing experience. For me, it was a profound lived universalism: knowing that none of us is cut off or set apart, that all of us can be saved to become the people we are called to be here and now. AA was also my first exposure to the spiritual practice of deep listening: setting yourself aside and trying to be wholly present to listen without fixing or saving, without offering theories or generalities or advice.
In the midst of all of this, ministry called. The Rev. Scotty McLennan, a UU minister and the Tufts chaplain at the time, encouraged me to attend divinity school, and to think of my religious studies more broadly than academia.
In 2001, I entered Harvard Divinity School (HDS) intent on pursuing religion made real: not the “big questions” in the abstract, but what those questions mean in people’s lives. It was not arcane theology that I wanted, but lived practical theology; not just what centuries-old movements said long ago, but why they say to our lives here and now.
As part of my study for ministry, I also completed the Program in Religion in Secondary Education (PRSE)—a joint initiative of the Divinity School and the Harvard School of Education to prepare public school teachers to educate students for religious literacy in a multicultural, multi-religious country. The PRSE was rooted in a “critical pedagogy” approach to teaching in which education is about enabling students to engage critically with the world around them. This approach affirms that the status quo is not inevitable, and it trains students to resist accepting the world as it appears. This has become a core orientation of my ministry and philosophy of religious education.
After the first full-time year of divinity school, with debt mounting, I took a year off to work, and then returned to school part-time while working half-time at a dotcom startup. I worked first doing tech support and training, and then as a graphic and web designer. It offered personal and professional development in many areas: I learned a great deal about instructional design, web development, graphic design, project management and communication. The skill development and financial security was valuable, it also confirmed my call is to ministry, not business.
Through these years I was active at the UU Church of Medford, MA, my home church of 100 members during divinity school. I also preached as a supply minister at a dozen congregations in Massachusetts, from churches of hundreds to fellowships of a half-dozen. In those years I learned to preach and to pray, to lead committees, to fundraise, and to teach.
When Teri and I finished Divinity School, we chose to take turns with internship experiences to maintain financial stability and health insurance. When Teri started her internship at Unity Church—Unitarian, in St. Paul, I was recruited to the Learning and Development department at Target Corporation, headquartered in Minneapolis.
The decade of corporate work which followed influenced and strengthened my ministry immensely. Work at Target honed ideation, creativity, writing, curriculum development, business expertise, systems thinking, training and development. I alternated between leading large-scale, grassroots organizational change, and doing curriculum design and development. I honed skills of influencing without authority, mapping relationships, learning and using a toolbox of process improvement and group process techniques—and taught those skills to others. Within the learning and development team, I champion the notion that everyone was an expert at something and our work was to unlock that expertise.
My time at Target developed a strong sense that leadership can come in many forms from all people. I’ve seen twenty five year olds running hundred million dollar businesses and know that age is no barrier to capacity—all it takes is skill, passion, and investment in the mission, vision, and values of the organization.
From 2009-2011 I completed a two-year half-time ministry internship at the White Bear Lake UU Church. With over 700 members, I saw the life of the large church first hand under the leadership of the Rev. Victoria Safford. The church had grown out of a fellowship, and the ethos was of strong lay leadership nurtured by the minister—though large, the congregation owned the life of the church.
As an intern, I taught classes on UU history; “Faith and Film” movie discussions; an introduction to meditation. I taught a semester of 7th/8th grade religious education, and co-led a series introducing the Bible to 7th-9th grade students. I started a Passover Seder at the church that drew 80 people the first year and more than 100 in the second year. As a labor of love and study, I created my own Haggadah (the Passover order of service) which they still use.
I fell in love with the work, but even more with the parish and the people. I built relationships with congregants through work together, pastoral care, worship, conversation, classes, small groups, and conversation circles. Weeping or wondering, silently or boisterously, they opened their lives, and we laughed and sang and sat together. The architecture of the sanctuary at White Bear — built just a few years before I arrived — brings the congregations close, wrapped in a semicircle around the pulpit. Preaching in that house was literally and metaphorically a close conversation with people I knew and loved.
After the completion of my internship, I was invited to a one-year, part-time position as White Bear’s first director of small group ministry. Under my leadership, more than one hundred people in fourteen Sharing Circles met monthly through the church year. I designed the format of the monthly meetings and the group covenant; trained facilitators, recruited participants, and developed the monthly packet of readings, poetry, prose, music, and questions.
I also led the church’s first Wellspring program, an intense course for spiritual deepening developed by UU Rev. Jen Crow. It combines bi-weekly small group meetings with an education program in Unitarian, Universalist, and UU history and theology, as well as the daily commitment to spiritual practice by group members, and monthly spiritual direction. Over the nine months that we met, I saw incredible openness, honesty, learning, support, love, vulnerability, and transformation in the circle of participants. I had begun that journey believing in the power of small group ministry. By the end of the year I knew beyond a doubt the power of small group ministry.
First Unitarian Church of Chicago
The First Unitarian Church of Chicago called Teri and me to share one full-time position as Senior Co-Ministers in 2013.
First Unitarian is 185 years old, but in some respects the institution has been quiet in recent decades without much change in size or in practices. In our early years, some of the work was getting the church un-stuck from old patterns which no longer served it like bylaws the kept the Board overlarge (eleven members plus secretary and treasurer in a church of 150), or committees that continued meeting out of well-meaning inertia rather than shared mission and vision, or church social events that served to reinforce existing relationships rather than provide genuine onramps for newcomers to build connections. I worked with a team modernizing significant sections of the bylaws. I actively help shepherd three new lay-led social justice teams to help encourage the growth of our work outside the relatively small circle of longtime social justice activists. More than fifty new members joined in the first three years.
The next three years were focused deeply on a capital campaign: first a feasibility study, then hiring a consultant, building the campaign team, doing asks and fundraising, sharing input on design, and supporting the work of construction.
In the same way the congregation invested in its building, these last two years have focused deeply on investing in its people and transforming a culture sometimes marked by conflict. We developed a three-part approach. We formed a Good Relations Team which defined processes for how conflict can unfold healthily, got mediation training, and this year developed a congregational behavioral covenant. The Board has stepped up to enforce policies around disruptive behavior and hold accountability. Finally, Peace Circles, celebrations, and social gatherings provide an opportunity to connect and build deeper relationships.
Three weeks before hiring me as their half-time minister in 2017, Beverly Unitarian Church learned their 140-year old building was crumbling from the inside. Without a monumental repair project—at a cost more than five times their annual budget—it would come down around them.
I accompanied them in discernment: listening in small group and one-on-one conversation to members who shared their love (and sometimes their loathing) for the building. I gave a steady good word to the few who worried this would be the end of the congregation. I named different outcomes—staying, going, restoring, trying and failing—always reminding that change didn’t mean the end.
I anchored them in their values: as the capital campaign started, I preached and reported and reminded that no matter the building, the real foundation of a congregation is the people, and its cornerstones are care and support in shared mission. I kept us rooted in our mission and vision and how the building enabled but didn’t define it.
I empowered and supported lay leadership: my work as a minister isn’t to have all the answers. As they made the decision to stay—to raise internal and public money, to do the construction project—I stepped back from daily capital campaign operations to give space for the lay team to lead the fundraising and restoration.
In October of this church year, the last of the scaffolding came down from construction. The congregation of 75 members raised $400k internally and another $700k externally (as a historic landmark and beloved symbol of the neighborhood, they were able to seek public preservation funds and reach outside the church community in a way congregations are almost universally unable to). They completed the restoration project to keep their building standing another century. I reflected their story back to them: over those three and a half years, they discovered they were a group of people who could do difficult things and come out stronger as a community on the far side.