Meaning in Ministry
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, 21 January 2024
I know that many of you have already read the letter that I sent to the congregation on Thursday announcing that I will retire this June. First, I want to say thank you for the many beautiful messages I have received, filled with love and so much encouragement. I really couldn’t ask for more.
I’ve been on a lifelong journey toward the ministry, though I didn’t recognize it for years. If you’ve ever heard the spiel I give to new members, you know that my parents were working-class kids from New York City who ended up working underground for the Communist Party in Cleveland, Ohio, after the Second World War.
By the time I was three or four years old, they had become disillusioned with Stalin. They left the party and both took jobs at a then famous synagogue in Cleveland. My mother ran the weekday preschool for the Temple, while my father conducted the youth choir.
Even though they weren’t practicing Jews, my parents thought it would be good for me and my brother to receive some Jewish religious education. So they sent us to the Temple for Hebrew School and Saturday children’s worship services. I loved everything about the Temple. I loved God. I loved the stories we were told from the Torah. When I announced that I was going to marry a rabbi, my parents thought it was hysterically funny. But I didn’t know then that a woman could become a religious leader.
My brother was nearly six years older than me, and when he decided that he didn’t want to become a Bar Mitzvah at the age of thirteen, my whole family came out to me as atheists. At the age of eight I was crushed. God and faith had been taken away from me. I was given the choice to continue attending the Temple, but I followed my big brother’s lead and I found myself crossing a spiritual desert through the rest of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.
I knew I was looking for something, and it wasn’t until I married and became active in a Unitarian Universalist congregation that I found what I looking for. I was working on Wall Street, believe it or not, and I was feeling lost and soulless. The work I was doing felt meaningless. My Unitarian Universalist community helped me find my voice and gave me a sense of purpose.
I was told again and again that I should become a minister. But I wasn’t ready. I always joke that God kept calling and I kept saying, “You’ve got the wrong number.” I had served on the board of my congregation. I knew how hard ministers worked and how often they could be the target for everyone’s frustration and anxiety.
Still, I found my way to teaching and then to a job as a religious educator, a job I loved. It was through that work of ministering to children, youth and their parents that I found my call to ministry. Yet I fell into a dark night of the soul, questioning everything about my life. I had two young kids and a husband who was killing himself to support us, and I had come to realize that I needed to deepen my understanding of what I was doing, both practically and spiritually. Why did I keep saying “no” to entering the ministry?
I called my mom on the phone to ask her advice. “Mom,” I moaned, “if I do this, I’ll be practically fifty when I finish!”
“You’ll be fifty anyway,” she answered. It was the wisest advice anyone has ever given me.
I was forty-five when I entered seminary to study for the Unitarian Universalist ministry. It’s a long process, with a lot of work and financial sacrifice, requiring a Masters in Divinity, field study, an internship as a hospital chaplain, and another internship as a student minister in a congregation.
When you’ve completed all the areas of competency required in theology, UU history, pastoral care, church administration, worship arts, communications, and social justice work, you go before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which still oversees the fellowshipping process throughout North America, even though the Canadian Unitarian Council is a separate institution.
Once you pass through all the requirements, you are approved to be ordained and can go into search for a congregation or to serve as a minister in another role.
By the time I finished, I had decided my path was parish ministry — to do what I have done here. To serve a congregation. I had been deeply moved by the experience of hospital chaplaincy, and I enjoyed working with children and youth, but what I truly loved was my work as an intern minister in an old New England church. I loved being able to witness and to touch the lives of people of all ages, to help them explore big spiritual questions, and to abide with people as they lived through pain and triumphs as individuals and as a community.
As soon as I got the go-ahead from the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, I began searching for a congregation to serve. In those days we put together big binders about ourselves, and then exchanged packets with congregations looking for a minister. Nowadays, ministers create websites. It’s a bit like online dating. You express interest in a congregation. The congregation’s search committee expresses interest in you.
At first I had only been looking at congregations in Massachusetts, close to where we lived. “Why?” my husband asked me. “Because you have a good job,” I told him. But he said he’d go anywhere. So one day I came home and said, “How about Montreal? I’ve read their profile and I think they’re looking for me.” He started looking for skis.
My first interview with the Montreal search committee was on a conference call. Now you’d do it by Zoom. After some back and forth, the Montreal search committee ultimately chose me as their candidate, and I accepted the invitation. I spent a week that spring meeting everyone in the congregation before a final democratic vote was held that called me as your minister.
Eighteen years later, and I’m still here. That’s an amazingly long run. To my shock and surprise, I am tied for third place for length of tenure here. John Cordner served for 36 years, until 1879 (not including his years as minister emeritus); then William Barnes for 30, until 1909; and then me tied for 18 years with Angus Cameron, who served until 1959. Next is Charles Eddis, our late minister emeritus (also not including his years as minister emeritus). My predecessor, Ray Drennan, was here for about ten years.
When I was called as your eleventh settled minister you took a chance on me. I was the first woman. I had a small voice compared to my predecessor, and we used to have a rotten sound system. I wore a robe, which some people found shocking. I prayed and said, “Amen.” I had much life experience and excellent training under my belt, but I was untested as a minister of a congregation of your caliber.
Very early on during my ministry, one beloved Montreal elder got very annoyed with me about some changes I was making. “You’ll only be here for two years and then you’ll move on to a larger congregation,” the elder snapped. I took that angry comment as a great compliment. And I stayed.
I stayed through some challenging years. I stayed as I grew and learned as a new minister. This congregation helped me to grow, to develop the thickness of elephant skin that a minister needs, to recognize when I was focused on doing something to serve my own needs, when I was bending to please one individual or another, and how to become more focused on doing things that served the whole community. Sometimes that involved hard choices.
Those of us who go into the helping professions want to help others. We learn that trying to make or keep everyone happy is not what ultimately builds a healthy community. I’ve learned a lot about boundaries, something that is inherently challenging in our faith tradition. We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of each person. We want open dialogue. But there comes a time when a leader, and a community, need to set limits on the individual to better serve the whole.
We have been through a lot. When I arrived the Bouchard-Taylor Commission was just beginning. The war in Afghanistan was still raging. We were still printing a monthly paper newsletter and answering telephones all day. Now no one calls! Facebook and Twitter had just been released to the general public that fall. The first iPhone had only been released that spring. We were still trying to figure out how to interact through email. We couldn’t have imagined the possibility of a pandemic or multiplatform worship services. We were just seeing the first signs of what would become huge cultural divides.
The world has changed so much around us over these eighteen years, and we have grown and adapted in ways that make me very proud and should make you proud too. As I wrote in my letter, I have always felt like the luckiest UU minister in the world to have landed in Montreal.
You have taught me so much and you have given me so much. You have trusted me to be by your side during some of your most joyful and painful moments, individually and collectively. I have seen your courage, your care and concern for each other. I have seen your ability to laugh, to mourn and to break bread together in beautifully meaningful ways.
I have been welcomed, nurtured, inspired and lovingly challenged by this ministry we’ve shared. I have been grateful for all the ways that we have taken action in the world together, and for all the ways that you have encouraged me to use my role as minister of the Unitarian Church of Montreal as a platform to take action in Montreal and Quebec.
It has been an incredible privilege to be part of your lives, for both me and my husband David.
Making the decision to retire has not been easy. I truly love you all, and it will be hard to separate from you. But my heart and soul are telling me that this is what I need to do.
Some wise person once said that when ending a ministry you can only choose between leaving too soon or leaving too late. I have made the decision to err on the side of too soon. This is the right moment to say goodbye. As a congregation, you are in great shape. You have excellent leadership in place to guide you through this next phase. You have a strong staff that brings dedication and creativity to all they do. The next minister you call will be very blessed by all you have to offer.
I will always be a minister, but the Unitarian Church of Montreal will be my last full-time call as a settled parish minister. I’m sixty-seven (of course, that’s not old!), but I’m looking forward to slowing down, focusing more on family, working on a number of projects I have in mind, and traveling. My own search for meaning continues, with gratitude that my search has been connected to yours all these years. All that you have given me will enrich the next phase of my life.
I will still be your minister until the end of June. I’ve got a lot I still want to preach about, and a lot of songs I still want to sing with you! But as the months go by, many of the decisions you might have turned over to me will be yours to make. In the end, it will be up to you as a congregation to chart your course forward.
My hope is that the next five months will be a time of saying goodbye well. I hope that we can spend this time celebrating what we have accomplished together.
The next steps are pretty straightforward. The board will be in contact with the Ministerial Transitions office at the Unitarian Universalist Association, which will assist them in the process of finding an interim minister, who will join you in August. Usually, the interim minister stays for a year or two while you form a search committee and then search for a permanent settled minister. You, as a congregation, will choose your next minister through a democratic process. (If you’re thinking of becoming a member, now is the perfect time to join in order to have a voice in the congregation’s future.)
It might have been during the pandemic that I started to sign my newsletter column “with love.” That has not been artifice. It hasn’t been fake or just something to say. It has truly come from my heart. I cannot thank you enough for your trust and the privilege of having served as your minister for all these years. I know that change is always hard, but I have faith that you will go from strength to strength.
So I close this sermon
with all my love.