NEWFANE-Rev. Matthew Deen, settled pastor at Newfane Congregational Church, has been ordained by the Windham-Union Association of the Vermont Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC).
Deen has been the licensed pastor here since 2022. His installation took place on Sunday, May 26.
On Sunday, June 30, parishioners will celebrate the church's 250th anniversary with an outdoor service and celebration on Newfane Hill - or Fane Hill, as it was called on June 30, 1774, the date the congregation was established.
To mark the occasion of Deen's ordination, members of the church's Open and Affirming Committee designed, built, and installed a new sign "to make more visible the church's ongoing commitment to celebrating LGBTQIA+ folks as an open and affirming church," reads a press release.
"Open and affirming" is an official designation of congregations and other settings in the UCC which signifies full inclusion of people with a diverse array of gender and sexual identities - including gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and nonbinary persons - in the church's life and ministry.
Deen grew up in Columbus, Georgia, where he attended state university. After living in various locations in the South, he made his way to the Northeast.
"I was blessed to have as my first spiritual teacher my very own mother, who was a children's minister and educator in the Pentecostal church that was my first and longtime spiritual home," writes Deen in his profile on the church website.
He graduated college in 2010, and moved to New York City in 2011, where he "built the beginnings of what I believed would be a long career as a nonprofit fundraiser."
"But a series of events, personal and public, led me to discern a call to ministry," he said.
"In 2017, I entered Union Theological Seminary [in the Bronx], where I began to work through a lifelong accumulation of questions [and] curiosities sown from earliest age and nourished through many joys and hardships."
In New York, he served as a community minister for Judson Memorial Church under Rev. Donna Schaper. At Judson Memorial, Deen co-facilitated an ecological grief support group called Extinction Resilience.
He graduated in 2020 from Union Theological Seminary. At Union, his work focused on constructive eco-theology and animal liberation.
Deen has served as an interning minister at Centre Congregational Church in downtown Brattleboro and as pastor for Marlboro Meeting House, a seasonal worship community in Marlboro.
He has lived in Townshend since 2020.
'God, let me land here'
From the start, Deen says, it was important that his congregation know two things about him: that he is bisexual, and that a "great part of my theological focus has been, and continues to be, the human/animal relationship and how humans are relating well to the more-than-human world. And how the Christian tradition can include animals in the liberatory tradition."
Deen had been preaching around the West River Valley and quarterly at the church here since September 2020.
When Rev. Rob Hamm, his predecessor, announced that he would be stepping down in 2022, Deen was no stranger to the Newfane Congregational Church community.
"I had been growing familiar with the congregation in small interactions," he says. "This congregation felt most like home to me. I remember every time I drove past the church, I would say a prayer, 'God, let me land here.'
"What I love about this congregation is the reason I was saying that prayer," he continues. "They are so effortlessly welcoming and curious and willing to try new things, willing to explore what it means to be a church in the 21st century."
And, "especially in an era of ecological collapse and rapidly changing paradigms," the congregation is game to look at questions such as, "What is church, if it's not just the 10 a.m. worship service, and how can it be so much more than that?" Deen says.
"They're really excited, for the most part, to hear the good news preached differently and expounded in ways that are resonant with the times. That's one thing I'm really appreciative about," he continues.
"And they're such a generous congregation; they give so much to the community," Deen says. "They're really eager to help, and that's actually included in the visioning work they did in 2019."
One result of that work has been the church's open sanctuary once a month on the third Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. That's when church doors are open for anyone for contemplation and reflection and silence, "to detox from the noise and bombardment of news and discourse, and some time to sit and connect with the Divine spark within," Deen says.
He also launched a Courageous Conversations series in which parishioners and community members have started to explore topics "in a public and healthy way," including Christian nationalism, abortion, gender diversity, and spirituality.
"Those were really rich opportunities for members of the congregation and the community at large to come in and learn about these issues in the news and on our hearts and minds and to do so without feeling they'll be reprimanded for asking a question, or asking in a way that maybe isn't delicate," Deen says.
"And exercising the muscle of wrestling with these issues in public, in the community - that's something I hope will make the community more resilient in the future, because we need each other and we need to practice learning how to disagree well," he says.
The Newfane Church adopted an open and affirming covenant about six years ago, and an increasing number of churches in the U.S. are choosing inclusion over intolerance, Deen says.
"I feel like it's happening, very slowly," he says. "I think about this a lot and I talk to folks a lot about this stuff."
Deen wrote in his April newsletter about a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) finding. The nonprofit research organization surveyed folks who have left the church and left their spiritual traditions, and the results showed that - whether straight, gay, transgender, or nonbinary - roughly half of them "cited their traditions' negative teachings on queer folks as reasons for leaving," Deen says.
"The window has shifted and, at a bare minimum, people expect their communities to be inclusive, so I do think it's changing," he says. "If it doesn't, there is no future for the church."
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.