Reverends Phyllis Hubbell and John Manwell

JOHN: Whether you’re just wondering about your new ministers, or are a newcomer checking out this congregation, we want to introduce ourselves. We are John Manwell and Phyllis Hubbell, a married couple who have accepted the board’s invitation to be your new consulting ministers of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Loudoun. We’d like to tell you a little about who we are and how we got to this point in our lives. We look forward to hearing your stories, too.

PHYLLIS: I was 10 years old when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, requiring public schools to be integrated (“with all deliberate speed”). In high school I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus, and saw pictures of fire hoses being turned on people marching for freedom. At home, my family argued over the great religious questions at Sunday dinner. Those times left many of us seeking a religion that was committed to justice for all and that welcomed searchers like us. In my thirties, I found that religion in Unitarian Universalism.

JOHN: I am a life long Unitarian. My parents had joined May Memorial Church in Syracuse shortly before I was born. My mother soon became the director of religious education; my father taught Sunday School and chaired the board. Both coauthored books with Sophia Lyon Fahs, the pioneering liberal religious educator. I loved the church, and was active in youth activities. You could way I was hooked on religion from an early age. But I wasn’t brave enough to become a minister until years later, when I found myself spending all my evenings and weekends at the church, and becoming excited about some new ways of understanding what the church could be.

PHYLLIS: In our separate lives, before seminary, John and I both worked as Washington lawyers, John in private practice and I at the Justice Department. John married and raised a family of three wonderful kids, but the marriage did not survive his call to ministry. I was still single when John and I first met at All Souls, in Washington. As our religious lives deepened, we each found ourselves drawn to parish ministry (and to each other). We married in 1992, at John’s first church in Mississauga, Ontario. We returned to the States in 1994 to begin a fourteen-year settled ministry at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore.

JOHN: My call to ministry was about deepening our spiritual lives to sustain the work we are all called to do – doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our god. I think of myself as a humanist Unitarian Universalist Christian -- humanist because I ground my sense of the holy in human experience, and Christian because the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and the stories and poetry of the struggle of ancient peoples with the great questions of human existence, have helped me to feel connected with people in all times and places.

Struggling with these same questions, I have found myself drawn closer to the spirit of life and love which connects us all. I have come to realize that God is a human name for the great forces of the universe. But whatever our name for these ultimate forces, we paint the face of this god in different ways, based on our often evolving human experience as we go through life. The question is not whether they exist, but how we experience and understand them, and relate to them.

PHYLLIS: My ministry is focused around the theme that we are one – all beings, all creation -- and what that means for who we are and what we do. Like many UU’s I once struggled with the idea of God and prayer and with the place of Jesus in my life. Over the years, I have developed my own natural spirituality in times of silent prayer and thanks. If asked, I call myself a natural mystic theist.

JOHN: Phyllis and I both have been transformed by our relationships with gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered individuals. No one I knew had ever admitted to being gay when I was a young adult. Our faith has taken me into the lives and loves of courageous, funny, loving couples who endure much even with all the progress of recent years.. We’ve preached, marched, testified, visited legislators, and organized UU congregations to seek legislative equality. Three years ago, we decided that until the law changes, we could no longer sign wedding licenses as agents of the state. We felt that in doing so, we were collaborating with the state in its discriminatory practices.

PHYLLIS: We are have been pleased to see equal treatment come closer in many other states and countries, and even in Virginia. We hope to continue to press for full equality.

JOHN: We hope to work with and walk with all of you. We believe that religion should be a source of renewal and transformation for all of us as we struggle both in our personal and public lives. We hope that you will find here something that will get you through the week.

We’ll be in the pulpit twice a month. We have a home outside Baltimore, but we’ll be living (with our dog and two cats) in Frederick, so as to be closer to you, yet also convenient to family and still within reach of our permanent home in Baltimore, which for the time being we’ll be renting. We share three children and six perfect grandchildren, all living in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. We’ll be working mostly from home, within the limits of the one half-time position which we share. In our first weeks with you, we’ll be getting to know as many of you as we can, hearing your stories and your hopes, and developing goals for our work together.

PHYLLIS: We hope that together, we will grow more aware of the beauty and wonder of our lives, and more thankful, even in the hard times …, especially in the hard times. We are here to walk together on life’s journey, to learn to love more deeply, and carry our love out into the world, deepening our sense of oneness with all that is.

JOHN: We look forward to growing with you. Let us make of this place a holy place where love dwells and life flourishes.