Jane Quandt, M.Div.

It’s hard to believe that I’m coming up on 15 years as Senior Minister of First Congregational Church, Riverside, CA, located an hour east of Los Angeles. I have often been struck by how churches change pastors as much as
pastors change churches. This one is a progressive voice of Christianity in a land of Roman Catholic and evangelical mega-churches. The city is filled with names of streets like Alesandro Blvd and Dios Rios, reminding us that we are living in a place that once was Mexico, and really still should be. Euro-Americans are a minority here, so if you ever decide to visit you’ll find your High School Spanish very helpful.

It’s interest living in the desert. People here try to tell me it’s really chaparral, but it sure looks like desert to me…and increasingly so given the serious drought we’re in. It has brought biblical texts alive for me in ways that living in New England never could. (By the way, the place where Jesus was born looks a lot more like Riverside than New England in December. So, forget your sleigh bells and snowmen; we’re claiming Christmas.)

I know that pastors always say this, but it really has been a privilege to serve this 144 year old church. (In California we consider that very old.) It has been a church of progressive ideas and activism since the day it was first established by abolitionists who had been chased out of Tennessee for their “radical ideas.”

How has this church changed me? Well, maybe this is true of all of us as we get older, but I know that now I could pretty much care less about orthodoxy. Instead, I care about being a voice for justice in the public square, and caring for the last and the least, the lost and the little.

I’d love to see any of you should you be in SoCal. Some of you may remember me as Jane Haley; that was my married name when I was at Yale. Nope, that didn’t work out very well. Oh well. While I adopted my son from Honduras, I have been very happily single for many years and feel called to promote the single life as a legitimate vocation. (Would anyone like a copy of my sermon on Monophobia?)

It’s been a hell of a ride…a hell of a good ride. Surely being a pastor has to be the greatest job on earth.

Dios te bendiga!