E
A week later, the new pastor smiled at the memory of the way the women, portraying residents of Bethlehem two millennia ago, had acted out the lesson she wanted to share with the rest of the flock.
“That was a time when it could be a death sentence if you were having a child out of wedlock,” Lape-Freeberg recalled during a mid-December interview in her office at what many in Hanover call the White Church. “You could be subject to stoning.
“I could just tell the story from the pulpit or show film clips, but it’s so much better to have three live bodies do it.”
Living the faith was a hallmark of the laity at Lape-Freeberg’s last posting, 17 years at Windsor’s Old South Church. In Hanover, she has found a new flock that has long made a habit of pitching in to do the church’s work.
“I’ve always believed that the members should play an active role,” Lape-Freeberg said. “When you’re that invested you cease to be an audience. You become a participant. You have ownership.”
Lape-Freeberg’s belief in sharing in deed as well as in worship made it all the harder for Old South’s members to say goodbye to the first woman pastor in their church’s 250-year history.
“We’ve grown up together,” deacon Kathy Prevo, an Old South member since 1970, said in an interview. “Mandy encouraged a lot of lay activity in the church. We were working together, not just having her do all the ministering and the leadership.”
In the months after she arrived in 2000, at age 40, with her husband Bruce, a teacher, and their 5-year-old son, Caleb, Lape-Freeberg spent nearly as much time ushering Old South congregants onto the next plane as she did recruiting new ones.
“My first year, I did 19 funerals,” Lape-Freeberg said. “There was a kind of changing of the guard.”
The members who remained soon learned that their new pastor, who grew up on the coast of Maine and earned her master’s degree in divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary, in Decatur, Ga., could do more than rouse them with her sermons on Sunday.
“She was amazing,” Prevo said. “She seemed to know what people needed at whatever point they were in life. She’d spend hours in the hospital with somebody going through a rough treatment. She had a knack of knowing what to say. She said amazing prayers that were so comforting, whether it was you who were sick or whether your dog was sick.”
Word got around as well about the programs that Lape-Freeberg either started or encouraged, including a winter series of coffeehouses at which she and Bruce and Caleb often played instruments; the community meals that Old South and other churches in town host on Wednesday nights at the American Legion hall; and Old South’s annual Christmas Day meal with all the fixings. By the time Lape-Freeberg left, the membership of 135, with between 55 and 60 coming regularly to Sunday services, enjoyed a balanced mix of age groups.
“We always seemed to have babies,” Lape-Freeberg said. “We always had young, active, committed people who really gave grace and vitality to everything we wanted to do.
“Old South is an amazing community. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts, and its parts are impressive. They taught me how to be a better pastor.”
Lape-Freeburg, who was ordained a Presbyterian minister and has served in the United Church of Christ system under a “privilege of call” agreement between the denominations, added that she “would have been fully content to end my career at Old South.”
Then she heard about the Hanover church’s extended search for a replacement for senior pastor Carla Bailey, who had served for 19 years before moving to a church in Minnesota in 2015. Like Old South, also part of the United Church of Christ, the White Church shares a history of support for human rights, from abolitionism before the Civil War to advocacy for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) in the 21st century.
“I am a progressive Christian,” Lape-Freeberg said. “There’s a balance here, between the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ and a commitment to the dignity of all, that was really attractive to me.”
The more the Hanover church’s membership learned about Lape-Freeberg, after the search committee recommended her early in 2017, the more attractive she looked to its leadership.
“We’re rather sermon-centric,” Patricia Jackson, president of the church’s board of elders, said this week. “We expect to be challenged and provoked in real ways, and expect thoughtful messages throughout worship, especially from the pulpit. At the same time, we want to be cared for as a family and a flock. … I forget now that I was worried for a while that we would find the right candidate. I sort of laugh sometimes, because Mandy seems so right. … She is remarkably accessible. She is a very grounded preacher who thinks about the liturgy creatively.”
Lape-Freeberg said that her new church’s staff, particularly associate pastor Rob Grabill, make it easier for her both to preach on Sundays and to minister to her congregation in other ways the rest of the week.
“Every day, I’m grateful to Rob,” she said. “He’s tireless. He is an extraordinary person. He gives me the dynamics of the folks here: Who might be in need? Who can be counted upon to help with something? My first week here, he said to me, ‘You’re Batman and I’m Alfred.’ And I said, ‘Who’s Alfred?’ Now I understand how his role is different from Robin’s. Everybody should have someone like that to help them come up to speed.”
Once she hits her stride in Hanover, Lape-Freeberg, who moved to West Lebanon to be closer to her new church and to her husband’s job teaching history at Crossroads Academy in Lyme, hopes to weave into her ministry the kinds of artistic touches she shared with her Windsor congregation, including decorating the sanctuary with banners and other crafts to symbolize the particular season.
“In Windsor they were open to whatever creativity God blessed me with,” Lape-Freeberg recalled. “That was really exciting. Even when I overreached, it was ‘God bless you for trying.’ Nobody put up a big huff.
“For me, these kinds of projects are rejuvenating. I try really hard to make space in my schedule to do those kinds of things. We live in such a visual culture. We need to visualize our faith in ways that bring us joy.
“I’m bringing gifts, but I’m receiving gifts.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.