Ready to tend to her cows, Central Congregational Church's longtime pastor says farewell

Over the last few weeks, I began to get emails saying I should write about the Rev. Rebecca Spencer.

She’s about to retire, they said – after an extraordinary 35-year run at Providence’s majestic Central Congregational Church on the East Side.

One of the messengers was Scott MacKay, former political commentator for The Providence Journal and The Public’s Radio. I never thought Scotty was religious, but Rebecca’s personal style, and eloquent sermons about repairing a broken world, drew him in.

“I’m not the only one,” he said. “Sen. Whitehouse told me that’s why he went there too when he’s in town.”

And then there’s Rebecca’s pastoral side. Scotty said she helped him through a tough breakup, later nudging him to meet another congregant – “this nice woman doctor,” Rebecca said – named Staci Fischer.

Scotty joked to Rebecca, as she likes to be called, that he didn’t realize Central Congregational doubled as a pickup spot. She laughed and told him, “I’m serious – she’s a very special woman.”

Rebecca ended up marrying the two in 2004, Scotty’s first time at the altar, at age 50.

Noble Brigham – a Journal contributor – was another one who told me I should write about Rebecca, which surprised me, since he’s a 22-year-old Brown student, and I didn’t think kids like that went to church. But Noble‘s family members are longtime Congregationalists, so he gave Central a try. Largely because of Rebecca and her well-crafted sermons, which impressed him as a future journalist, he became a regular.

So I went to see what the Rev. Rebecca Spencer is all about and found her at the big yellow brick church on Angell Street, in its majestic sanctuary. It seats 800 but, because of its low dome, preserves a feel of intimacy.

You can often judge a person by their habitat, and it says a lot about Rebecca that a whole section of pews was filled with donated clothing to be taken by congregants to groups serving the disadvantaged.

After a brief tour, Rebecca and I sat in her office, which isn’t the neatest place I’ve ever seen. She laughed and explained that she loves to get lost in books and pamphlets, then set them down on any surface while looking for others.

I met her Thursday, three days before her last sermon this Sunday, Nov. 19, the service to start at 10:30 a.m.

“So that’s your final day?” I asked.

She told me that sounded ominous – she prefers calling it a farewell. And indeed it will be, because protocol says departing pastors shouldn’t hover too much or it might overshadow the new minister, in this case the Rev. Patrick Faulhaber, who was recruited from Georgia.

It had not been easy finding a time to chat with Rebecca. That might surprise some folks, like the fellow mom who once asked her while picking up their kids at the Gordon School, “What do you do actually, besides just sit around and write sermons?”

That got me wondering what her days are like, so Rebecca began flipping through her paper calendar, which she trusts more than her cellphone.

The previous morning, she'd spent a few hours on the Distribution Committee of the Champlin Foundation, which gives out millions a year in philanthropy. Then she had lunch with a congregant going through a personal challenge, which she often does with folks facing things like divorce and illness as well as issues with kids, career, grief and, well, life. After that she did some work with church committees, had coffee on Thayer Street with another congregant, planned for a funeral, and, yes, did some sermon writing.

She calls herself more a professional listener than a counselor, but it’s really both.

One reason people told me to write about her is that Rebecca was a pioneer when she arrived in 1988, the first female senior clergy at Central Congregational, which draws folks from almost every city and town in the state.

She was also unmarried at the time.

“When she came,” Scotty MacKay told me, “they kind of took a chance getting a single woman.”

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But Rebecca became a beloved pastor for more than three decades, long enough to have performed marriages for people she'd once baptized as babies.

The way she met her husband, a banker named Charlie Rice, says a lot about Rebecca. She ran into him while the two were were volunteering at a soup kitchen on Broad Street in 1993.

Laughing, she told me she noticed Charlie ladling out chili, and added, “I thought he had nice arms.”

They married a few months later, just as Rebecca turned 40, then had two late-in-life kids, whom she began to raise alone when she lost Charlie to cancer in 2008.

Her eldest, Tom Rice, now 29, does historical preservation in New York City, currently on the famous Flatiron Building. Ezra works in global sales for Tesla in Austin, Texas.

That’s another reason she’s retiring – it has been two years since Rebecca made it to see her son there, and she wants to do more traveling in general.

That and look after her cows.

Yes, Providence’s Central Congregational minister has cows, four of them, at her Little Compton home, a small farm. She apologized to me for limping – one of the cows had stepped on her foot.

There are around 4,600 Congregational churches in the United States, with a membership of 700,000, around 500 of whom worship at Central on Angell.

That’s a bit down from the 600 congregants before the pandemic, which hit houses of worship hard, but it’s still a healthy number.

One reason is that Rebecca’s style is to deeply involve folks, and, in fact, when I visited, Barry and Barbara Bayon, ages 80 and 77, were putting prayer and contribution cards in the pews. Now living in North Kingstown, the two previously had been with a Congregational church in Mansfield, Massachusetts, then came down to check out Central on a random Sunday. They were intrigued to find Rebecca’s good pal Rabbi Les Gutterman, then of Temple Beth-El, giving a guest sermon.

That sold the Bayons – they loved the open-mindedness. Soon, they said, Rebecca made Central feel like the spiritual home they wanted.

“She forces us to think about somebody other than ourselves,” said Barry. It's why he has long gone to Amos House once a month, arriving at 6:30 a.m. to serve breakfast.

Rebecca grew up in Middlebury, Connecticut, went to Wellesley and spent time working on an Israeli kibbutz, hosted by a family where the parents had tattooed numbers on their arms from Nazi death camps. Tragically, a son of theirs was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But the son’s clarity of commitment to country inspired Rebecca to want to embrace a profession of purpose.

So she enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. Smiling, she explained, “They offered me the most money.”

After serving as an assistant minister in Greenwich, Connecticut, she learned that Central in Providence was hiring. Many people, she says, picture Congregational assemblies as small white churches on village greens. This was a big, traditional city institution. She felt the odds were long, since each church does its own hiring.

“I thought they’d want a man, married with 2.3 children,” said Rebecca. “But they took a leap of faith.”

Rabbi Gutterman told me it wasn’t easy to be the first woman at this well-known Congregational bastion.

“It was an era when people lifted an eyebrow,” he said, “but she fulfilled everyone’s hopes.”

Over time, he felt, she emerged as the church’s mother figure, with a listening ear and moral compass that made folks want to make the world outside better.

Les and Rebecca became close friends, and he told me one of his own daughters is now a rabbi not just because of him, but partly inspired by Rebecca’s example as a woman in the clergy.

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When I asked Rebecca to sum up her mission in a few words, she said: building bridges.

She has worked with the African American Camp Street Community Ministries, partnered with the Muslim community in Sharon, Massachusetts, and once formed an interfaith group with Rabbi Gutterman, Father Robert Randall at nearby St. Sebastian Catholic church, and Tom Ahlborn at First Unitarian Church of Providence.

I asked if her outreach is harder in politically divisive times.

“That’s what places of faith can do,” Rebecca said. “We don’t have to believe in the same thing, but can work together for good.” She embraces a particular aspect of Jesus as a model – she said he was known for reaching out personally to folks, one by one.

Soon, it was time for the next thing on her calendar. Rebecca walked me out, pausing by the church sign announcing her weekly sermon.

For a brief moment, she seemed wistful, knowing it would be her last. The title on the sign was, “Gratitude, gumption and grace,” which captured Rebecca – some whimsy, some good writing and a real life message.

Then she headed back inside, her work not quite done, though once you meet her, you realize that even in retirement, because of the things Rebecca Spencer cares about, it never will be.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Central Congregational pastor Rebecca Spencer set to say farewell