SEARCH COMMITTEE

After a year of meetings, more meetings, writing, more writing, deliberating, interviewing, reading, more reading, listening, compiling, collating, sleepless nights, angst, and (finally) joy, your Search Committee is pleased to announce that we have a candidate! His name is Matthew Johnson-Doyle.

On Sunday, April 6, our congregation voted overwhelmingly to call Matthew Johnson-Doyle as our next settled minister. We are all eagerly looking forward to beginning the next chapter of our church's long history together with Matthew.

Below is the text of Dick Lake's introduction of Matthew to the congregation on Sunday, March 30.

I am very pleased to announce that Matthew Johnson-Doyle is the candidate that we present to you. Matthew comes to us from the High Plains Unitarian Universalist Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he is in his fifth year of ministry.

He is a life-long UU from the Seattle, Washington area and took his undergraduate degree at Whitman College in Walla Walla Washington, where he formed and led a UU student group and was very active in social justice causes. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and won the Eugene O. Marx Award given to the graduating senior who shows both dedication to community service and academic excellence.

From Whitman College Matthew went to Meadville Lombard Seminary where he graduated in 2003, having won the Robert Charles Billing Prize for Excellence in Preaching and the Robert Charles Billing Prize for Excellence in Scholarship, and had been student body president. He did his internship with Kendyl Gibbons at the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis.

When Matthew arrived at the High Plains Church, they had 90 members, a 12-hour-a-week Director of Religious Education and were meeting in an elementary school gymnasium. During his first four years there they wrote two strategic plans, increased the DRE to 20 hours a week, increased membership to 154, moved to a larger middle school cafeteria, and then bought and remodeled their own building, after a successful capital campaign. Matthew was elected president of the UU Minister’s Association of the Mountain Desert District by his colleagues there and was a leader of the district’s Growth and Outreach Service Area. In the Colorado Springs community he is a founding member of the Pikes Peak Equality Coalition, co-founder and co-chair of the Pikes Peak Inter-Religious Clergy Alliance, and Board vice-president of the Pikes Peak Gay and Lesbian Community Center. He is currently finishing up his coursework for his Doctor of Ministry from the Iliff School of Theology.

Matthew is thirty-one years old, (for those of you have been trying to figure it out) and is married to Morgan, whom he met when they were both students at Whitman College. She has a Master’s degree in library science, and is currently staying home with their one-year-old daughter Rosalie.

The Search Committee was very impressed with Matthew’s self-assured demeanor, his warmth, his many strengths, and especially his preaching, which he pays a great deal of attention to and considers one of the cores of his ministry. To quote from his Ministerial Record, “Preaching matters – it is often the most important thing we do, the place where we reach the most people and where we do the most teaching, counseling, and leading.” Matthew is a preacher.

He was the first choice of the Search Committee from the many applicants that we received and we are very excited about the future of our church under his ministry. Matthew and Morgan spent a weekend here a month ago and are enthusiastic about the community and the prospect of making their home here. It is with pleasure that we present Matthew Johnson-Doyle to you and we’re sure that you will enjoy getting to know him when he and Morgan are here for candidating week at the end of the month and the beginning of April.