Photo By Dave Wilder

Following ten years in journalism and advertising, Rev. Angie felt called to a different phase of the persuasion business, known as parish ministry. Pursuing that path was made easier by the fact that she was now part of a denomination that began ordaining women in 1869, and no longer part of one that still doesn’t. In pursuit of her new goal, she earned her Masters and Doctorate degrees at the University of Chicago and Meadville/Lombard Theological School, and set out to save the world.

The job took longer than she had imagined, as she learned first hand why UU ministry is likened to herding cats. Her metaphor is that of Brer Rabbit, who found that when you go in determined to straighten out the tar baby, you end up stuck with three limbs and hopping on the fourth.

She survived terms of six and seven years as settled minister—once again in Michigan and Florida—before stumbling upon her true love, Interim Ministry, which assists congregations that have lost their ministers prepare to call a new one. Three more years of training and she set out as an Accredited Interim Minister (AIM) to "make straight the path" of the one who would follow. This job she likens to being a perpetual John the Baptist, a role she found both joyful and rewarding, in no small measure owing to her determination to get out of town before Salome dances.

Fourteen years of relocating every year to various states east of the Mississippi—and one west—Rev. Angie concluded that, while Interim Ministry allows her to indulge in a favorite professional pursuit, that of ministry to ministers, she longed to be of assistance to more than one minister at a time. But where to do that? Open a Minister’s Retreat Center, to nurture and bolster working clergy with appreciation, pampering and cold shrimp at social hour? That, at least, would raise the number from one to dozens. But ah, at last, at the urging of a congregant who happened to be an English professor, and who verbally beat her about the head and shoulders insisting she needed to publish her “personal essays”—not the first to so behave, but the one finally to get her attention—she set off to publish. The result, while not exactly the Minister’s Manual with all the answers she futilely sought for 27 years, is at least a set of stories to provide rich black soil in which clergy can plant the seeds of their personal theologies to grow their own messages taller, stronger and covering more ground.

Infused with new excitement, she took a year off to write—even possibly retire—at just the moment America’s market containing the whole of her savings and pension decided to flush itself straight down the toilet via The Crash of ‘08. As the sages say, “It has always been thus.”

Rev. Angie, veteran of two “interesting” marriages, now lives in Florida with her clown/companion/poodle, Diva, and is working full time on Volume II of Season’s Readings.