Home

     
Church of the River’s new minister hopes
to get congregation more involved in social justice
    ​​

Rev. Sam Teitel had a different sermon planned for Aug. 13. But when violence broke out after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., leading to the deaths of three people, there was a change of plans.

“I really wanted to sort of ease into this,” he told the congregation at First Unitarian Church of Memphis, known by most as Church of the River. “My goal was to try and get everybody more comfortable with this over a matter of years, but that was naïve of me. There isn’t time for that and there never really was.”

Rev. Sam Teitel is the new minister at First Unitarian Church of Memphis, the Church of the River.
It was the 30-year-old’s second Sunday in the pulpit at Church of the River, so named because it overlooks the Mississippi River with towering windows that give everyone but the minister a view of the river and all that goes with it.

When he was called to Church of the River, one of the Teitel’s charges was to help the congregation of about 300 become more active in social justice issues. So that sad Sunday, after Charlottesville, he dove right in.
“How do we get involved in social justice and, God forbid, politics and maintain the integrity of our faith?” he asked.

“Frankly, these are not political issues. White supremacy is not a political issue. It is a spiritual issue. It is a theological issue. It is a human issue,” Teitel said.

He acknowledged that becoming more involved can be scary, but challenged the congregation to be willing to act.

“This is not the sermon I wanted to give on my second Sunday in this pulpit,” he said. “But at some point, we do have to take these risks . . . In the end, we as a community need to be willing to act.”

Teitel is tall with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. He wears studs in one ear, hoop earrings in the other, and, like many in his age group, several tattoos peek out from under the bunched-up sleeves of his sweater. The most notable of these is of a flaming chalice, a key symbol of Unitarian Universalism.

His sermons are punctuated with humor, some of it self-deprecating, and he has a fondness for preaching on the Bible, interpreting different verses and stories in ways that make them compatible with the UU faith, which does not recognize the Holy Trinity.

Teitel was raised in the Unitarian Universalist faith – his mother, Rev. Mary Harrington, was a UU minister who served congregations in California, Texas and Massachusetts before her death from ALS in 2010. He writes his sermons from the same desk she used.

After Teitel graduated from college, he spent a few years as a slam poet and arts organizer before deciding to go to seminary.

“Slam poetry is about . . .  I have this thing, this feeling or this idea inside me and I need to get I out . . . There’s this sort of cathartic element to it. At least there was for me,” he said. “With preaching . . . I’m not focused on what is inside me, I’m focused on what is inside the people in front of me. What do I have to offer these people in front of me?”

“Writing sermons, I think is what I wanted to do the whole time – I just didn’t figure out that’s really where my heart was.”

Still, he occasionally writes poetry, as did his mother, and many of her poetry books occupy a shelf in his office.
Teitel met his wife, Sandra Summers, at Andover Newton Theological School near Boston.  After graduating, he became outreach and youth program coordinator at First Parish Church in Wayland, Mass., and she, ordained in the United Church of Christ faith, became Pastor of Youth and Families at Memorial Congregational Church in Sudbury, Mass. They married about a year ago and moved to Memphis in August after he was called by Church of the River.

In Memphis, Summers is an associate minister at Lindenwood Christian Church.  They live downtown with a Jack Russell-ish terrier named Tommy – a Hurricane Harvey evacuee that they rescued. Teitel is a Boston Red Sox fan, and he and his wife have been enjoying Memphis Redbird games, along with everything else Memphis, judging from his Instagram feed.

“I love Memphis,” Teitel said. “Memphis is totally different from anywhere I’ve ever been before.”
Although he was born in California, Teitel lived in Boston from age 10 on, and considers himself a “Bostonian at heart.”

“Being in the Middle East felt more like Boston than Memphis does,” he said. “That is a beautiful thing and a wonderful thing, but it is a huge adjustment. Even if most of the changes are positive changes.”

The biggest shock has been the slower pace. “People are more laid back here. . . I think they are not plagued by New Englander anxiety. People talk to you. People are kind. People help you. People say please and thank you,” he said. “And that gets me in some trouble . . . I do not have Southern manners.

“I got a ‘Bless Your Heart’ the other day, like a sincere, passive-aggressive ‘Bless Your Heart.’ It felt like it was a rite of passage.”

Working in different faith traditions is not a problem for he and his wife.

“We believe basically all of the same things,” Teitel said. “The way I think about it, it’s about language. Faith is faith, but religion is language. Religion is the language we use to express our faith. The language Sandra and I use is slightly different and that’s because we both use the language we were raised with. Her father is a UCC minister, my mother was a UU minister. So we both grew up in those churches.”

He has been well-received by the Church of the River congregation, which voted unanimously to call him as their minister. Since he began serving the church, attendance and membership has increased.

Becoming more involved in social justice work is an important goal, but he knows that it will be a learning process.

“This congregation really wants to do social justice work,” he said. But, “it hasn’t’ been a part of the life of the congregation. So what I want, because social justice is sort of a non-negotiable part of my ministry, what I want is to introduce social justice to the congregation in a way that makes it accessible to this congregation.”

“I think that the worst thing I can do is not go there, or go there so slowly and so gently that we’re never really able to accomplish anything.”

In other areas, he would like to see the Church of the River grow, but not necessarily in terms of membership. “When we talk about growth, do we just mean more people? More people would be great . . . I’m thinking about growing into its full potential and growing into the 21stCentury. This is a great church full of great people and there is so much we can do.”

He would also like the church to explore finding weekday uses for its building, which is underused 6 days a week. Every other church I’ve worked at or been affiliated with ha had someone running a daycare out of the church.”
Church of the River is also a frequent wedding venue, and Teitel would like to investigate ways to increase that stream of income.

“There are all kinds of interesting things we can do if we’re willing to take risks and try to do things a different way,” he said.

One other thing:

“I want the identity of this church, when people say, ‘What is the Church of the River?’ or ‘What’s it like to be at Church of the River?’ – I want them (members of the congregation) to say an average of three sentences before they mention the view,” Teitel said. “It’s a great view…  I’m not saying the view isn’t great.” He’d just rather it not be the main identity of the church.

“I think there is so much here that is so much more beautiful than that view. This congregation is so much more beautiful than that view.”

This article was written as an assignment for Advanced Media Writing, a graduate course in journalism at the University of Memphis. Full disclosure: The author is a member of Church of the River and served on its Board of Trustees from 2010-2016. This article was originally posted on Nov. 2, 2017