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09/21/2016 08:30 AMEvery now and then, you hear about a person who entered the clergy after retirement. The Rev. Todd C. Vetter, the new senior minister at the First Congregational Church in Madison, looks a little young to fit that profile. But we’ll let him explain that later.
Having started at First Congregational, which is part of the United Church of Christ (UCC), in July, Todd is still finding his place.
“Part of my initial goal,” he says, “is simply to get to know the church, because every church has its own personality, its own history, its own culture. So I think it’s very important to spend some time building relationships and understanding where people want to go together as a church.”
The UCC’s system of local control—it has no official hierarchy—can make transitions like Todd’s seem harder than those of clergy in more structured churches.
Todd says, “We’re not invested with that sense of authority that we can come in and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Follow me.’
“In the Congregational tradition,” he says, “there’s an inherent sense of partnership between the clergy and the laity.” Putting it another way, he says, laughing, “I have, like, 400 bosses.”
Todd appreciates his congregation’s commitment to good works, mentioning its involvement with Habitat for Humanity, the Guilford CROP Walk, the Shoreline Soup Kitchen, and other charities.
“My initial goal,” he says, “would be to sort of concentrate on building on our existing mission projects and outreach work.”
Moreover, Todd says, “From what people have told me, and from what I’ve experienced so far, this church has always been kind of the center of Madison. The high school graduation is hosted on the Green, we have all these things going on in the church and on the Green outside the church, and it would be nice to build on that as well.”
Todd is coming to First Congregational after a nearly four-year period in which it was served by interim ministers. Without going into any specific controversies that may have led to that long hiatus—”there are always specific controversies,” he says—he attributes the stress and strife in many churches to bigger historical trends in mainstream Protestantism.
“All of those old-line churches are going through a period of intense transition,” he says. “We’re moving from that period where people just came to us. Now church is not the sole source of meaning and purpose in people’s lives the way it was 30 or 40 years ago, and that has caused anxiety, because finances have become much more of an issue for local churches, so there’s concern, stress over that. And again, I think that that kind of plays out in a lot of different ways in different churches, and sometimes, rightly or wrongly, it is laid at the feet of the minister.”
Growing a Worldview
Raised in the UCC, Todd was born to American parents in 1964 in Bangladesh, back when it was still East Pakistan. His father was a civil engineer; his mother taught at the international school in the capital, Dhaka.
Before the revolution that led to Bangladesh’s independence, in 1971, the family relocated to the Netherlands, then to Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Todd attended Heidelberg University, a UCC-affiliated institution in Tiffin, Ohio, where he majored in English history and English literature.
“Heidelberg was a minister factory,” Todd says, but he took a different path after college, moving to Portland, Oregon, where his parents had relocated.
He planned on fulfilling his language requirement in preparation for entering a Ph.D. program in history.
“I spent two weeks in German in community college,” he says, “and I thought, ‘I can’t. I can’t do this.’”
Although the term “Gen X slacker” hadn’t yet been invented, Todd wound up embodying it for the next eight years.
“Portland was a very bad place to live in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s if you had no ambition,” he says. “It was cheap. There was no social pressure. It was a glorious place to live.”
Todd worked in bookstores and as a hotel doorman and concierge.
“It was something to do to live in Portland,” he says.
Although the term “the Greatest Generation” hadn’t yet been invented, Todd’s father, who survived the Depression and served in World War II, reacted typically.
“My father refers to my 20s as my early retirement,” Todd says, laughing.
Todd’s ambition gradually began to stir again when he worked as a volunteer for the Portland mayor’s office of international development, arranging visits by Asian officials who wanted to learn about Portland’s methods for managing growth.
“Because I’d lived overseas so much as a child,” he says, “I’d always wanted that international experience.”
Thinking he might go into international development work or diplomacy, he entered the Peace Corps. Todd was placed in the southern African country of Lesotho, where he spent three months with 30 other volunteers doing language and technical training.
“You form this very quick bond,” he says. “You’re there for Thanksgiving and Christmas together. There was a real sense of sticking together. And then at the end of it, they kind of rip you out of that and send you to a mountain and leave you there alone.”
Todd was sent to a remote mountainous region of Lesotho, where he taught high school English and math in a Catholic school in a village of subsistence farmers. The transition was painful but life-changing.
“There was, I think, a kind of real trauma there,” Todd says. “And that deep sense of isolation, that kind of breaks you open a little bit. I’m very fond of that Leonard Cohen lyric about, you know, ‘Cracks are good because that’s how the light gets in.’”
A Call to the Clergy
“I think it was that sense of being taken out of a place of comfort and security and going to a place where you had to sort of put yourself back together,” Todd says. “And I think that was sort of the context of hearing that call to ministry. Of sort of having everything kind of stripped away a little bit and being forced to listen to how God was speaking.”
His decision to join the clergy, Todd says, “was a great relief to my parents.”
Todd wound up spending an extra year teaching in order to see one particular class graduate. Until then, the school had never sent a student on to higher education; that year, thanks to what Todd says were the tenacious efforts of the headmaster, 6 out of 13 students went on to a university or training college.
Todd cites one of those students, named John, as strengthening his commitment to becoming a minister.
“He was an extraordinary young man,” Todd says. “And he would give this morning exhortation. It was a sermon every morning. He kind of said the same thing every day, but just the passion with which he talked about how God was leading us in this day, it just began to get into my bloodstream.”
John went on to earn a Ph.D. in African languages; he and Todd still communicate via email.
Todd had already applied to seminary, but upon returning to the States, he decided to test his commitment by working for a year in the UCC’s office in Washington, D.C. He then enrolled in Yale Divinity School. Like most people who have attended Ivy League schools, he says it’s a lot harder to get into now.
It was at Yale that Todd met his wife, Sarah, a fellow divinity student.
“In the interest of full disclosure,” he says, “we weren’t in the same prayer group. It was much more profane than that. First we met at the graduate-school pub at Yale. Then we had our first extended conversation in the beer line at the spring formal at YDS. There was nothing pious about it.”
The couple married in 2004. They now have two children: Matthew, age 10, and Holly, 8.
After getting their degrees, Todd and Sarah lived in the parsonage at the Methodist church in Greenwich where she was pastor. Todd drove every day to his job as associate minister at the Congregational Church in Orange.
“Associate ministry was glorious,” Todd says, “because it’s the senior minister who’s responsible for the hard stuff. I spent 3 ½ years there, and I loved it. You got to do kids, you know, youth, mission. It was all sort of mission trips and hammering nails at Habitat and going to soup kitchens. I only preached once a month. It was a very nice existence. It’s everything but money.”
Money was partly a factor in Todd’s decision to take his next job, as the senior minister in the Congregational Church in Duxbury, Massachusetts, but he and Sarah also thought it would be too difficult to raise a family while working at two churches.
He soon learned the hard stuff about being a senior minister.
“Reading a profit and loss report, reading a spreadsheet—I had no idea of how to do any of that stuff,” he says.
Although he generally speaks positively of his eight years at the church, he says “it was not a good fit.”
Todd is still getting oriented in Madison—for fun, he says, “I unpack boxes.”
Although he manages to find time to read and walk his dogs, he still hasn’t been able to get his kayaks into the water.
Asked how his 400 new bosses are treating him, the former retiree says, “So far so good. I probably have a year and a half. You always have a sense of how long your honeymoon’s gonna be. It might be two years. But, yeah, so far so good.”