Rev. Alden Studebaker
(March-April 2025) — Can you believe it? It’s been an entire year since we began this journey together! There’s a lot of truth to the old saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” I like to think we’re having some fun while we’re building our ministry together. If it didn’t have an element of fun then why do it? That isn’t to say everything in life is fun and games. There are serious aspects of life that require more than comedic responses and frequently demand that we dig down deep for solutions. No doubt 2024 has provided these learning experiences for each of us.
I’ve served a lot of ministries in my career. While attending ministerial school I had a small church in Leavenworth, Kansas. In addition to the church work I was also a counselor at the United States Disciplinary Barracks. I can say with total accuracy, “I did time in Leavenworth.” And it’s ironic that my first ministry as an ordained minister in 1984 was in Vacaville, California, home to the California State Prison, Solano. I began to wonder what it was in my consciousness that had attracted me to prison towns?
Apparently, I transcended that karmic anomaly and went on to serve for several months at a newly formed ministry in El Paso, Texas. The next ministry I served for six years in the suburban LA community of La Crescenta.
From Southern California I was called (they called me out of the blue) by a large church in Bellevue, Washington to help bolster their youth ministry. I was thirty-five years old, and we had two kids. I guess I was what they were looking for. Incidentally, their senior minister was Linda Spencer (minister at Unity of Springfield 1978-88). After a couple of years, we left Bellevue for the Midwest. I wrote my Bible handbook, Wisdom for a Lifetime and went on to serve for ten years at Garden Park Unity in Cincinnati. When I finished at Garden Park in 2005, I had every intention to move to another ministry and community, but the Universe had other plans.
We stayed in the Cincinnati area at our home in Bright, Indiana for another thirteen years while all three of our children attended Indiana University-Bloomington (required our residency in Indiana). I had many interesting jobs and also went on the road promoting my Bible handbook. It was during this period that I came to Unity of Springfield as a guestspeaker and workshop leader (March 14, 2010).
Once the kids had their degrees, I re-entered pulpit ministry in 2018 at a small church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Our son, Nathan, lived in the Twin Cities. We bought a home and began to get acquainted with our new community. After six months it became clear to me that I was their unintentional transitional minister. It was a difficult church for me. Their minister had been there for fourteen years with no transitional work. She lived just a few blocks from the church, and even though we got along just fine, this created some complicated dynamics. We left Wisconsin voluntarily and moved south to Missouri just as Covid began. We didn’t want to spend another winter in Siberia.
It took nineteen months to find another church job! Eventually, I was hired by a church in Bonita Springs, Florida (between Fort Myers and Naples).
This church had some similar qualities to Eau Claire (certainly not the weather!) in that they had had a well-loved minister of fifteen years who retired. Since no transitional work had been done prior to my arrival the first two years involved that kind of work. Once that phase was more or less complete, my work became calmer, more normal. They gave me a big raise to help with some of the increasing costs of living in Southwest Florida. I could have stayed there for the rest of my career. We owned a decent house with a 3% loan and a nice mango tree. I planted banana, lime, orange, avocado, and coconut trees in the yard. Sounds like paradise, right? Then, Unity of Springfield came open for leadership.
I’m often asked by people, “Why did you move here from Florida?” My response, “For the moderate weather.” My intention in sharing many of these details of my ministerial career with you is to hopefully help you understand our process. For those of you who have lived in Springfield or nearby for most of your lives, it may seem a little odd to move around so much. We moved to Springfield for many reasons but mainly because we wanted to. It’s been a very smooth transition. Trust me on this one. Having had transitional ministers here has paid off for everybody. Plus, we like it here. Mel-O-Cream is only two blocks from the church. We can buy
mangoes in the supermarket. I rest my case.
Abundant blessings,
Alden Studebaker
