Island Pastor
Arriving unexpectedly by freight boat, a newly minted pastor steps out onto a wharf and is engulfed into the rhythms of a stunningly beautiful, historic, and at times quirky island and its people. Rev. Ruth sets out to get to know her new congregation and community on Nantucket by wandering along historic cobblestone roads, brick sidewalks, and sandy by-ways, bicycling the island from end to end, engaging in conversations on wooden benches in town and on the miles of beaches that ring the island, and listening carefully to the challenges and delights of year-rounders, seasonal residents, and visitors living on a sandbar thirty miles out to sea.
Over the next six years of joyfully ministering at the white-steepled circa 1711 First Congregational Church, Rev. Ruth is gradually invited into the heartbreaks, celebrations, ponderings, and generational identities of a community rooted in its cherished and well-curated history as a vibrant whaling town. Through frozen harbors and hurricanes, early morning worship on the beach, life-and-death realities of MedFlight, and the pleasures of wheelchair bicycling and goat-scaping, the energetic and amiable Rev. Ruth welcomes the reader into her experience of life on Nantucket in this snapshot in time.
By Rev. Dr. Ruth Herron Smalt
- Paperback: 146 pages
- Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches
- Publisher: Nantucket Historical Association (2020)