Gang of Four Ministers are virtual strangers to each other around town. So four in Greater Bangor decided to begin a new conversation

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Words may be stock-in-trade for rabbis and pastors, priests and evangelists, but there’s been an unspoken secret for a few years around Bangor: The clergy don’t talk with each other.

A few share coffee now and then. Some visit other services. But it’s a fair bet to say that most of the clergy in Greater Bangor spend most of their time in parallel universes, barely aware of their colleagues.

In 2004, a Bangor clergy group had been fragmented for several years, broken by division over admission of a pagan priestess from the Temple of the Feminine Divine downtown.

That’s when four area ministers decided to begin a new conversation.

“I can’t even remember who called who first,” said the Rev. Elaine Hewes, pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church on Essex Street. “Maybe we bumped into each other or somehow we thought, ‘How about if we just met around a table and messed around with art?'”

They wound up messing around with more than that.

They became a Gang of Four, taking their ideas about the sharing of art into the very political world of their fellow clergy. They studied the problem in a graduate program, then invited ministers, priests, rabbis to get together from time to time.

In the months since, some have. About 20 ministers participated in the first gathering in December, and now, nearly a year after their program began, the four are working out the resulting changes in their own lives.

“We felt that we would be able to address the needs of the Bangor community more effectively as a group,” said the Rev. Elane Peresluha, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor on Park Street. “So there was that motivation to bring the clergy back together.”

Hewes and Peresluha joined with the Rev. Grace Bartlett, then of Grace United Methodist Church on Union Street, and the Rev. Constance Wells of First Congregational Church on Court Street in Brewer in a Boston University School of Theology program for urban pastoral ministry.

They worked together on a proposal for the program, which includes about six months of retreats, research, time off and frequent meetings with each other here at home.

Their big question revolved around whether art could be a medium for people of diverse backgrounds, with the specific focus on clergy. As Hewes put it: “Can we begin to gather clergy back to a place where we could make some connections?”

Key to the BU program: four-member partnerships of pastors from the same city. All four must be allowed by their congregations to take four- to eight-week sabbaticals, or leaves. The BU program provides a $1,000 a week stipend to each, so even the poorest congregation back home can pay for temporary ministers.

That paid sabbatical was significant to the four. Their denominations encourage such breaks after a certain number of years in a church. But finding the time and the money is usually a problem.

Their gatherings to “mess around” with art were significant, too. Aware not only of the lack of communication among their fellow clergy and the deep divisions exposed by recent controversies over the Iraq war and homosexuality, the ministers suspected that art could be a way to bring people together. That’s what they stressed in their proposal to BU.

“There’s something about that realm of the imagination and creativity,” Hewes said. “I think it allows us to pull down some of the barriers that are put up intellectually.”

In the most literal sense, their idea also stressed the practicality that close clergy communication can provide. Every congregation in Greater Bangor has demands placed on it by people in need.

“It helps to know that Grace is managing the thrift shop, how she manages the number of people who come to her door for food, financial assistance, bus tickets,” Peresluha said. “And when Connie calls me and says, ‘Oh, Reggie’s been out again. He needs support, and so he’s been here three times this week.’ And I say, ‘Oh, he’s been here three times this week, too. What are you getting him?’ … That helps me put some boundaries in terms of what I may give him.”

The four, coincidentally, turned out to be the first all-woman pastoral team in the BU program. While gender was not an issue on the surface, it was close by. “I guess there are different levels of collegiality,” Wells said.

“I think that oftentimes trust is an issue between clergy – it certainly has been an issue between male and female clergy,” Wells said. She paused, then added, “Respect might be a better term.”

Denominational ties between ministers are sometimes stronger than local relationships.

“I have two or three male Lutheran colleagues I could say anything to,” Hewes said. “I could talk about menopause if I wanted to. It just doesn’t matter one bit. I don’t have that same relationship with any of the men clergy in Bangor. In part, I think we just haven’t had a lot of time to get to know one another.”

As part of the program, the four ministers met every two weeks for a couple of hours on Thursday afternoons.

Their invitations drew response from area clergy: a rabbi, a sister from St. Joseph Hospital, a priest, other Protestant pastors. Wells said “we saw the excitement around the table” at the first meeting.

Their part in the BU program ended in late March.

For Bartlett, 52, who has been active as an artist in her United Methodist ministry, the end of the sabbatical was a turning point.

“Somewhere along the line in the midst of those conversations that happened in the spring, the ‘ah ha’ came when I realized that I really had been doing it … that … collectively each local church and the four of us together were creating, if you will, the New Creation, the New Church, that new creative act – together. So it was a real different understanding, for me, of what art was,” Barlett said.

So at the end of June, Bartlett retired from United Methodist parish ministry and moved to southern Maine, where she plans to continue her art as well as serve as program director for the Joyful Harvest after-school program in Biddeford.

Hewes, 54, said she found the BU program emphasized creating time – for clergy communcation or anything else. “It got me back into my daily regimen of reading, writing, poetry, reading Scripture – even doing art work. So every morning I’m up at 5 to do an hour and a half of what’s really significant and vital for me. If I’m going to nourish others, I have to be nourished.”

Peresluha, 53, has begun work on her doctorate in practical theology, but will continue at her Bangor congregation.

Above all, Bartlett said, she and her partners have a clearer understanding of their roles, their art and their fellow ministers. “We’d all sort of come to the place in realizing that we were the works of art – each of us. That just moved it to the next dimension.”