Great Barrington — Back in September, the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ (UCC), officially named Rev. Tadd Allman-Morton as its designated term minister. This is the first time the church has had a designated minister in over a year, having previously used supply ministers since its previous pastor relocated to the Midwest area.
Rev. Allman-Morton told The Berkshire Edge that he grew up in Stowe, Vt. and that he did not have “a very real religiously grounded upbringing” as he was growing up. “I was out of Sunday school by the time I was seven years old,” Allman-Morton said. “That was because when I entered the school that October, the director of the school told me that I couldn’t be in the Christmas play. I told my mother that I thought that was a kind of crappy attitude, and that I didn’t want to be involved in church anymore at that point. So my mom yanked me out of Sunday school.”
However, Rev. Allman-Morton said that returned to his Christain spirituality when he was a teenager. “During my teens, I started having a variety of spiritual experiences that I couldn’t explain or understand,” Rev. Allman-Morton said. “I was always interested in mythology and other faiths, and I started poking around into Norse and Greek mythologies. Eventually, a friend of mine gave me a book when I was an undergraduate student called ‘The Gnostic Gospels’ by Elaine Pagels. The book talked about alternate aspects of Christianity. That became like a door for me. Which is why, little by little, I wandered back towards the church.”
Even before he started working in the area, Allman-Morton had a connection to the Berkshires as he attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock from 1983 to 1986, earning an associate of arts degree in Liberal Arts during his last year.
He eventually became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society church in Burlington, Vt. “Within a year, I became a membership coordinator at the church,” he said. “I then became the director of religious education at the Unitarian Church in Montpelier, Vt. I was there for five years, and that sense of religious calling really solidified while I was there. That religious calling had been whispering to me throughout my childhood, but I didn’t know what it meant until I had the container of a faith community to kind of point me in a certain direction.”
Rev. Allman-Morton eventually attended the Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Center from 2001 to 2005, earning a master of arts with a Master of Divinity degree. From 2004 to 2007, he served as an intern minister at the Old South Church in Boston.
For 14 years, from 2007 up until last year, Rev. Allman-Morton served as the pastor for Westhampton Congregational United Church of Christ. Rev. Allman-Morton said that he remembers his time in Westhampton with great fondness, but that he, along with other pastors all across America, had to deal with many challenges during the COVID pandemic. “Like so many pastors, I found that the COVID experience was very challenging and diminishing, including in spirituality in some ways,” Rev. Allman-Morton said. “A lot of that is because church communities are all about meeting face to face. You always have eyeballs looking at eyeballs, and you have people in proximity. I am a rare creature because I am an extrovert, and most ministers are introverts. But I love being together with other people.”
Another challenge Rev. Allman-Morton and his family had to deal with near the end of his time in Westhampton was the death of his mother, who died in May 2021. “All of that began to take a toll on me,” Rev. Allman-Morton said. “And then I got in a bad place, just thinking that I wasn’t meant to do this.”
Rev. Allman-Morton proceeded to work at a co-op in Easthampton for about a year. “That didn’t prove satisfactory, nor did it satisfy my spirituality,” Rev. Allman-Morton said. “That was then a friend of mine, another pastor, set me up with what is called a ‘Bridge Ministry.’”
Rev. Allman-Morton served as a bridge minister at Granby Congregational Church, UCC, in Granby, Conn., on a part-time basis before he became the full-time minister at the First Congregational Church in September.
“There [are] a lot of churches out there that have rather fixed theologies,” Rev. Allman-Morton said. “One of the great things about the UCC is that it has a progressive ethic that is striving toward a radical openness toward all of God’s children. Intolerance, bigotry, racism, and antisemitism are all on the rise; I don’t think that humanity has ever been served by coddling those baser instincts. I think that church is one of those places where those instincts are corrected.”
“There’s something to be said for having a faith background that grounds you morally,” Rev. Allman-Morton added. “I see a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum who claim to have Christian backgrounds who promote diminishing the rights of women over their own bodies, or not welcoming people who might love a different gender than they do or might have a different hue to their skin. That’s not the Christianity that I see when I read the Bible. Jesus had his moments, and he had to grow too. That, of course, will offend so many people on the conservative side of the religious spectrum. But I think that it’s important that we get rid of this notion that religion is regressively conservative. I’ve got no problems conserving the things that need to be conserved. But I do have a lot of problems with people using what they call ‘faith’ as a way to demean or diminish anybody else.”
Rev. Allman-Morton, who lives in Montgomery with his family, called residents who attend the church “a lovely bunch of folks.”
“I hope to bring to the church a sense of enthusiasm,” he said. “I hope I’m getting people excited about being in faithful relationships together. I’ve been blessed to make a connection with some of the Simon’s Rock students, and we will make a significant ongoing connection with the campus. I’d like to think that we might be able to have the youth and elders get together and do something significant, maybe some kind of mission trip. I don’t know when everyone’s schedule will allow that, but I would like to do something to make a difference in the world around us.”
For more information about the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, visit its website.
