Senior Minister Biography

 The Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper has been Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church for five years.  Her life goal is to animate spiritual capacity for public ministry.  That means orienting individuals to find their power in such a way that they redistribute power and make the world beautiful and fun for all.  She imagines beauty and enchantment as God’s purpose in the beginning – and joins in the great stream of the enchanted as a life love. She also grows a fine tomato – and helps to grow fine congregations.

She keeps worms in her kitchen where they turn scrap into soil and grows a variety of greens in her backyard.  She is an avid green guerilla and weeds in public gardens whenever she can.  Her Manhattan front yard is filled with multiple hues of morning glories. Upstate in her Fishkill place, she is joined often by guest Judsonites in growing tomatoes, corn, sweet peas, and the occasional dahlia.

You can find her at Judson, often, or at the Sotheby’s auction for the finest heirloom vegetables grown in the area. Think a Turkish Orange Eggplant or Black Sea Man Tomatoes.

Previously in ministry in Chicago, at Yale, in Miami, and Tucson, Schaper has been involved with a series of turn around congregations and a host of social action issues.  She was instrumental in the God is Still Speaking Campaign for the UCC and in founding the Open and Affirming Movement in the UCC.  In Miami she was rejected for membership in the Coral Gables Garden Club because some feared she would do the same thing she had done at the church, which is to grow it with new members of color, diverse orientations and backgrounds.  She is less anti-racist than she is pro color.

Schaper was one of the first women trained by Saul Alinsky in community organizing.  She leads a group of community ministers at Judson, mostly seminarians, in learning how to get power for social change.  She calls this program “mutual mentoring.”  There are 28 graduates, many of whom “hang around” at Judson.  Additionally she is active in the New Sanctuary Movement, based in Judson and beyond, which accompanies undocumented immigrants in such a way as to shift the host and guest balance in the United States.

Schaper has written 31 books.  Her best selling book is Keeping Sabbath.  Her latest book is Sacred Chow.  Her favorite book is Grass Roots Gardening: Rituals to Sustain Activists.  She is a Slow Food Activist, guerrilla gardener, bike riding, golden retriever raising, cat loving mother of three adults and married to Warren Goldstein, author of the Biography of William Sloane Coffin, Jr. 

"When the elephants fight, the grass suffers."  Schaper lives to build Judson as a grass protecting and grass-liberating place.  Her usual language is Christian but she calls herself a post denominational person.

What Donna Sees and Hears Regarding “The Judson”

For most people, Judson Memorial Church is an idea more than a reality.  “I just love the Judson,” people say, usually meaning they love the idea of the edge, of risks taken and buildings still standing, of epic utopian dreams incubating social change and artistic expression.  Others think Judson is a Bohemian hideaway, in the heart of the heart of the village, which village is in the heart of the heart of a great global and globalizing city.  A little musty, rustic looking but actually Italian, the building sits on the South of Washington Square Park, amused at what it sees all day long, every day.  It is known for the artists, writers, dancers, and actors who gather in its several basements to share food and drink and ideas.  Arcade Fire “played” Judson before it went to Madison Square Garden.

Judson is also known for a moral rigor, which marries trust in your own creativity.  It is a place where we find BOTH creativity and its disciplines.  Eat your heart out, Peter Elbow.  You say writers rarely do both. Judson does.  It elicits your trust and creativity – and then asks you a lot of hard questions, most of which you can’t answer.  You leave, nevertheless, more alert to what it takes to be alive.

Many argue that they tapped into their creativity in the vaulted meeting room or the basements.  Others say they were afraid of the people at Judson: they were so intense about something like truth.  You can’t be too smart here – but that competition for the clear is joined by enough coffee and smiles that you are able to forget about it, for minutes at a time.

Judson is a local ingredient with national and international significance.  It is safe space for research and development for national denominations and national movements.   Both Rauschenberg and the Guardian Angels started here. You figure.

To me, Judson is a catalytic congregation of a couple of hundred people who worship on Sunday mornings at 11 in what can only be called a kind of church you never heard of.  Anti-nostalgic with a big past, Judson retains its artistic personality and religious roots, while integrating new people on a nearly daily basis.  Here you can learn to trust and shape your creativity, along with other people up to the same purpose.

For what do I hope, knowing this place and now having it as part of my heart and my own illustrious past?  Keep Judson weird and different.  It is a place where, mercifully, nobody is that impressed if you are queer. It is instead a time/space of good coffee, cool people, hot church.

I have come in five years to love Judson.  In a fast city, Judson is slow. Judson takes its time.  It is, also, often early to scream on behalf of a robust future for the church and nation.  As I write, we are protecting the right of Moslems to pray where they want to downtown in New York City. 

Founded, along with Riverside Church uptown, by John D. Rockefeller, to be a different kind of church downtown, Judson enjoys change.  Clean water for the first Italian immigrants or establishing the right to choose an abortion, ministry to prostitutes and drug users, keeping undocumented immigrants with their families, talking to the parents of thrown away gay kids from Iowa, pick your unpopular cause and you will Judson people there.  It has been a working fountain since 1895.  

If you were to stop by this week, you could join a Community Supported Agriculture program and get food grown by an upstate Moslem Farmer, or help an undocumented immigrant stay in the country, or find some new music or drama at the Bailout Theater or make a bleach kit to reduce harm among drug users.  You might be invited to dance in a “Flash Mob,” and mime a same sex marriage in the middle of Washington Square Park.   Or participate in a “Pop Lab” which is populist bible study, support group, consciousness raising face to face encounters with people as confused and alert as you are.  On the last Sunday of the month you could bring stuff and take stuff at the Really Really Really Free Market.  You might also find some inspiration, snug and safe in the Village’s hidden – and open – heart.  You might find yourself saying, “I just love the Judson.”