During a baptism ceremony on a recent Sunday morning at First Parish Federated Church in South Berwick, Rev. Brian Gruhn asked his congregation to ponder the commonalities between God and water.
“I come from the Grand Canyon state of Arizona. We are known for this giant, deep, wide hole in the ground,” said Gruhn, who wore a short-sleeved pink button-down shirt and a striped stole. “It got there because, over millions of years, water went running through mountains and rock, and over time chipped away enough of it to create this gorgeous canyon. Water is constantly active in our lives and changing the world, just as God is doing for us.”
For Gruhn, who was hired in January as the new pastor at the Federated Church, the last three years have been full of change – personally, professionally and spiritually. When he and his wife, Emily Skinner, and their three young children moved to South Berwick in 2022, Gruhn had recently stepped away from the ministry after seven years, disillusioned and uncertain of his future.
But a stint as a roaming interim pastor followed by his new post at the Federated Church has reignited his passion and led him to pursue a new vision centered on forging community bonds and bringing people together.
“Over the years, I have felt moved to develop a new kind of ministry,” Gruhn said in a recent interview. “I wasn’t really interested in preserving the church the way it started out a few hundred years ago.
“I was more interested in answering ‘what is God doing now? what’s God asking us to do now?’ And it has turned into this ministry of learning how to connect people to others, to themselves, and to their sense of God.”
At a time when social connections are increasingly fragmented and digitized, social safety nets are evaporating, and people say they are lonelier than ever, he says, it is the church that should step up to mend the gaps, rather than sow more division.
It’s part of what Gruhn calls the “theology of life,” which focuses on building up the well-being of individuals and their connectedness to the community in the here and now rather than fixating on what potential prizes or punishments may come after death.
So far, Gruhn has fit right in with the Federated Church, the white-steepled fixture in downtown South Berwick long known for its charitable work and turkey suppers, and which has long advanced an ethos centered around community nourishment.
“What we always say to people is that we are a church that feeds people in mind, body and spirit, and we take that very seriously,” said Julia Ouellette, a member of the pastor search committee who has been active with the church and its charitable work for more than two decades.
“Everybody loves Brian. He has a lot of energy, a lot of interesting ideas and is very thoughtful and well educated. We are very excited by all the new things he is trying,” said Ouellette.
Gruhn, 43, exudes a mix of thoughtful, energetic contemplation. He keeps abreast of current events and the undercurrents that foster the social ills he seeks to heal. In his leisure time, when he isn’t playing with his three children, ages 1, 3, and 6, he is reading up on history, economics, science, politics, theology – even comic books – and thinking about ways to make the world happier, more just, more inclusive, and less lonely.
One new initiative he’s started at the church is a monthly program called Abundant Parenting. One evening each month, parents, regardless of religious affiliation, are invited to come chat and commiserate about their challenges and experiences with parenting in the modern world. While the parents talk, volunteers watch over and play with the kids in the next room. Afterward, everyone sits down for dinner.
“Part of this idea is we don’t have the same kind of connections or safety net that human beings have always had in raising children, and that feels like a really important missing piece,” Gruhn said. “We’re trying to find, what are the practical things that people really need? How are we equipping and supplying those things so that folks have a better time living life together?”
While building resilience and strengthening connections are paramount to these efforts, they may have the added benefit of attracting new and younger members to the Federated Church, Gruhn said.
Across the Western world, overall church membership and attendance have dropped precipitously in recent decades, especially among younger people who say they don’t feel there is a place for them in the institution.
“You hear all the time that churches are dying, but I think it’s not that people are not into church, I just think we’ve outgrown that model of church,” Gruhn said, referring to churches that still adhere to antiquated thinking and messages that don’t reflect the realities of life in the 21st century.
“And so, I am a firm believer at this point that the real secret to all this is, let’s just try stuff. I see my job right now as helping the church think through what are the things we haven’t tried yet.”
Gruhn grew up in what he described as a culturally sterile military community in Arizona not far from the southern border. He started working with a youth group at Benoit College in Wisconsin and was later a youth minister and camp director in Phoenix.
When a student at the camp was diagnosed with cancer and later died, he helped the bereft students put on a celebration of life memorial and was inspired to see them work through their grief and honor their friend with ongoing charity work and service. It was that experience that drew him to pursue a career in the ministry.
“I thought, if this is what me and a bunch of kids in one little city can do, I wonder what else we can do,” Gruhn said.
Not long afterward, Gruhn moved to the Boston area to study theology at the Andover Newton Theological School. He met his wife, who is a nurse, in Boston and in 2016 the couple moved to Maine after Gruhn was hired as pastor at the First Congregational Church of Kittery.
His seven years in Kittery, however, coincided with the COVID pandemic, mounting national social and political strife, and was often marked with differing opinions and debates about the church’s direction. The experience, he said, proved difficult and left him disenchanted and unsure if he wanted to continue as a pastor.
In 2022, shortly after leaving Kittery, Gruhn and his family moved to a home in the Agamenticus Estates neighborhood of South Berwick, where he pondered his next chapter.
About a year later, Linda Hurst, the longtime pastor at the Federated Church, informed the congregation she would be leaving to pursue new opportunities. Church members discussed the qualities they hoped to find in a new pastor and formed a search committee to look for someone who fit the description.
Ideally, they wanted a thoughtful leader with fresh ideas, who was “a young and dynamic pastor and who hopefully has a family and lives in the neighborhood,” Ouellette said.
Ultimately, after a yearlong nationwide search and interviews with pastors from Ohio, Texas and Boston, the church found Gruhn, who, despite living just a few miles away, didn’t initially even apply for the job.
When church leaders first approached him, Gruhn said he was unsure if he wanted to lead a church again. In the intervening years he had found a happy niche as an interim pastor, pursuing novel projects in various churches and working with youth, including at the Federated Church.
But when he met with the church leaders to discuss the opening, he said, he felt invigorated by the church’s strong shared sense of mission and its members’ passion for working together despite not aligning perfectly on every issue.
Though many of the First Parish Federated Church’s 140 or so members may look demographically similar – they tend to skew older and are mostly white – as with any group, there are differences. Some have very deep roots in South Berwick and have been attending the church their whole lives, while others are recent transplants. Some members would describe themselves as progressive, others as proud conservatives, Gruhn said.
But everyone at the church “has the grace and the respect for other people that enables them to sit at the same table as everybody else and ask, ‘How are we going to love and serve the world?’” Gruhn said.
“Rather than being divided by our differences, it’s about finding ways of connecting through the differences. Not avoiding the elephant in the room but saying, ‘Hey, that elephant is valuable, let’s figure out how to put it to good use.’”
Gruhn believes that kind of attitude is what’s missing most from our current discourse. At a time when everything is politically charged, when people are increasingly segregating into distinct tribes or isolating from the world entirely, a church that’s working to bring people of all backgrounds and beliefs together can be the elixir for change, he said.
“My main call to ministry is trying to bring as many people together around commonality and similar projects as possible and not allow toxic things – distrust or disunion, or difference – to have the last word,” Gruhn said.
“For me, love, light, life – those are the final words of every story,” he said. “That’s how I try to prioritize my time. That’s how I try to offer myself. And I feel really lucky to have found a church full of people who see all of this the way I just described to you.”
