First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

The Reverend Dr. Kendyl Gibbons is the ninth senior minister of the First Unitarian Society. She is a life-long Unitarian Universalist, a recognized leader in our continental Association, and past president of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. Kendyl is a 1976 graduate of the College of William and Mary, with B.A.s in Religion and Sociology. She holds a Master degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and a Doctorate of Ministry from our UU seminary, Meadville/Lombard Theological School.

Kendyl served as the minister of the DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church in Naperville, Illinois for fifteen years before being called here to Minneapolis in 1998. While there, she was elected president of the local ecumenical ministers group and the district UU ministers chapter, and was active in district growth programs. She also served as a Ministerial Settlement Representative for the district.

Kendyl has a long-standing commitment to theological education and the future of ministry. She has formally supervised thirteen student ministry internships, and been an informal teacher and mentor to dozens of seminarians. She is an adjunct faculty member of Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago and the United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities, and currently teaches in the areas of worship and liturgy, and the dynamics of professional leadership. From 1987 to 1991 she served as president of the Meadville/Lombard Alumni/ae Association, and member of the M/L Board of Trustees. She has also served as a member of the midwest regional committee overseeing the care of ministerial candidates. She currently serves as the UUA Ministerial Credentialing Office's appointed liaison to UU students at UTS.

An articulate representative of the Humanist theological tradition in Unitarian Universalism, Kendyl is a member of the board of the HUUmanists organization within the UUA, and co-dean of The Humanist Institute, where she also serves as mentor for the incoming class of 2006.

Kendyl has been widely published in UU journals and publications, including Quest, Religious Humanism, and the UU World, and she has made numerous presentations at the annual UUA General Assemblies. She is the recipient of the John Burton Wolf Prize for Excellence in Preaching, and the Meadville/Lombard Alumni/ae Association Excellence in Ministry Award. She is also the author of two hymns included in the 1991 UU hymnbook, Singing The Living Tradition.

In an essay describing her understanding of the nature of the church and ministry, she wrote:

The church exists as an institution to help all people lead more fully human lives, in spite of our mortality and the finitude of our understanding. We gather to this institution in response to the values that we have come to treasure, and are still seeking, as individuals. The church becomes a laboratory, where we try to live out together, in one minor voluntary association, the values by which we claim the world ought to be run. This always proves in practice infinitely more difficult than it sounds in theory, which should help us to remain non-dogmatic.

The experience of community is neither the starting point nor the ultimate purpose of a church. Rather, community is what emerges when people connect with each other as we undertake challenging projects together; it is the by-product that forms in the process of faithfully pursuing worthy goals that help to illuminate the world.

Over time, the church becomes a vessel which holds us, in moments of tragedy and transformation, in moments of need and vulnerability, in our most urgent questions of meaning. It is the chalice which carries the heritage of our tradition as it is handed from one generation to the next. Within its structure we learn to practice the disciplines of covenant; to mourn, to remember, to promise and to rejoice, and we take responsibility for a future beyond our own gratification.

The function of called professional ministry in such an institution is to preserve and extend the vision of wholeness; to tell the truth about what it is to be human and to be alive; to cultivate the best of the people, as a corporate body and as individuals; to bear witness to their agonies and their promises; to model integrity in his or her own life; and to create for the common worship of the church, the choreography of praise.