Consulting Minister

Cell:	(603) 540-2487
Home:	(603) 751-2628
E-mail:	emilyburr@comcast.net

The Reverend Emily Burr is the minister of the Kearsarge Unitarian Universalist Fellowship located in Andover, NH. A native New Englander, she was born and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, and has been a Unitarian since age twelve. She received a BA degree in Physics from Vassar College. After being a teacher, mom, and chemist for many years, she returned to school in January 1999 to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. She was the summer minister and intern at the UU church in Nashua from the summer of 2000 to June 2002. Emily graduated with honors from Andover Newton Theological School in May 2004.

Emily has two grown children, Adam and Megan Burr-Mecum, and currently lives with her husband, Rich Kleinschmidt, and two cats in Concord, NH. She enjoys canoeing, hiking, and reading in her spare time.

She leads worship services on the first and third Sundays of the month at the Proctor Academy Stone Chapel in Andover, NH, where the Fellowship gathers every Sunday at 11:00 AM. She also provides pastoral care for the congregation.

I just went back and read the first “Minister’s Missive” I wrote to you in September ’04. I was excited about becoming your minister and getting to know you and having you get to know me. I expressed my anticipation and my sense of possibilities for KUUF and my ministry. Here I am, four years later, writing my final Minister’s Missive to you. We have gotten to know each other. Most of those possibilities have become realities – a few haven’t. Isn’t that the way of hopes and dreams – on a good day? I have grown as a minister and you have grown as a congregation. Shortly we will be saying good-bye.

This is another time of anticipation and possibilities – for both of us. I know the Search Committee has worked very hard and is pleased to have found a candidate they believe is a very good match for KUUF. On June 8th, Rev. Bill Nelson will lead a service and you will decide if he will be the minister to lead the Fellowship into its 2nd quarter century.

Rich and I are still trying to navigate the approval process for the Peace Corps. It is frustrating and far more difficult to satisfy their requirements for medical information and assurance of good health than we thought it would be. We still hope to be accepted as volunteers, but are adjusting to the possibility that, even if we are, it may not be in July or in Africa and, in fact, it may not happen at all. With this in mind, we are pursuing other interesting possibilities for next year and the future.

Ever the numbers oriented person, I figured out that the four years of my ministry with you covers 16% of KUUF’s lifetime and that KUUF has been a part of 7% of my 57 years. That exercise reinforced my growing understanding that numbers are not capable of telling the whole story. I have grown and changed in those four years and my relationships with KUUF, as a congregation, and you, the individuals that are KUUF, have added to the depth of my experience of being a human far more that the 7% might indicate. I leave with many good memories and will carry many valuable life lessons with me.

When I was growing up my mother would tell us children that she loved us “more-than-tongue-can-tell” (imagine it as one word). It was abbreviated on birthday cards and such as M.T.T.C.T. In this good-bye Minister’s Missive I thank you M.T.T.C.T for all your encouragement, support and love these four years.