“Old Glory is flying proudly,” Sheila Foote tells me. Thanks to the response of Dispatch readers, it took less than a week to solve the ongoing problem of the tattered flag flying at Sunset Gardens Retirement Community. People all around Gilroy, such as Dion Bracco, wrote and called to offer to buy and put up a new flag themselves.
When Candace Capogrossi, Deputy Director of the Santa Clara Housing Authority, heard the story, she expedited the purchase of new flags.
Foote says, “I want to thank everybody for their response to the article. We seniors appreciate it very much.”
There was a recent reunion of Gilroy residents both past and present at the Sacramento Convention Center across the street from our state Capitol. The occasion was the ordination of Pastor Alison Berry, the first woman to become a fully ordained senior pastor in any mainline Protestant Church in Gilroy.
After 152 years of Methodism (and 18 male senior pastors), the Gilroy United Methodist Church is now headed by its first fully ordained female pastor.
Hollister, Morgan Hill and Watsonville have employed fully ordained female senior pastors for a number of years, but Berry is Gilroy’s first.
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of women being ordained in the United Methodist Church at large.
Those celebrating Berry’s ordination in Sacramento included former Gilroy city planner (and former Dispatch columnist) Chuck Myer, former city activist and mayoral campaign manager SueEllen Rowlison, and teacher Melissa Adams, just to name a few. Berry’s family traveled from Connecticut to attend the ceremony.
In the past, Berry was employed as a professional field hockey player for Spain and worked with youth at San Francisco’s private French-American International School. She has Master’s Degrees in both Clinical Psychology and Divinity. She is a world traveler and has worked extensively with youth on mission trips and in pastoral settings. In Arizona, she lived in a teepee while working with troubled youth in a wilderness setting.
Her ordination process has been a rigorous one, requiring many interviews, tests, conferences, seminars, and sermons which were taped and analyzed by the United Methodist California-Nevada Board of Ordained Ministry.
The entire process took about 10 years to complete. Her final test sermon was given before a clergy session in Sacramento two days prior to the ordination ceremony. The challenge was to say something meaningful in a mere three minutes.
Berry was accompanied on the ordination stage by Gilroy’s retired Rev. Charles Krahenbuhl, who was ordained in the Methodist Church in 1962.
Berry has now received her Elder’s Orders in full connection with the United Methodist Church, which, as Berry pointed out, means that her official title is now “Elder Berry.”
Berry’s congregation purchased a new robe and various other gifts to celebrate her achievement, as well as a one-gigabyte MP3 Player, a device the size of a small pack of chewing gum which can be used to store and play approximately 300 songs.
This week Berry leaves for England to continue her education by attending classes at Oxford. She will return in September to continue leading Gilroy Methodists into the 21st Century with the theme from her final exam sermon “making a new heaven and a new earth in which God’s spirit of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience is at home.”
