When Elijah Kellogg Church asked the Rev. Joseph Connolly to serve as interim pastor, neither the church nor Connolly expected the temporary post to last four years.
The Rev. John Carson retired in 2022, and the church needed someone to fill in during its search for a permanent replacement.
Carrie Bubier, a member of the Pulpit Search Committee, knew her longtime friends Joe and Bonnie Connolly were moving back to Brunswick after living in New York and asked if Joe would consider the role.
“He thought about it and he said, ‘Sure, we’d love to,'” she recalled.
Bubier and fellow church members expected the process to take about two years, but Connolly wasn’t so sure.
“I warned them it would take at least three years,” he said.
Candidates for the permanent role came and went, but Connolly stayed with the parish as long as he was needed. That happened to be only three Sundays short of four years.
Connolly, now 78, doesn’t worry too much about typical time frames. After all, he and his wife didn’t marry until they were 40 and 39, respectively, and he didn’t go to seminary until he was 44.
Before seminary, Connolly worked on Wall Street and wrote for theater. He eventually came to Maine and joined First Parish Church in Brunswick, where he is still a member.
“What I always say is, I joined First Parish. After 2 1/2 years, they kicked me out and sent me to Bangor seminary,” he said.
He recalls a moment when he was reading a course catalog from Bangor Theological Seminary. “I’m sitting there reading the catalog alone, boring course descriptions, and I started to cry,” he said.
He had a friend who was an Episcopal priest, and he asked her what her call to ministry had felt like.
“And she said, ‘Oh, it felt terrible. I cried for an hour.’ And I said, ‘Uh-oh.'”
Connolly went on to serve in many churches, including 23 years as pastor of a congregation in a town not much bigger than Harpswell in upstate New York. Upon retirement, the Connollys returned to Brunswick.
After about 34 years of Joe’s pastoral ministry, the Connollys are ready for what’s next. They have plans to visit friends and family this summer, but they will miss the community at Elijah Kellogg Church.
Bonnie Connolly said those partings are a difficult part of a pastor’s life that people don’t understand. “It is hard to leave,” she said.
As interim pastor, Connolly was active in the community and urged the congregation to support and uplift their neighbors.
“He’s become friends with many of us, and he’s involved in everything,” Bubier said. “Every event that we have, every public supper that we have, Joe is always there to support, meet the community, greet them. He’s made a huge impact.”
On May 24, Connolly led Elijah Kellogg Church’s annual Heritage Sunday service, when the congregation gathers in the historic 1750s meetinghouse that was its original home.
“We are not on this journey alone. On this journey we need to travel together,” Connolly said in remarks prepared for the event. “So let us together be empowered by hope.”
His last day at the pulpit will be Sunday, May 31. Services start at 10 a.m. The new pastor, the Rev. Dr. Robert Ganung, will lead his first service on June 14.
