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Bob Ganung started his career as a minister in New Harbor. Fifty-some years later, he’s a new minister again, about 25 miles southwest at Elijah Kellogg Church.
Along the way, he taught philosophy and religion at private schools from Massachusetts to Hawaii. He has led services in Canada, Sweden and France.
Here in Harpswell, he wants to support and encourage the work of building community and lending support locally and around the world that he already sees the church doing. Connecting social justice and human rights with spiritual practice, he said, “is my main thing.”
He is clearly impressed by the congregation. “They work tirelessly for their community,” Ganung said. Churchgoers fixed up the parsonage where Bob and his wife, Catherine, will live. And he spoke in awed tones of watching volunteers in their 70s and 80s pushing full wheelbarrows as they set up the church’s annual barn sale this summer.
Ganung’s style of ministry is focused on building connections. He said he likes to visit members of his congregation to care for them, listen to them and learn about them. He has worked with people in hospice, at the ends of their lives, something he hopes to be able to continue.
He is also exploring the wider Harpswell community, joining classes at Fishmoon Yoga, stopping in at the Itty Bitty Coffee Shop, and walking his goldendoodle, Juniper, at Mitchell Field. That last has even helped him grow his flock; he said four women he met there started coming to services and plan to return next summer.
The Ganungs didn’t really mean to end up in Harpswell. Bob’s first positions after finishing divinity school at Boston University were at Methodist churches in New Harbor and Round Pond. From there, he spent four years at two churches in Portland, then became the chaplain at Milton Academy in Massachusetts.
He and Catherine, who worked in college counseling and admissions, served at two other schools, Punahou School in Honolulu and the Taft School in Connecticut, where for 19 years Ganung also taught classes on Buddhism, Eastern and Western mystical traditions, and religious terrorism. Across the three schools, he spent 30 years as a chaplain, teacher and coach.
The Ganungs have kept their house in New Harbor since the 1980s, and Bob filled in a few times at Elijah Kellogg in recent years.
Last summer, during Elijah Kellogg’s long search for a pastor to replace the Rev. John Carson, the church called Ganung and asked if he knew any ministers looking for a church. Ganung had been thinking about retiring, but after considering it for a while, he called back and said that he was. He gave his first sermon on June 14.
While Ganung puts Christ at the center of his belief system, he is heavily influenced by other religions and philosophies. He draws on traditional Buddhist practices, like yoga and meditation.
Ganung likens the spiritual journey to the experience of climbing Mount Katahdin, which he has done a number of times: “There are many paths to the summit,” he said.
He hopes to introduce some of these ideas and practices to Elijah Kellogg Church. He has engaged with the Brunswick Area Interfaith Council and hopes to get involved with the Maine Council of Churches, a coalition of Protestant denominations. He would like to start a speaker series at the church to help connect spiritual and social ideas.
He also would like the Kellogg Church, which he already sees as a warm and welcoming space, to make a formal commitment to inclusivity. But he is very clear that such a decision can only come from the congregation when it is ready, not from him.
The measure of his success in Harpswell, Ganung said, will be whether his new church can find ways to weave itself more tightly into the fabric of Harpswell and the wider world around it.
