Not Your Average Pastor: Ann Kansfield

After a particularly exhausting day, Pastor Ann Kansfield needs to relax. She’s just spent the better part of a morning and afternoon coordinating volunteers who, frankly, would have rather spent their MLK day elsewhere. She is sitting in one of the booths at Papacito’s Mexican Restaurant, pouring over a plateful of nachos.

“Even on the most difficult of days,” she says, in a manner not remotely dejected. “I try to be a detective of grace.”

And that’s precisely what she is. Kansfield has the rare ability to find the good, the positive, the potential in any situation, and she readily applies this to her job as Pastor of the Greenpoint Reformed Church at 138 Milton Street. Between running the only soup kitchen and food pantry in the neighborhood, coordinating 12-step meetings and a range of other workshops and constantly working towards supporting even more community initiatives—for example, she and her crew are currently working on starting up a letter-press in the church basement—Kansfield is one busy Pastor, though she manages to make time for everything.

This is what makes the Greenpoint Reformed Church so special. And the fact that its two pastors just happened to be a married lesbian couple, which has helped influence the church’s emphasis on equality, social justice and acceptance, from both the leadership and the congregation. Though it didn’t exactly come easily: Kansfield and her wife and co-pastor Jennifer Aull attracted city-wide attention in 2004 when, after their marriage was officiated by Kansfield’s father, a pastor who worked at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and a minister of the Reformed Church of America, he was suspended. Not long after, Kansfield would be denied her ordination, because of her sexuality. Throughout the hardship, however, Kansfield managed to harness the strength of the Greenpoint congregation, and use the support of the neighborhood to build a strong and study little church.

“During all of that controversy, the church really started to grow,” Kansfield said. “The external pressure caused us to become unified. And it was terrifying! Sometimes it’s easier to have people hate you because you are gay than to have them love you unconditionally, but we proved that we are capable of loving in this congregation, and in this neighborhood.”

Before Kansfield took the call to join the Greenpoint Reformed Church, she was working on Wall Street—“I thought I was going to be a journalist or a lawyer…or a baseball player,” she said, half-seriously. Though, after 9/11 Kansfield’s plans changed and she began re-evaluating her life, her career and her calling.

“You have to have the hunger,” she said. “It’s not a career selection it’s a passion that is divinely lit. After 9/11, I realized that the only place I wanted to be was at church, reading the bible.” Kansfield then moved to New Jersey and enrolled in the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Upon graduation, Kansfield began working part-time at a reformed church in Flatbush until she received a call from the Greenpoint Reformed Church, requesting a pastor—the Greenpoint Reformed Church hadn’t had a full-time pastor in roughly 20 years. When she started, there were only a handful of regular congregants, which posed a particular challenge while also presenting an incredible opportunity for growth.

“When I got there, there was a big ugly badlock on the front gate,” Kansfield said. “But as the church grew, we have been able to look around the community and identify their needs, and try to meet them.”

Kansfield explained that the congregation has identified three major needs in Greenpoint, the most pressing of which is hunger. As a result, the Greenpoint Reformed Church, alongside Ahavas Israel and the other participating institutions of the Greenpoint Interfaith Food Team (GIFT) has established a soup kitchen and food pantry that feeds several hundred hungry Greenpointers per week. The Church also makes an effort to bolster and support the arts by creating the space to make and display art on-site. In addition, the church hosts music programs for infants and youth, and is in the process of developing a broader set of programming based on community need and desire.

At the end of the day, even on the most difficult ones, Kansfield couldn’t be happier than she is in Greenpoint.

“People ask me how we can get all the food to feed all those hungry people week after week, and normally I’d get all nervous about it,” Kansfield said. “But I realized that God provides, and quiets the anxious voice inside my head. I know that God is in control, and I am reminded that there is a power greater than me, which keeps me same amidst a crazy world.”

“I get so excited about faith and God, because I have experienced the gift of God’s grace and love,” she continued. “But that six years of love and support from this congregation has really made a difference.”