Harvest Sunday at Union Chapel: Times worth celebrating

This Sunday, Aug. 28, Union Chapel in the Grove hosts Harvest Sunday, celebrating Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. Reverend Galen Guengerich of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan will preach. His sermon is titled “The Point of Dawning.” Colin Van Tuyl will play trumpet.

Reverend Guengerich has noted, “When significant institutions in our lives mark anniversaries — Union Chapel celebrates 150 years this year, and Sylvester Manor will celebrate 375 years in several years — it reminds us that the values we cherish and the ideals we pursue will extend beyond our individual lives and lifetimes only as they become embodied in institutions.”

Sylvester Manor was originally a Native American hunting, fishing and farming ground. From 1652 to 2006, it was home to 11 generations of its original European settler family. The Sylvester family acquired the property to be a provisioning plantation for their sugar interests in Barbados. Enslaved Africans and their descendants worked the property, along with indentured Native Americans.

The remaining 235-acre core of the estate contains remnants of its earliest days, including an Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground and memorial to Quakers who were given refuge.

Now a nonprofit educational farm, the Manor teaches young farmers about sustainable agriculture, while providing fresh produce for the Island community. And, it runs educational and cultural programming based around the history and heritage of the three cultures that came together here.

Reverend Guengerich is senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church, an historic congregation located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the 10th person to hold this position in the congregation’s 203-year history. He has served as a minister of All Souls for 29 years, the last 15 as senior minister. He was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA, 1982), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1985) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 2004).

Reverend Guengerich is the author of “God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age” and “The Way of Gratitude: A New Spirituality for Today.” He has written opinion pieces for Reuters, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Time magazine, Huffington Post, and other media. He also has appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he leads the “Humanities in a Conflict Zone” initiative at Tel Aviv University, and served on the Board of Directors of Interfaith Alliance and on the boards of Dads and Daughters, the Unitarian Universalist Service, and the New York City Audubon Society.

He lives in Manhattan and on Shelter Island with his wife, Holly Atkinson, MD, who is affiliate medical professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the CUNY School of Medicine.

Trumpeter Colin Van Tuyl is a lifelong resident of Greenport and director of the Greenport Band. He also performs with the Riverhead No-Doubt-World-Famous Monday Night Band, Big Band East and the East End Brass Quintet. He plays in pit bands for local musicals and is a member of the Orient Congregational Church Choir and Bell Choir.

Join us for Harvest Sunday on Aug. 28 at 10:30 a.m. outdoors in our shady grove for our second-to-last service of the summer. Please bring a chair. In case of rain, the service will move indoors. A reception, catered by Stars Café, will follow the service.

Next week: Our Closing Service, on Sept. 4, will be Poetry Sunday. Our commemorative book, “All Are Welcome: 150 years of Shelter Island’s Union Chapel in the Grove,” by Carrie Cooperider, is available after the service or at Finley’s Fiction