'She's Prepared Us Well'

When the Rev. Roberta Finkelstein became the first full-time minister of the Unitarian Universalists of Sterling in 1997, about 45 worshipers were meeting at the Sterling Annex Community Center. Each week the congregation held services on folding chairs on a squeaky gym floor, unpacking and repacking a chalice, candles, hymnals and other supplies. Office space was a rented room above a used bookstore nearby, and weekday meetings or religious classes were squeezed in at members' homes.

Finkelstein was hired for a five-year term -- it was extended by the church indefinitely -- to help establish a congregation that had been formed slightly more than a year earlier. Now more than 90 people attend Sunday worship at Sterling Oaks Commerce Center, where the church has room for a suite of offices and Sunday programs for children.

For Finkelstein, 52, her original mandate has been fulfilled, and it's time to move on. Today is her last day.

"I must leave the future of the church in your hands," Finkelstein told the congregation at her farewell sermon June 5. "It has never been my church or my ministry. It was and is your church and your ministry."

Under Finkelstein's stewardship, the church has become known in Loudoun County as a vocal center for social activism. It collects nonperishable food weekly for Loudoun Interfaith Relief and has participated in a series of interfaith forums with local Muslims and people of other religions in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The church is recognized by the Unitarian Universalist denomination as a "welcoming congregation" for bisexual, gay and transgender people and has conducted letter-writing campaigns and circulated petitions supporting same-sex marriage and benefits for homosexual couples.

Steve Dick of Ashburn, a founding member of the church, said it has been imperative for the congregation to be involved with social issues as well as spiritual ones.

"A church like this plays a role in the larger society as the voice of a liberal religious community," said Dick, 55, who works for NASA.

And "Rev. Roberta," as she is known by the congregation, has been a central force in leading the Sterling congregation to this point.

"Churches have development stages the way people do and companies do," Finkelstein said in an interview. "I'm feeling the church needs a different kind of person."

Finkelstein will spend at least a year as an interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, helping the group find a permanent leader while she seeks a congregation of her own. She said she is looking for a church where she can continue to pursue her activism, perhaps in the Northeast or on the West Coast. Ideally, she said, it would be near the ocean, her "spiritually calming place."

The ministry is Finkelstein's second career. She spent a decade as a nurse, including several years as a midwife. She was a lay leader at the Unitarian Universalists of Arlington, when one Sunday she was asked to give a sermon while the minister was on vacation.

"I stepped into the pulpit, and I loved it," Finkelstein said. She enrolled in seminary at age 36, the same year her son, now 22, started kindergarten. During her studies, she interned at churches in Shenandoah and Manassas.