About two weeks before he died at 92, my slightly confused dad said of me: "She's a little Amish girl who went to San Francisco and started her own Mennonite church.” That's almost wholly wrong: I didn't start First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, and I wasn't raised Amish, although that is my heritage. (I am little, however.) But my dad did get the overall gestalt of my life correct: being a pastor at a progressive San Francisco church is a long way from growing up in a traditional Amish Mennonite rural community in Ohio. 

 

Holding the tension of opposites between the world in which I grew up and the world I now inhabit has defined my life. It informs my work, whether that be my parenting, pastoring, writing, or activism.

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I'm trained as a spiritual director and a permaculturist, and I live with my husband, Jerome Baggett, and son, Patrick, on an island in the San Francisco Bay.