Rev. Jeanette A. Good, Ph.D.

On Sunday, November 16, 2008, at the State Street Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, The Reverend Jeanette A. Good was installed as its 15th settled pastor.

Rev. Good brings a rich background of both local and international experiences to State Street Church. Her experiences match the church's local and international concerns. Born just down the street and brought up just inland in Sebago, Maine, she has studied and traveled extensively, and worked in a variety of pastoral settings.

Rev. Good was an AFS Gorham High School exchange student to the Amazon area of Brazil. She received her BA degree in French from the University of Maine at Orono. Her coursework included two years of studying in France, one of which was at a small Protestant College, Cevenol, in a village that had hidden nearly 5,000 Jewish children during the Nazi occupation. After graduating from college she returned to Brazil under a Northern New England Rotary Scholarship studying the roots of hunger. While there, she witnessed extreme human suffering caused by poverty and injustice. She spent a second year in the Northeast of Brazil working in the area of human rights with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee. For over forty years Rev. Good has retained a relationship with Brazil, traveling there many times and in recent years serving as a member and former President of the Maine Partners of the Americas, a sister state partnership with the poor state of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil.

Rev. Good earned her M. Div. degree from Yale Divinity School, and her PhD in pastoral psychology from Boston University. Early in her ministry, she was a Hospice Chaplain, and later served churches in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. She was ordained in 1980 in the United Church of Christ. After completing her PhD in 1999, she returned to Maine to serve as Interim Senior Minister at Woodfords in Portland. She then served in interim positions in Windham and Fryeburg before coming to State Street Church in April, 2005. She is adjunct faculty at both the University of New England in the Psychology Department, and at Bangor Theological Seminary. She is a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, and a member of the Maine Association of Mediators. She is also author of Shame, Images of God and the Cycle of Violence published by University of America.

For the past three years, Rev. Good has been excited to be part of a turnaround ministry at State Street Church, and has an enthusiastic vision of the State Street Church of the future as a progressive, diverse, tolerant, and alive congregation.