| An Introduction to Our Minister | ||
| The
Rev. Douglas Warren Drown (“Doug”)
has been Minister of First Congregational Church since January 1, 1977.
A native of Gardner, Worcester County, Massachusetts, raised there and in
nearby Ashburnham, Doug is an alumnus of Gordon College, attended Bangor
Theological Seminary and, through the Institute for Ministry of the American
Baptist Churches of Maine, has also studied at Gordon-Conwell Theological
Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School. He was licensed to the ministry
in the American Baptist Convention in 1973 and was ordained a Congregational
(NACCC) minister in 1979 after a three-and-a-half-year lay pastorate in
Royalston, Massachusetts, and two and a half years in Bingham. He previously
worked for the Cumberland Farms convenience store chain. Doug has been active in town affairs as a member of the Planning Board, as chair of the boards of directors of Bingham Union Library, the Old Canada Road Scenic Byway, Inc., and the Old Canada Road Historical Society, as well as a former member of the board of the Bingham Area Health Center. He is a long-time substitute teacher in the Bingham area school district (SAD 13) and has taught art in the former Pleasant Ridge and Caratunk elementary schools as well as serving as choral director at Valley High School. He is currently Master of Bingham Grange and a member of Keystone Lodge of Masons in Solon. In addition, Doug has served in a variety of denominational, ecumenical and wider civic capacities. He is Central Region Ambassador (area minister) and state historian of the Congregational Christian Council of Maine, has served the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches as a member of the World Christian Relations Commission, Communications Services Committee, Nominating Committee, and as co-chair of the NACCC’s 1993 Annual Meeting in Portland. He has also served as chair of the American Committee for the International Congregational Fellowship, and led the American delegations to the ICF’s quadrennial meetings in Massachusetts in 1985 and Holland in 1989. In the wider church world, he has served on the Executive Committee and the Communications Committee of the Maine Council of Churches, together with Dr. David Glusker did religious spot ads for the Maine Broadcasting System (now Gannett) television stations in Maine and Iowa, and was the radio announcer for The First Radio Parish Church of America broadcasts for several years. He was the compiler and editor of the Maine Council’s Directory of Maine Churches and Religious Organizations, published in 1990. He has served as the lecturer/preacher for annual spiritual emphasis week seminars at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia and Atlantic Baptist University in Moncton, New Brunswick. For several years Doug was a member of the board of directors of HealthReach Network, an extensive non-profit corporation in Waterville providing a wide variety of health care to Central Mainers through a system of regional health centers, hospice care outreach, and outreach to single mothers as well as persons with HIV, AIDS, substance abuse and mental health issues. In the late 1980’s, Doug’s voice was heard as a reader on Maine Public Radio’s highly-regarded program Read to Me, which was broadcast throughout northeastern New England and much of the Canadian Maritimes. Doug continues to enjoy his thirty-one-year ministry at First Congregational, the second longest in the history of the two-hundred-year-old church. In addition to leading Sunday worship, he plays the piano for the opening worship of the Church School each Sunday, leads the Adventurers youth group meetings on Monday evenings, leads two weekly Bible studies, a monthly service at the Somerset Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, and the usual round of other activities and ministries that a small-town pastor enjoys. For fifteen years, Doug hosted a weekly half-hour church-sponsored radio broadcast, “Good News,” on WSKW-AM in Skowhegan. His hobbies include railroading, photography, hiking, music, art, history, cooking, fishing, reading, and things related to broadcasting history. He is a member of the 470 Railroad Club, the Boston & Maine Railroad Historical Society, and the Congregational Christian Historical Society, and is a regular contributor to several railroad and broadcasting Internet sites. He lives in the church parsonage with his stub-tailed Maine coon cat, Spook. |
 Rev. Drown The Parsonage 
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