NAHANT — Rev. Scott Elliott just joined the Nahant Village Church as their new pastor. His first service will be Feb. 12 and will talk about church growth from the Letters of Paul to the Corinthians.
“I’ll be discussing what that means, and how it comes into play in the old version of the church and what we’re looking at now,” Elliott said.
He has jumped around from California to Oregon to Florida to Ohio and now to Nahant.
With all of his kids grown up and spread throughout the country, he said it was time for him and his wife to move closer to family. One of his sons lives in Vermont three hours away from Nahant so after finding Nahant Village Church they made the move from the Midwest.
“My heart in ministry is a lot in social justice issues and working on progressive Christianity, which is very love center and the part of Jesus’ teachings it’s about just loving people and so this church was into that and interested in that,” Elliott said.
Before becoming a minister, he was a lawyer.
“I had always wanted to be a minister but I couldn’t find a church that for me felt this love centered … I had lots of LGBTQ friends and churches tended to reject the ones that I had experienced.”
While practicing law in Oregon, he walked by a church and saw his friend go in.
“If my friend could go here it can’t be that bad so I wandered into the church and it was all about loving other people tending to their well being,” Elliott said.
After that he went to seminary in his late 40s and now at 65 he has been a minister ever since.
In Nahant, he is hoping to expand their community reach efforts and eventually lead a kids theater program like he did as a pastor in Ohio.
“Not only did we end up connecting youth to the community through performing arts in Ohio, we actually did it to raise money for a homeless shelter, and we raised, in the three productions we did, over $100,000,” Elliott said.
Religious entities do “a lot of good” in communities, he said.
“They’re the safety net for so many folks in so many ways,” Eliott said. “People of faith are involved in protecting and promoting and pushing for the good of the community … and so we come together as a community and try to do that. And that’s what Jesus was doing, if you go to the heart of his message, he’s saying love your neighbor, that’s what we’re talking about.”
