Lessons Learned by a Pastor in Rural Vermont Over Decades
The difficult lessons that David Scott Lee has learned along the road to becoming a faithful pastor in rural Vermont for two decades began when, as a teenager, he realized that his lifetime of church attendance was not synonymous with genuine Christian faith.
“I thought I was a Christian as a kid, but when I was fourteen I realized I was not.” Through the ministries of a pastor and a youth leader, Lee said, “I came to faith—real, true faith—in Christ.”
Two years later the Westminster, MD, native “sensed a call” to vocational ministry. “Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what inspired it from the Scriptures. I remember one Sunday, through my pastor’s preaching, I just sensed that God was calling.”
Lesson 1: Pastoring Through Tough Times
Lee’s journey toward a pastorate in the village of Newbury started to become a reality when he joined the faculty of the Websterville Christian Academy, a church-based school in Barre, VT. Lee taught several academic courses including history and Bible for four years before being named principal and administrator.
After two years as the school’s leader, BCNE Executive Director Terry Dorsett, who was then Director of Missions for the Green Mountain Baptist Association, submitted Lee’s name to leaders of the troubled Newbury Bible Church.
Newbury Bible Church in Newbury, VT
As Lee remembers it, “Terry was constantly after me to come to Newbury,” a township with more than 2,000 residents. The town, as Lee described it, “is made up of small villages that are miles apart from each other. The largest part of the population doesn’t live in the villages, but in the countryside. So where I’m at is the Village of Newbury—and our population is only 447.”
The church and its Christian school were served for three decades by Joe Rinaldi—but the pastor, Lee said, “was also molesting the boys in the church and in the school.” Rinaldi was fired, convicted of the crimes, and served three years in prison. He moved to Connecticut and died in 2024.
Newbury Bible Church, a Baptist, confessional, and reformed congregation that affiliates with the Baptist Churches of New England, needed to find a pastor who also knew how to manage a Christian school and who could lead the congregation through its major crisis. By God’s grace, they chose Lee.
Two years later, the church closed the school and Lee supplemented his small church salary by becoming a high-school substitute teacher. In fact, Lee has been a bivocational pastor for thirty years including almost twenty-two years in Newbury.
Lesson 2: Handling Unexpected Troubles
As if the unexpected dismissal and conviction of a longtime pastor were not enough for Lee to confront in his first years as pastor in Newbury, three families in the last few years told him that they could no longer afford to live in Vermont and they were planning to move elsewhere.
“In those three families, we lost six adults and ten kids. In all, probably thirty members left” including a longtime elder and the church secretary who died. “It felt like half our congregation was gone!”
In response to those membership losses, Lee continues as he always has to preach and teach the unchanging word of God.
Lesson 3: Stay Where You Are Planted
Lee started as pastor in Newbury in 2001 and he has been planting the seeds of good will in the name of Jesus ever since. It is a difficult and lengthy task for any pastor to rebuild a church’s broken trust with its neighbors, especially in a rural farming village like Newbury, where residency is counted in generations and newcomers are called “flat landers.”
To rebuild trust in and serve their community in what Lee called “an approachable way where no one feels threatened” by Bible-preaching Protestants with a horrendous crime in their distant past, Newbury Bible Church, on September 14, held their twentieth annual community-wide barbecue cookout on the town common.
The food and live Celtic and folk music performed by a band from Maine was offered without charge. Bibles and church literature were kept on a side table for, as the Bible puts it, “anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience” (1 Peter 3:15-16, ESV).
“As God gives us opportunity, then we’ll share our faith. Because of the church's past and what happened here before I came,” the pastor commented, “the community no longer could trust the church. We’ve been rebuilding that, and we praise the Lord that it [the church’s reputation] has pretty much been rebuilt.”
When someone asks Lee: “Why would you stay [in Vermont]?” he replies: “I have always been taught that, if the Lord calls you somewhere, you do not leave unless he changes your assignment or calls you home. This has helped me through many of the difficult times as a pastor.”
Lee said he has learned that “the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence, and the Lord has not called us to success, but to faithfulness—no matter what the circumstances.”
Lesson 4: Value Rural and Small-Church Ministry
When asked about his longevity in an inconspicuous village in the Green Mountains, he responds: “I have sensed a calling to and have a love for small, rural churches that seem to be overlooked or even forgotten.”
“It isn’t easy, and at times it is pretty discouraging.” he added. “but there are times of great joy! We may not have the numbers other churches have in larger areas, but the Lord has us here. When he brings us someone we rejoice together and when he calls someone home, we mourn together.”
He serves his flock faithfully “because this is where God has us. We continue to do the work because we desire to see God’s kingdom built here in Vermont.” Lee is praying for “a great awakening all over New England” like those of centuries past that were led by Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, and others.
Lesson 5: God Surprises Us in How He Guides
Lee’s life journey from Maryland to Vermont continued when he served seven years (1980-87) in the military, four years in the US Navy in New England, and three years in the US Army in Germany. In addition to his assigned duties, Lee served both military branches as a Protestant lay minister.
When stationed at the naval yard in East Boston, Lee attended the college and career group at the historic Tremont Temple in downtown Boston, where he met his future wife, Donna. After being reassigned to the naval base in Newport, RI, the couple married.
David Lee baptizes a young man in a local body of water
During those years, he was assigned to secret missions in war zones in the Middle East where “our job was to go in and evacuate people. Half of my letters that I would write to Donna were blacked out a lot of times.”
Lee freely reminds himself of God’s guidance and blessing through tough times. He said, “I get down and discouraged. I get depressed.” Anxiety issues have been a part of his life experience “between my time in the military, in the Middle East, and [with] family crises—things like that.”
After military service, the Lees lived in South Carolina as he prepared for the ministry and earned a DMin degree. He spent eleven years “praying that the Lord would one day allow us to go back to New England to serve him.” During those years, they needed another vehicle. “I was told to see a man named Dick Smith, who owned car dealerships, and he would like to bless young student ministers.”
Somehow Smith found out that Donna Lee lived in Vermont for a few years when she was in middle school. The first question Smith asked Lee when they met was: “Are you willing to go back to New England to serve the Lord?”
Naturally, Lee was surprised to hear this blunt question because he was focused on acquiring a car. “I started to weep as this had been on our hearts for some time. Mr. Smith then said that he supported the work of the Baptist Convention of New England and that they needed bivocational men of God to serve the churches there.”
Lee told Smith their story and replied that he did, in fact, want to return to New England “as I felt called to this very thing.” About a month later, Lee “found out that he [Smith] had contacted the BCNE and told them about us. The next thing we knew, we were getting calls and letters from churches in Massachusetts and Vermont.” (Smith also gave Lee a car.)
There was one essential detail, Lee stated, “that loomed over my head. When Donna and I were first married, she knew I felt called to serve the Lord as a pastor. She told me that she would go anywhere, but please don’t ever ask her to go back to Vermont.”
Donna and her family “had some bad experiences while living here. Plus she knew then what the spiritual climate was like. So I prayed and asked the Lord that, if going to Vermont was his will, would he change Donna’s heart?”
When she arrived home from work, Lee showed his wife a letter [from a BCNE church]. “Almost immediately,” he said, “Donna asked me when would we be moving to Vermont—with a smile on her face.”
“Then I knew this was of God!”
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Reader: if you have lessons learned over decades of New England ministry, send them to BCNE Executive Director Terry Dorsett for consideration as a testimony that will benefit others. Read all of our “Lessons Learned” articles by clicking here.