The First Church in Belfast Welcomes Lee Witting
As we work toward finding an interim pastor, we welcome Lee Witting to our pulpit beginning September 29, 2024. Lee, a member of the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Castine, has led a rich and varied life and came to ministering after many other careers. He began as a caseworker in Harlem. He then traveled through Europe and the Middle East in a VW camper with his first wife and three-year-old son. He ventured into publishing in Philadelphia and gave that up to restore an abandoned farmhouse and farm in Castine, Maine, replete with goats, chickens, pigs, and a horse. He helped start and edit Farmstead Magazine and then opened a real estate office in Castine. He published and edited a weekly paper, The Castine Patriot. He earned a master’s degree in theater studies in 1992, and then he and his second wife attended Bangor Theological Seminary.
He has served as an interim at the Searsport Congregational Church, co-pastored at the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor, and was for 15 years a nondenominational chaplain at Eastern Maine Medical Center. In 2010, he earned a doctorate in Near Death Experiences from Bangor Theological Seminary and currently has an ongoing podcast, Near Death Experiences with Lee Witting. I hope you will all take the opportunity to hear Lee preach and get to know him during coffee hour!
Deborah Woodbury
Moderator, First Church in Belfast, UCC