The Rev. Carrie Bail is pastor of the First Congregational Church of Williamstown United Church of Christ where she has served since the summer of 2000. Born, raised, and educated in New England, after a B.A. degree in anthropology from Yale, she spent some years migrating south and west, living first in Mexico and then Hawaii. In Honolulu, singing in choir of the Lutheran Church, she met her husband, Darius Jonathan, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii from southern Sudan. After attending seminary at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA. she was ordained and served her first church, Ka Hana O Ke Akua United Church of Christ in Wai’anae, Hawaii beginning in 1987. All three of the Jonathan children were born into the loving “ohana” (family) of that congregation.
In the mid-nineties, economics and elderly parents prompted the family’s return to New England where Carrie served Canaan Congregational Church (UCC) in the New York Berkshires until 2000. Since settling within yards of the Haystack Monument in Williamstown, her life-long fascination with multiculturalism has been reignited by the story of how the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was born here. (In 2006 First Church hosted the Haystack Bicentennial Celebration.) She is challenged by imagining what form global ministry might take in the present, especially living right in the middle of a college campus. A visit from her mother-in-law, Raile Daffala, deaconess and Church Mother in Khartoum in the Anglican Church, inspired her commitment to mission anew.
Carrie loves music of all kinds, especially singing sacred choral music and listening to jazz as performed by her son. She enjoys children’s literature, writing, swimming (especially in the Pacific ocean), and being a soccer mom. She is a committed activist for peace and justice, most particularly around issues of mental health, climate change, and education in and about the Sudan.
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