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Rev. Gail Tapscott

Reverend Gail Tapscott is our spiritual counselor, and leads our Sunday worship. She serves as chief administrative officer to the staff and is on call for pastoral care. She joined us in September of 1999.

She is in full fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association. Gail holds a Master of Divinity Degree from Harvard Divinity School.

Gail presents three out of four of our monthly Sunday Services. She leads Adult Religious Education classes. Gail can be found popping in on our special focus groups and providing her insightful thoughts to the committees of our church. The door to her office is a shrine of cartoons, photos, and clever sayings.

She is active in the greater community working with the Cooperative Feeding Program, Interfaith Alliance groups, Empty Bowls to feed the hungry, and she occasionally appears on television talk shows.

Our Minister has ventured down once to SWIM, the Southeast Unitarian Universalist Winter Institute at Miami, to present a workshop, but she has become a regular at SUUSI, the Southeast Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute, where she may either lead a worship service, do a workshop, or serve as Minister of the Day. Each summer, SUUSI attracts 10 to 20 members of our congregation.

Rev. Gail makes an annual pilgrimage to General Assembly, the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalist where she renews ties with fellow professionals and collects ideas for the coming year. She is active with FUUMA, the Florida Unitarian Universalist Ministers' Association and is interested in their continuing education programs.

From thoughtful essays in the Journey, our newsletter, sermon topics, acting out in our attempts at theater, traveling to conferences, times of remembrance, or feeding the hungry, Rev Gail is forever in our midst.

Gail came to us following a consulting ministry at UU Fellowship of Flagstaff, AZ, for ¾ time plus Pulpit supply at West Valley UU Church, Peoria, AZ, for ¼ time. She also served an Extension Internship for the Flagstaff and Phoenix congregations. Previously, she was a lay minister and religious educator at the UU Fellowship of Flagstaff, AZ. Prior to that, Gail also served as a leader in women's spirituality programs at the Winchester Unitarian Society in Massachusetts. She was a Director of Religious Education at the UU Church of Marblehead, Massachusetts.

In her pre-ministry professional life, Rev. Gail was an advertising and editorial assistant for a Journal on Water Pollution Control and then a teacher of English and Journalism in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She then spent almost twelve years as an environmental journalist in Washington, D.C. She worked for seven years on a trade newsletter that covered the toxic chemicals and pesticides regulated by the then fledgling Environmental Protection Agency. Then she helped start several new newsletters on state environmental policies, hazardous waste control and finally became the Executive Editor of "The Hazard Communication Exchange." During her journalism years she also had a column called "On the States Side" for the trade magazine World Waste.

During and right after her time at Harvard Divinity School, Rev. Gail worked at a business publishing firm and sold books and journals and eventually became the Director of the Training Department there. Her final pre-ministry career was as the Director of the National Telephone Fund Raising office for Greenpeace in Flagstaff, AZ. She also coordinated some Greenpeace campaign work and protests on mining issues while running the Flagstaff operation.