In 1638, the Rev. John Davenport founded the Center Church on the Green in New Haven, then a Puritan colony. Nearly 400 years later, the Herald sat down with the Rev. Sandra Olsen, who leads the church’s congregation today. She discussed atheism and the modern church, posting her sermons on the Internet, and a mysterious $200,000 gift.

YH: Can you tell us a bit about the early history of the Center Church?

SO: [It] was the founding Puritan church [in New Haven]. [It] was also the church Yale students were required to attend when chapel was required before Yale built its own chapel sometime in the 1740s or so. Graduation was held here until the 1800s.

YH: And what does the congregation look like today?

SO: It’s very sad. This congregation has been declining for decades and decades. On each side of us, there are healthier churches. By healthier, I mean more membership. I’ve been here six years. I certainly haven’t turned it around, not that I expected I would. Think about our culture: these are liberal churches. By liberal I don’t necessarily mean politically liberal, though many people at the church are—I certainly am. By liberal I mean in the classical sense of the term—these are not rigid Orthodox. You are not told, you have to believe this. The other thing about the main line churches, which would include things like Presbyterian, Unitarian, Methodist, is that we live with a lot of ambiguity.

We don’t know what the final truth is. Faith is not in place of doubt; it’s in spite of doubt. So we also tolerate a lot of questions. A lot of the Evangelical Conservative churches that tell you exactly what to believe seem to do a little bit better. They give you an answer. What kind of answers do we have?

And it’s not just New Haven. It’s a universal trend. I think a lot of people who still go to church are interested in community, in connecting with other people.

YH: And you would say that’s true of your church?

SO: Well, Center is a very unusual church. It’s quite diverse. We have people who have money. We have people who are almost street people. Membership is probably about 70. Sunday morning, 25 people. That’s very small. The church is well-endowed, which is what makes the church survive. I have actually wondered if by having an endowment, which it’s had for a while, the church hasn’t been forced to grow.

YH: Where did that endowment come from?

SO: Because this church was the church that it was, people would leave money. Two years ago, somebody died and left the church $200,000. We didn’t even know who she was.

YH: Did you grow up going to church?

SO: I was raised as a very liberal Presbyterian. We were always taught that there’s never anything to fear from knowledge, and so the church embraced Biblical criticism. Our brains are part of God’s gift to us, and we use our brains and we’re called to use our intelligence.

But when I was your age I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, [I read] the great atheists: Freud, Marx…  and I decided I was an atheist. I didn’t go to church for a number of years, and then, when I was 26, I had my first baby. And I just began to think in different terms, that the mystery of life is just so big. And I started going back to church. I decided I would go to seminary, not because I believed in God but because I thought, “If you’re really interested in this question of God, where do you go?”

This is why I love theology—it asks big questions. It really asks, “Why do we live? What’s the meaning of life? What is worth living for? Is there anything worth dying for?”

YH: Are there aspects of your job today that you feel just as strongly about?

SO: One of the great things about my job is being a downtown church on the Green. If you stay down on the Green very long, you see the cast of characters that are there. I see people that are really very desperate. What I love about the ministry, is that it’s such a varied job. I see troubled people, I see healthy people. There’s an intellectual dimension to my job, I have to think, I have to preach, I have to try to say something that’s interesting and meaningful.

YH: Speaking of your preaching, I noticed that your sermons are transcribed and put on the Internet. Is your church unique in doing that?

SO: A lot of [churches] do that. I don’t think it helps people come into the church. It doesn’t happen that somebody reads a bunch of my sermons and says, “Wow, this is kind of interesting, I think I’ll go,” but I do get [requests for] weddings. Sometimes people who are not particularly religious want to get married in a church because they’ll say, “I believe in God—I’m not a church person––but I’d like to be married in a church because it signifies something that’s serious.” You don’t have to be a member of my church. You can call me up, and I’ll meet with you, and I’ll say, “Yeah, I’ll marry you.” I think sometimes people read some of my sermons to make sure I’m not a wackadoodle religious nut or something but to say okay, this sounds like a reasonable person.

YH: What’s your process like for coming up with your sermons?

SO: You’ve got 20 minutes, it’s not a long time. So I read the text, and [as] Albert Einstein once said, sometimes imagination is more important than knowledge. Because [the sermon has] got to work on your imagination. So there’s information about the text that you want to help the congregation understand: why is this text here? What are some of the larger cultural issues of the day? But in order for people to care, it’s got to have some existential relevance, right? So that’s where the human imagination comes in.

Last Sunday was Easter Sunday, and I started off the sermon by talking about that U.S. Airways plane that had to land on the Hudson River when birds flew into its engine. The guy sitting in seat 1D thought he was going to die…and what he said was, what he felt as the plane was going down, was not fear at all, it was sadness. He thought about the friends he let down, the forgiveness he didn’t give, or the kindnesses he didn’t show, and he said, “I got a lot of my priorities wrong.” So I started my sermon with that. [Because if I] start talking about this strange story in the Bible about a resurrected body? We have no experience of a resurrected body.

This is what Easter is about. We live sightless among miracles. It’s about the possibility that we can see a little differently, a little more fully. I don’t think my job is to convince anyone [that] there was this dead body and it suddenly came back to life. I don’t know what the resurrection was. I think there was something extraordinary that happened, so that these people who were in despair about their beloved leader were no longer in despair. The resurrection may be a metaphor for new life; I don’t know. I do think there was something. Life is mysterious, we don’t have everything figured out. You don’t have to live sightless among miracles. If we all were told we were going to die tomorrow, how would we look at our lives? How would we look at our priorities? That’s really what my sermon was about.

—This interview was condensed by the author