Hingham’s Old Ship Church Hires Rev. Carie Johnsen as Minister

July 18, 2024 By Roy Harris

Rev. Carie Johnsen will become minister of Hingham’s Old Ship Church on Aug. 1. She brings to the Unitarian Universalist congregation what she calls “a collaborative leadership and worship style,” developed over the 15 years since she was co-ordained by First Parish Brewster and First Parish Duxbury.

Rev. Carie, as she prefers to be called, has experience that reaches across New England. She was a minister in Augusta, Maine, for a dozen years, in addition to time with the Duxbury parish. After completing a clinical chaplain residency in 2022 with Pittsburgh’s Veterans Administration Healthcare System, she most recently was “behavior health and forensic chaplain” at Taunton State Hospital, and hospice chaplain at HopeHealth in Providence.

At Old Ship, where she will serve under a one-year contract, she is first scheduled to lead the congregation’s “water communion” service on Sept. 8. On Sundays up to that point, summer services are led by the congregation’s members.

In an interview, Rev. Carie speaks of her upbringing in South Dakota on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Oceti Sakowin (the Sioux nation.) Of Welsh ancestry herself, and raised in the Lutheran tradition, she moved to Massachusetts in 1986 and worked in social services with people having cognitive, physical and mental health disabilities, before attending Harvard Divinity School.

“My theology really evolved over the years,” she says, and she eventually “began to understand Jesus as a humanitarian, activist, and teacher and healer. That evolved into understanding God more in terms of ‘energy’ than as a white-bearded man in the sky.” Today, the minister describes God in terms of “pointing toward mystery.”

After graduating from Harvard Divinity she moved to Maine, where she also became an interfaith leader and public speaker, advocating on a range of social issues.

A special passion of hers involves reducing her carbon footprint and improving her overall wellbeing with a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle. “I feel most grounded in my kitchen preparing restorative healthy food from a wide range of fruits, vegetables, grains and beans,” she says. “I have learned to have fun with spices, while avoiding processed oil, sugar and refined white flour.” To Rev. Carie, this “has become a spiritual practice of self-care for my being, other creatures, and the planet,” she adds.

In Rhode Island, she is “part of a growing community that gathers multiple times a month to share meals and support plant-based living.”

In the early stages of her year’s ministry in Hingham she plans to commute from her current home in Pawtucket. She has two adult sons, Justin and Mo, and five grandchildren. Rev. Carie offered this biography as part of a “Dear Old Shippers” letter in recent months.