Scott Alexander knew there would be challenges 11 years ago when he took on leadership of the most socially liberal congregation in heavily conservative Indian River County.
But he never anticipated that in the year-and-a-half before his retirement at the end of July, he would find his flock in the midst of a deadly pandemic as well as a raucous political divide over how to end it.
Fortunately, only six of his congregation’s 400 members came down with COVID-19, and the cases were not traced back to the church, where mask-wearing and social distancing were strictly followed. That comes out to a rate of 1.5 percent, he notes, far less than the county’s infection rate of 8 percent.
Perhaps most impressive is that today, “virtually 100 percent” of his Vero congregation is vaccinated, Alexander claims.
“Unitarians follow the science,” he says.
This summer, at age 72 and after 48 years as a Unitarian Universalist minister, Alexander will turn over the pulpit to a new interim minister; interviews are taking place this week.
He plans to keep the home in Vero that he shares with his longtime partner and now husband, Collins Mikesell, who has been commuting to Vero from Washington, where he is a senior analyst with the Association of American Medical Colleges.
“We have a lot of friends here,” says Alexander.
The two plan to divide their time between Vero, a place in the Adirondacks and a riverfront condo they bought recently in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where Alexander has a large extended family.
One practice that will follow him is bike riding, a passion so intense that his congregation built a plaza at the church and installed a sculpture of a bike in his honor.
Alexander puts in 40 miles nearly every day, for a total of 13,000 miles a year.
During his future Vero stays – and barring any wipe-outs like the one in February when he broke his hip after a skid on slimy pavement in the church parking lot – Alexander will continue to be a regular sight riding his bike “around and around and around” Indian River County.
And the rides aren’t just for his own benefit.
Five times, he has ridden across the country for charity, dipping his back tire in the Pacific Ocean and his front tire in the Atlantic 30 days and 3,300 miles later. Three of the rides were to fight hunger in Indian River County and raised $150,000 for United Against Poverty.
“The energy he put into not just the ride but the fundraising [is impressive],” says Rabbi Michael Birnholz of Temple Beth Shalom. “He could just as well have said, ‘This is my thing.
I’m going to ride across America.’ Instead, he brought the whole community into it and turned it into a source of incredible donations – tens of thousands of dollars. And so many groups were involved in supporting it and following it up.”
Birnholz has a long relationship with the Unitarians. For years, the congregation’s home was next door to Temple Beth Shalom. After Birnholz’s arrival in 2002, the synagogue needed to expand, so it bought the building vacated by the Unitarians when that congregation moved to its current location at 16th Street and 27th Avenue.
Birnholz was among more than a half-dozen local faith leaders who met with Alexander before he flew to California to bless his bike.
Today, those spiritual leaders and more are part of a countywide interfaith group with Jewish, Christian, Moslem, Hindu, BaHai and humanist representatives that meets monthly at Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital, hosted by hospital chaplain Mindy Serafin.
It is the same group that came together in 2016 after the Pulse Nightclub terrorist attack in Orlando. In the days that followed that tragedy, Bob and Casey Baggott, the reverends at that time of Vero’s Community Church, organized a moving interfaith service in their sanctuary honoring the victims of that tragedy.
The Baggotts went on to organize an annual interfaith memorial service at Thanksgiving, and when they were ready to move on from Vero, Alexander took over the service and held it at the Unitarian Universalist fellowship. More than 20 groups came together to offer prayers, readings and songs that year.
“He took the mantel from the Baggotts and really took it to the next level,” says Birnholz.
Last year, the Thanksgiving service had to be held on Zoom. So were most church services, at least during lockdown last spring. As they reopen, some congregations, including Alexander’s, are not giving up virtual services, after finding the outreach on Youtube invaluable.
UU members have the option of watching services live – or at their leisure later in the week – on the fellowship’s Youtube channel, produced by six volunteers in a production booth with three computer-linked cameras, part of a $20,000 technology upgrade to connect during COVID-19.
At one point in the pandemic, online services drew 180 viewers. Among the earliest sermons: risk assessment in life. Today the number has dropped to 120, some of whom watch the recording during the week.
Another 120 members show up in person for services. “Virtual services aren’t going away,” Alexander says. “It’s something we’re going to keep, going forward. We have older members who watch, or someone breaks a leg. We have snowbirds who watch from their other homes. My accountant is Roman Catholic, and he watches.”
Alexander grew up in Wisconsin but his calling to the UU ministry took him to Houlton, Maine, where he was ordained in 1974 and served four years before moving on first to a church in Plainfield, New Jersey, and then to one in Boston.
He served a decade at each, and just over a decade in Bethesda, Maryland, with the River Road Unitarian Universalist congregation. In the summer of 2010, he moved to Vero to lead the congregation here, delivering his first sermon in September.
Vero’s UU fellowship was founded in 1981 by the late Shirley St. John, a Boston-born member for life of the Republican Women’s Club. A charter member of the Center for the Arts, now the Vero Beach Museum of Art, St. John volunteered with the VNA and Council on Aging, but had to drive to Fort Pierce to find what her 2013 obituary called “a liberal fellowship.”
Eventually, she called the Boston UU and found out how to start a fellowship here. The first meeting, with 15 members, was at her home. Within a decade, there were 100 members.
The group hired their first full-time minister, Dr. Richard Speck, and by 1994 had settled into the location on 43rd Avenue, next door to Temple Beth Shalom. In 2001, former School Board member Claudia Jimenez became the church’s director of education. A second minister, Gail Geisenhainer, replaced Speck when he left for a post within the national organization, and in 2005 the congregation bought a 1,100-seat facility that was the former First Church of God.
In it, the Unitarians opened a revenue-generating, non-denominational pre-school, called Bridges Early Learning Center, which now serves 100 children from 8 weeks old to kindergarten. And they started a money-making speakers series at Emerson Center.
Together those enterprises paid the bills for the building while congregants pledged support for ministry and staff.
Today, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship may be best-known because of the Emerson Center programs. In non-COVID times, the Celebrated Speakers Series brings in nationally known lecturers, often with a more liberal bent than other series in town. It is also home to the Florida Humanities Series, which offers its programs for free.
The congregation’s Coalition for Racial Justice is among the longest-running committees at the church. In 2015, after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Alexander put a Black Lives Matter sign in front of the church, likely one of the first ministers in Vero to do so. The sign was defaced twice.
A week after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Alexander organized a demonstration for gun control measures. It drew several hundred supporters to the Indian River County Courthouse.
Other committees at the church include an environmental group working on water quality in the Indian River Lagoon, and a group offering support for the LGBTQ community.
“We’re very much a community center, and very involved in the improvement of the local community,” says Alexander. “We’re not a navel-gazing, inward-looking congregation. We’re outward looking, serving in a wide variety of ways. And that’s why we’re growing. People are looking for avenues to express their caring and compassion. If a church doesn’t do that, they’ll go somewhere else.”
Alexander, whose last day is July 31, anticipates serving on the boards of local nonprofits once he has stepped down from the pulpit. “I’ll certainly stay involved in progressive politics,” he says.
“This congregation is the progressive religious voice of this community and I intend to be a progressive voice in this town,” he says. “We’re for compassionate politics.”