Rev. Samuel Dansokho, a current member of the General Council Executive, has been nominated to be The United Church of Canada’s next moderator.
Nominated by Conseil Regional Nakonha:ka Regional Council, Dansokho says as moderator he would “accompany the church.” Dansokho was the first person to be nominated (but the third nominee Broadview learned about).
Rather than “a charismatic leader” who tells people to “follow me,” he prefers to be a bridge who shows by example, “not just by teaching or by preaching, that our diversities are a factor of mutual enrichment when they are embraced.”
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Born in Senegal, a Muslim-majority nation, Dansokho was ordained in 1982 in L’Église Protestante du Sénégal. From 2001 to 2011, he was a professor at Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina, where his courses explored the intersection of religion, society and culture. Eventually, he felt called to give more as a pastor. He interviewed for a role at Saint-Pierre et Pinguet, a parish ministry near Quebec City which needed a French-speaking minister and made his way, along with his wife, to Quebec in 2012. Dansokho served there for two years before moving to Plymouth-Trinity United in Sherbrooke, Que., where he currently ministers.
Dansokho has been involved in the life of the United Church since arriving in Canada, serving on executive committees at both the regional and national levels. Now in his second and final term on the General Council Executive, he says the nominations committee, in particular, opened a window to the rest of Canada for him.
“That was a great opportunity where I saw where I could be useful, where The United Church of Canada is very courageous, but also that people tend to feel alone,” he says, noting that the church can do more in terms of mutual respect and sharing of material, financial, human, cultural and spiritual resources.
More on Broadview:
- Cheri DiNovo nominated for United Church moderator
- John Pentland throws his hat in the ring for United Church moderator
- United Church review to look at how well the restructured denomination is working
“That goes beyond the internal constituency of The United Church of Canada,” he says, explaining that there is “mutual exchange and mutual enriching” to be sought with both global partners and the Indigenous church.
In June 1998, Dansokho completed his PhD at Chicago Theological Seminary where his doctoral thesis traced the history of the Protestant church in Senegal. Subtitled, Hope on the Margins, the work considered how, despite being “the hyper, hyper-minority” in Senegal, the Protestant church has “no fear of disappearing.”
“My experience was that real hope of transformation is not necessarily at the centre, [but] at the margins,” he says.
“For me, the margins are not something pejorative.”
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Leslie Sinclair is a freelance journalist in Toronto.
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