I was born in New York City and grew up in Westchester County where I went to Sunday School at the White Plains Community Unitarian Church. I studied philosophy and music at Beloit College in Wisconsin and began writing songs there.

At 25, I decided to enter the UU ministry and I enrolled at Meadville/Lombard Theological School and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I was the summer assistant to the ministers at the Community Church of New York in 1982 and 1984 and I worked at the World Conference on Religion and Peace at UN Headquarters in the summer of 1982. I did a chaplaincy at the Texas Medical Center and an internship at May Memorial Unitarian Society (where I wrote my first hymn) and the University of Syracuse, NY. I graduated from the U of C in 1983 with a Masters in Religious Studies and M/L in 1985 with a Doctorate of Ministry. I also won both the John Haynes Holmes and the John Wolf preaching scholarships.

Scott Roewe, Director of Publications

I grew up attending a the First Unitarian Universalist church of Wilmington, Delaware until I was about 16. I got involved with the church again in in my mid 30's singing in the choir at the UU church in Santa Monica, Ca. After hearing me perform some of my music, a visiting minister, Reverend Rick Hoyt, asked me to serve a music director in Santa Clarita, CA where I have been music director for ten years. I joined the UUMN to "up my game" and become a better music director.

Elizabeth Norton, Good Offices Co-Chair

This year marks my 20th serving as Music Director to this large New England UU congregation.I came to Concord and to Unitarian Universalism after a decade of teaching music in independent schools and performing as a singer, conductor and violinist. I was raised as a Presbyterian, but had also attended and led music in other mainline denominations. Music ministry is definitely my calling.

Dana Decker, UUMN Trustee at Large 

Dana Decker, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, began his professional career as an electric and acoustic bassist. In 2006 Dana began to focus on composition, specifically writing worship music for liberal faiths, and this writing eventually led to the release of Dana’s first worship album in 2008 entitled When We Sing. In September of 2008 Dana was hired as the first ever Contemporary Worship Associate at First UU Church of San Diego. In 2012 Dana became the Associate Director of Music at First Church and he has been using this experience to build a “model” for contemporary worship within the UU movement.

Like a lot of UUMN members, I spent the first part of my church music career working for other denominations. Upon returning to Rockford twenty years ago, I spent a year as organist at a small Episcopal church, two years as choir director/organist at a medium-sized Lutheran (ELCA) church, and seven years as Director of Music at a large Presbyterian (USA) church. During that time, I was invited occasionally to play at the Unitarian Universalist church, usually to accompany the larger musical undertakings of my predecessor, Kay Hotchkiss. I enjoyed making music with Kay and the Unicantors (the UU Rockford choir), and I especially enjoyed the liberal theology that informed the worship services in which I participated. After decades of working in churches where my beliefs didn’t match their theology, I found myself less and less engaged in the worship that I was supposed to be helping to lead. When Kay decided to give up the reins after over five decades of service, I jumped at the opportunity to be able finally to work at a church where I felt I could participate fully in worship. It’s been ten years now, and I’ve never looked back and couldn’t be happier!

I had to put off going to UUMN conferences for a couple of years because I was finishing up my degree at Middlebury College during the summers. My first conference was in St. Paul, where I will never forget the feeling of standing to be recognized with all the other first-timers as we all sang “Come and Go with Me” together. I guess I took that message to heart. When asked to serve on the newly-reconfigured Conference Planning Committee in 2008 along with several of my area colleagues, I gladly said yes. Work on that committee led to a request to serve on the Board of Trustees as Treasurer, which led to serving as your current President. I feel like I have learned a lot from all of you over the past several years. I look forward to learning even more over the next three years. Most of all, I look forward to greeting you all in San Diego in July – especially the first-timers, to whom I will extend the same invitation you all extended to me in song in St. Paul.

I am a classically-trained musician, primarily a choral conductor. I have worked as a conductor for (gulp) some 35 years and during that time I have worked for several different religious denominations. In 2007, I became the Director of Music Ministry at the First Unitarian Society in Newton and I have found my spiritual home in Unitarian Universalism.

I joined UUMN right away in 2007 because a) my congregation encouraged me to do so and b) I needed help in planning worship services and choosing repertoire. UUMN has been a fantastic resource for me.


I was raised in the Carolinas and Appalachian Ohio by a piano teacher mother who taught me to love music, and a minister father who taught me to love language. Webelieved in a tolerant God, social justice, hard work, speaking our minds, harmonizing loudly, and eating waffles on Sunday nights. I wrote many songs when I was a teenager, some of which were not too bad. All in all, it was a pretty good way to grow up.

In college I learned that the canon of music was bigger and more amazing than I’d ever dreamed, and that music theory held more expressive possibilities than I could ever fully explore. After nine years in the academic world, with a fresh doctoral degree in hand, I set out to become a “freelance composer.” The only problem was that I had absolutely no idea what that meant.

In our recent survey, seventy UUMN members described themselves as composers. They were invited to submit a composer profile as part of a new series, "The YOU in UUMN." Today we begin sharing those profiles:

I like to tell people that I direct the Children's Choir at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign, and in my spare time, I teach electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois. I have composed and arranged music for piano since I was in high school. Except for one course in music theory in high school and one in college, I have had no formal training in music, and none at all in choral conducting. When I became director of the Children's Choir in 2002, I found that some of the music that I wanted to program was in the wrong key for the children's vocal range. So I had to transpose the music. At that point, I decided to change the harmony, and then I added an instrumental part.