Ted Spencer
I grew up in Charlotte, and attended the Unitarian Universalist Community of Charlotte and Open Door School as a young child, including spending a lot of time at The Mountain and around the Highlands area. Later I attended Grace United Methodist Church in middle and high school. After I graduated high school, I spent nine years in the US Navy. I moved back to North Carolina in 2011 to attend NC State University for electrical engineering, specifically renewable energy systems. For the last 18 months, I’ve worked for a national nonprofit that works in advocacy and organizing around environmental and climate justice, voting rights, women’s health rights, LGBTQ protections and rights, immigrant rights, and racial justice.
My family and I have been attending UUFR since 2022 where I have participated in OWL facilitation, the Facilities Team, Children’s ministry activities, associate pastor search committee, Chalice Circles, BIPOC and antiracism work.
I pride myself on being a deliberate listener and trying to listen to as many unique voices as possible. My training and experience as an organizer has been central to this skillset, as well as working across different socioeconomic and other backgrounds. Having worked in racial, environmental, and immigrant justice both as a volunteer and professionally for the last many years, I think that I’ll be bringing the experience of creating safe, inclusive, collaborative spaces into this process, trying my hardest to ensure that everybody is heard, and even more importantly, communication is maintained in both directions. Further, as an engineer I’m used to falling back on my analytical skills and developing and implementing processes to achieve complex goals and plans with multiple competing goals and requirements.
I was a deacon at Greenwood Forest Baptist Church during their last pastor search in 2016, which involved a similar process of listening, discernment, community input, and developing a process for filling the interim between our former senior pastor leaving, and identifying and appointing a new senior pastor.
