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By KURT ACHIN, Falmouth Enterprise, 03.10.2023 “Breathe in love, breathe out fear,” spoke a strong, reassuring voice last Sunday at the front of Waquoit Congregational Church in East Falmouth. Weekly worship was getting started, and the voice belonged to the Reverend Nell Fields, the church’s minister. Her flair for public speaking is just one reason parishioners love “Reverend Nell.” Recently, they gained another: Falmouth’s Chamber of Commerce has named her its 2023 “Citizen of the Year.” “Nell is an active defender and advocate for those without a voice who is willing to work tirelessly on behalf of others,” wrote chamber president and CEO Michael Kasparian in announcing the award, set to be formally conferred at a Sea Crest Beach Hotel dinner on May 25. The award comes at an auspicious time for the Waquoit Church, which kicks off celebrations this Sunday to mark the 175th year since it was founded in 1848. When Ms. Fields assumed her post in late 2010, it was her first time leading a church. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” she said. Preaching is a later-in-life career chapter for Ms. Fields after decades in corporate publishing, journalism, and technology. Now 63 years old, she said her way of compensating for lack of experience at first was to “get out of the way of the Holy Spirit” and to keep her message simple. “I have one sermon only,” she said. “God loves you. Exactly the way you are. With all your hurt, what you’re bringing from your childhood, whatever your experiences are.” “She’s not the typical stoic minister,” said Demos Young, a 92-year old parishioner who has seen Waquoit ministers come and go since 1970. “She’s a people minister, and she sees her role as one of bringing together people and issues.” Humility and openness are on display Sundays as she hugs members of her congregation, an assembly of diverse faces, ethnicities, and even species: a well-behaved black Labrador “Mabel” frequently occupies her own pew, and has even been trained to drop a dog biscuit into the collection plate. The passion Ms. Fields has displayed for community engagement has made her and her church the hub of many different civic spokes. “I’m really quite in awe of her energy,” said Rabbi Elias J. Lieberman of the Falmouth Jewish Congregation. “She’s not just the minister of her congregation, she’s like an unofficial mayor of Waquoit,” said Pamela Rothstein, the Jewish congregation’s director of Lifelong Learning. Reading out Ms. Fields’s laundry list of roles in the Falmouth community risks leaving one breathless. To name just a few: she is the co-founder of the Upper Cape Interfaith Coalition; a board member of both the Falmouth Service Center and Neighborhood Falmouth; an advisory board member of Belonging to Each Other; and a member of the Barnstable Human Rights Commission. She frequently organizes food drives and partners with Gosnold Cape Cod to help clergy better minister to those struggling with addiction. “If you need help, chances are Nell’s involved,” said Dr. Seyane Mawusi, a congregation member who came to Waquoit church through her affiliation with No Place for Hate, an Anti-Defamation League initiative of which Ms. Fields is a local steering committee member. A thread of commitment to progressive social causes runs through Ms. Fields’s efforts. She takes strong public stances on the need for gun safety as well as the defense of Ukraine. She puts African American spirituals on the Sunday hymn lists and is organizing a Lenten book circle about the indignity of racism. To hear her explain it, the fuel for her grueling schedule of community engagement is grace—a sense of eruptive joy she tries to instill in followers. But there have been painful milestones along her life’s journey. Ms. Fields was the youngest of five daughters, whose father was an Army officer in Kentucky. She awakened to both born-again Christianity and her own homosexuality during roughly the same span of late teen and early adult years. When she and her then-partner tried to come out to their California minister in the 1980s, they were shunned. “He said, ‘I can’t take care of you when I have an entire flock to take care of,’” she recalled. It was not the only time fellow Christians would treat her as an outcast, but Ms. Fields said that first experience forged her commitment to openness. “I would not be the minister I am if I had not had that experience of being rejected,” she said. It was in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, that Ms. Fields said she felt her most powerful call to ministry. Ms. Fields was then the CEO of a tech company that managed online payments for news articles and was in the city for a board meeting. Forced to evacuate the bus she was riding through Manhattan, she saw the smoke rising from the World Trade Center. There and then, she reevaluated her life. “Being in corporate, I was taught my job was to increase shareholder value, and you realize, no—that’s not your purpose,” she said. She enrolled in divinity school soon thereafter. Ms. Fields said the COVID pandemic intensified her understanding of life as a precious and brief window to work with other people to make a better world. Quarantine procedures got her into the business of putting Sunday services on YouTube, which she said has generated virtual church attendance from South Korea, Tennessee, and other points far from Falmouth. Waquoit Congregational Church continues to stream services, and frequently helping out in the tech booth is Sarah J. Long, Ms. Field’s wife of more than 20 years. (“She’s got to listen to my sermons every Sunday to make sure I’m not too political,” Ms. Fields said.) The couple have raised three children from Sarah’s former marriage to a man. Ms. Fields said their family dog, Tillie, is still too rowdy to join Mabel in the pews. (“She’s not a believer yet.”) When asked what her faults were, Ms. Fields said she is often self-critical. “At the end of the day, I’ll say, ‘Did I do enough? Did I say the wrong thing?’—I can be hard on myself.” She can also be intense. “I do feel that we are called to do the work of love, now. Not tomorrow, not next week, right now,” she said. “I probably should breathe a little bit more.”