Caroline Hamilton-Arnold enjoys rock climbing, reading, camping and dreaming. She also loves myriad forms of music, from electronic to folk, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s pre-Sherlock show The Last Enemy.

She is not a fan of cold weather, however, which would be an issue for the newest staff member at Newtown Congregational Church if she had not already fallen in love with the town where she now spends much of her time.

Rev Hamilton-Arnold has not yet been formally installed, but the 25-year-old has been serving as the church’s transitional associate minister since September 1. That was the day after she had presented her Candidate Sermon.

The Reverend Matthew Crebbin, the senior pastor at Newtown Congregational Church, said that while it was unusual to have a candidate speak on one day and then begin working the next, the timing just worked out.

“Typically you have a weekend where congregation has a chance to meet the candidate, and that person will offer their Candidate’s Sermon,” Rev Crebbin said February 9. “In this case, the committee that had been searching for our new transitional associate minister had gone through a number of profiles.”

NCC knew by early last year that it would need to begin a search for a new associate minister. Its then-associate minister, the Reverend Allyssa De Wolf, was serving “basically on an interim time,” said Rev Crebbin. “We knew there would be a possibility that she would not be staying with us for long, so we formed a committee and created criteria for what we would be looking for.”

By late spring, Rev De Wolf had been offered and accepted the position of pastor at First Congregational Church in Santa Barbara, Calif.

“When we learned that she had accepted a position, we were able to start the search process,” said Rev Crebbin. The process eventually narrowed a group of applicants to three people, with Rev Hamilton-Arnold becoming the “top candidate,” according to Rev Crebbin.

It was serendipity that brought Rev Hamilton-Arnold to the Newtown’s Congregational church. When Rev De Wolf began thinking about taking a position in California last year, she mentioned this change of career to a friend. That friend turned out to be a mutual friend of Rev Hamilton-Arnold, who mentioned the opening and urged the Texan to consider Connecticut.

While Rev De Wolf was heading toward California, Rev Hamilton-Arnold and her husband were heading East. Jeremy Arnold had been accepted into The Institute of Sacred Music at Yale, so the couple was relocating.

“We offered her the job while they were on the road,” said Rev Crebbin. “They were up near Yellowstone when we first started trying to reach her. Cell reception wasn’t good, so we had to trade messages for a little while,” he said, laughing at the memory.

Rev Hamilton-Arnold presented her Candidate Sermon on Sunday, August 31. She spoke on “The Stories That Shape Us,” using the text of Jacob wrestling the angel to parallel how “we have struggled with God, to shape who we are,” she said.

The congregation voted that afternoon, affirming what the search committee had already hoped for. The Rev Hamilton-Arnold began working in Newtown on September 1.

There will be an installation service, said Rev Crebbin, but that will not happen until after Rev Hamilton-Arnold meets with the committee for church and ministry of Fairfield East Association. NCC is a member of the association, which oversees United Church of Christ conferences across the country.

“We hopefully anticipate this spring there will be an official service of installation,” said Rev Crebbin.

A Life In The Church

Caroline Hamilton-Arnold grew up immersed in religion. She spent her first 18 years a very active member of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Lewisville, Texas. Church has always been a safe space for her.

Happily ensconced in one of the offices on the lower floor of 14 West Street, Rev Hamilton-Arnold spent time talking about her past, present, and future. The members of her childhood church, she said, provided “a very supportive environment, and had a broad range of views”

Her parents, she said, are church leaders. She sang in the choir by age 13, and preached her first sermon at age 16.

She earned bachelor’s degrees in religion and English, with a minor in political science, at Texas Christian University. She graduated in May 2011, also being named a Paul and Judy Andrew Honors Scholar. She had a cumulative GPA of 3.97.

She then earned her master’s in divinity, with a concentration in worship, preaching, and the arts, at Claremont School of Theology, from which she graduated in May 2014.

While earning her degrees, Caroline Hamilton-Arnold also earned numerous honors and awards, and held memberships in the religion society Chi Delta Mu (for which she also served as president and vice president), and the academic honors societies Phi Beta Kappa and Theta Alpha Kappa. She has, since October 2011, been a member of the general board of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Prior to NCC, Rev Hamilton-Arnold was co-chair for two years of the Worship Council at Claremont. She was one of two students responsible for planning and implementing the weekly community chapel services.

She also served as transitional minister at United Church of the Valley (UCV), in Murieta, Calif., for eight months, October 2013 to June 2014. She had previously served as student minister for the progressive Christian community a year earlier, from September 2012 until May 2013.

While she enjoyed the time at UCV, she is enjoying her new church family and the way its members have found a way to agree to disagree on some topics.

“They were more theologically homogeneous,” she said of the members of UCV. “They tended to agree with each other.

“This church has a pretty broad range,” she said of NCC. “I missed that,” she said.

A Very Good Place

Today, Caroline and Jeremy live in the Westville section of New Haven, which has turned into a very good location for the young couple.

“Being in New Haven is a very good place for me,” said Rev Hamilton-Arnold. “It’s kind of the best of both worlds. I enjoy the intimacy of Newtown, and I still feel connected to the arts and culture in New Haven.”

She has enjoyed, she said, working with the church’s youth and young adults, and has already begun bridging her relatively new home and work worlds.

“There is a desire for them to be connected to the cities around them,” she said, “and to go on service trips that expose them to a broader sense of culture.”

One of her current projects has her working with NCC’s Human Services ministry on “Choosing To Connect.” The series, said Rev Hamilton-Arnold, will visit the theme of violence in the community “and our responsibility as people of faith.”

 The program opened on February 8 with the Reverend Henry Brown from Hartford.

“We want to explore different ways to engage people in what we are experiencing in the world now, locally and regionally,” said Rev Hamilton-Arnold.

Rev Hamilton-Arnold spends a significant portion of her time immersed in the world of the church’s children and young adults. She has offered many Children’s Messages during worship services, and has begun youth group nights that are held on alternating Sunday nights.

“We’ve had a pretty regular and enthusiastic attendance,” she said.

She has also been working with the current crop of confirmands, high school freshmen who are on a nine-month journey of “thinking about how to make this your faith,” she said. The students are, she said, “a very committed group.”

One of the first things she did with the young adults was organize a service trip to New Haven. Rev Hamilton-Arnold and other adults escorted a group of teens to New Haven on a Sunday after NCC’s regular worship service. The group took bag lunches with them, and joined their counterparts in the Elm City for Communion services.

“It was freezing. The wind chill was in the teens, so it was great because we were worshipping with people who live in the streets, while trying to teach our young adults about life on the street, and this was a living lesson,” said Rev Hamilton-Arnold.

The group then did one of Rev Hamilton-Arnold’s favorite things to do: they visited a museum. That afternoon it was one of the Yale galleries, where they viewed and discussed the exhibitions.

The young adults were “surprising, engaged, and insightful,” said Rev Hamilton-Arnold. “They drew connections between some of the art we had been discussing that I hadn’t even thought of. It was an awesome experience.”

Rev Hamilton-Arnold has also delivered a number of sermons in recent months. It is this part of her job where many of the adult attendees see a marked change to this sacred presentation. Where Senior Pastor Matthew Crebbin uses a leather-bound binder to hold his sermon, which he occasionally refers to — and where predecessors also referred to their printed sermons — Rev Hamilton-Arnold opens up her iPad.

“The kids haven’t said anything about that,” she said with a laugh. “They’re so used to technology, I don’t think it phases them.

“It’s the adults who have commented about it,” she added. “They’re the ones who say ‘I’ve never seen that before.’”

Knowing that her current position at Newtown Congregational Church is a two-year engagement, “with the potential for extension,” is not a concern, she said.

“This works for us logistically,” she said of her husband’s plan to continue his education, which may uproot the couple again once Mr Arnold’s studies are completed.

While she misses her home state, Rev Hamilton-Arnold seems comfortable with her new home. She sat down for the interview that served as the basis of this story prior to the storms of the past two weeks, so she was able to describe her first New England winter as “not as bas as I thought it would be.”

She had already found “unexpected beauty” in icicles by that time.

Fortunately, when she began thinking last spring about a move to the East Coast, she started to expand her wardrobe.

“In April I started buying, at the end of the season, a really good coat, and boots,” she said with a laugh.

Fall was “incredible, spectacularly beautiful,” she added. “It lived up to the hype.”

Regarding the recent spate of storms, she is still finding fun being in New England.

“We had a youth sleepover last week, and I had a lot of fun sledding,” she said. After a deep breath she then sounded like many of those around her, saying: “I’m still feeling like I was anticipating worse, but I’m already ready for it to be done.”