Rev. Dr. Samuel V. Dansokho, Moderator Nominee

He/him

Ordained Minister, nominated by Nakonha:ka Regional Council

I was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, a town bordering the Senegal River, the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert. The city is under threat to disappear from the dual perils of desertification and erosion. Environmental issues are a matter of life and death.

In the village of Kelle where I grew up, our family was one of the only two Christian families, yet we enjoyed warm and friendly relationships.

After graduating from the Université des Sciences Humaines in Strasbourg, France, I was ordained and installed as the pastor of Église Protestante du Sénégal. Nine years later, I went to Chicago, obtained my PhD, and went on to teach in North Carolina at Hood Theological Seminary, an AMEZ (African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church) graduate seminary. After eleven years, I left academia to return to my first vocation. I became the pastor of Saint-Pierre et Pinguet United Church, Quebec City, before being called to Plymouth-Trinity United Church in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where I have served for almost eleven years now.

My peregrinations across three continents and my experience as a national of a long-colonized country exposed me to the injustice and misdeeds of neocolonialism, racism and the shameless exploitation of creation and its children.... and also to the minute degree of separation between peoples: we are One. Along my journey, I have served as a pastor in different countries and congregations.

From the moment my journey with the United Church of Canada started, I served on executive committees of the Laurentian and Quebec Presbyteries; I’ve also served the Synode Montreal et Ottawa Conference, and the executive of Nakonha:ka Regional Council. I am now finishing my second term on the General Council executive.

If elected moderator, I will bring my international and multicultural experience to engage in what I see as a three-year multi-layered conversation under the palaver tree.

The journey continues....

Call and Vision 

Autobiographical Notes of a Living and Evolving Document 

I write these lines as a grateful hymn of thanksgiving. How could I not praise God as I consider what my life’s path—what it is and has been—is now becoming? It’s a special privilege to be able to offer my experiences, education, gifts, and abilities, with all integrity, to together evaluate, understand, change and reconcile, imagine and embrace a vision for a common future. We are called to daringly open ourselves to a vision for a better and hope-filled future while keeping our eyes wide open to the realities that surround us. We can do it by drawing upon the deep spirituality of audacious disciples, artisans of a just and equitable peace.  

My peregrinations across three continents (Africa, Europe, and the Americas) and my childhood experience in Senegal, a country colonized for over four centuries, have made me particularly sensitive to injustice in general, and especially towards the wrongs of neocolonialism, racism, and the shameless exploitation of Mother Nature and her children. 

Being a Christian, and more pointedly a Protestant, in Senegal, I grew up as part of a religious minority in a country where more than 90 percent of the population was Muslim. I therefore learned much from Islam by means of experience, and I learned to appreciate it as a pragmatic way of life that promoted peace, solidarity, equity, compassion, and social justice, while at the same time showing signs of homophobia and male chauvinism, like what is found in certain conservative Christian circles. The challenge is to find a way to live together while leaning into diversity beyond the usual considerations of colour, social class, or sexual orientation.  

In my current faith community, the advanced age of its founding members and the decline of its financial resources are sources of anxiety. Another increasing preoccupation is a society that tends towards restricting the space occupied by religion in the public sphere under the pretext of secularism. However, there are reasons for hope and to not slip into this quagmire. The inflow of new families, primarily through immigration, is a factor of renewal. I hope I can transmit the audacity of someone who believes firmly that the resurrection makes possible the triumph of good over evil, of justice over injustice, of love and reconciliation over hate.  

It is not acceptable to surrender to despair fatalistically. Learning from the ingenuity and love of life of brothers and sisters from underprivileged areas, we can make more of the little we have, as small as it may be. The African wisdom of Ubuntu teaches us that “I am because we are; we are because I am,” and the gospel shows us that we enrich ourselves by what we share and impoverish ourselves by what we attempt to hold onto selfishly for our sole benefit.  

The United Church of Canada, our ecclesial denomination, professes its will to be anticolonial, antiracist, intercultural, equitable, and reconciled to First Nations. This reconciliation will be the fruit of a long process stretching from recognition of our complicity with colonization and the alienation and genocide committed against them, to the presentation of sincere and updated apologies as well as reparations for the harms undergone in the past and perpetuated still today.  

We have also declared that we want to become a Church of disciples with a deep spirituality, a living testimony, and a bold practice of justice. To help us to get there, we have equipped ourselves with tools such as the seven basic principles for justice work and a five-point multidimensional Strategic Plan (growth, the environment, reconciliation, leadership, resources) that intersect and nourish each other. 

How not to praise you, Lord?