Of the Ages: Remembering the Rev. Dr. Brock H. Leach

Brock Leach has made his passage from this life, carried onward in the cycle that holds us all. We are still catching our breath.

Brock was a founding board member of Green Mountain Justice. He was our secretary, our sage, and our seer. He was a Unitarian Universalist minister who gave his life to community-building. To me, he was a mentor and a friend of the deepest shared faith. His loss leaves a big hole. The kind you do not fill. The kind you learn to carry.

So we will carry it the only way we know how. Through the ministry. Through the work he loved. His voice fills the hundreds of emails he left behind. It is so alive in them that it hurts. Here is a little of who he was.

Brock lived more than one life. For decades he stood at the top of the corporate world, leading Frito-Lay and Tropicana and serving as chief innovation officer for PepsiCo. Then, at 48, he walked away to answer a call he had carried since he was a teenager. He became a minister. He gave justice the same gifts he once gave business. And he believed you should never do the work alone. More people in the room, he always said, made everything better.

The encourager

Brock cheered everyone on.

When we shared our Neighbor Care Neighbors description, he wrote back, “I LOVE this.” He called it a portrait of a ministry built on liberating love. He said our Veterans Day reflection was masterful and moving, straight from the heart and utterly real. He said a hard radio interview brought listeners into authentic proximity with people surviving the worst that life can dish out.

He noticed everything. He celebrated all of it. When I finished seminary, his note was pure Brock. “You are in a class by yourself,” he wrote. And then the line I will keep forever. “Thanks for blessing all of us in manifold ways.”

The blessing ran the other way, Brock. It always did.

The seer

Brock saw around corners.

Most people look at a young ministry and see what it is. Brock saw what it could become. He read our Bending the Arc formation design and called it better than what he had seen in congregations, including his own. Then he named the real work. Too many comfortable people, he said, are happy to read the books and call it a day, because then they can consider themselves enlightened. He wanted more than enlightenment. He wanted change.

He gave us a mantra. “Outcomes, Outcomes, Outcomes. It’s not justice if it doesn’t change lives for the better.” He meant it.

His vision was bigger than any one program. He sat down with me once to talk through the foundations of becoming a truly multicultural community of communities. You can still hear him think it through, generous and clear-eyed, in our conversation on the Foundations of Becoming Multicultural.

When we dreamed about how congregations might sustain this work, he did not theorize. He pulled the data. He came back sharper. Do not ask for a one-time gift, he said, because it lets people off the hook. Ask for something ongoing that becomes part of who they are. He cared about the soul of the thing and the scaffolding under it.

The proximate one

Brock did not just talk about love. He practiced it.

When I introduced him to one of our neighbors at the shelter, Brock met him with open arms. He spoke of putting love at the center, this season and every season. He drew on years of trauma work to meet people where they were.

He was one of our strongest champions of Warmth with Dignity. Our EMPWR coats are sewn by formerly unhoused parents in Detroit, the city where Brock spent his childhood. I have wondered whether that was part of the pull. Coats of dignity, made by people climbing out of the cold, coming from his hometown. When a partner wrote to thank us for the coats, he said the note warmed him body and soul.

He lived our way of being. In a thorny debate over housing policy, he wrote that deeply loving relationships are the first and most important medicine. He trusted our neighbors as the teachers. He trusted proximity as the path.

When his GMJ vest arrived in the mail, he fired off a note titled “Woo Hoo!!” He said he finally felt like an official member of the team, and could not imagine a better one to join.

We were the lucky ones, Brock.

The friend who faced it with grace

In January, Brock wrote to tell us he had glioblastoma. He described the diagnosis plainly, then added, “Definitely a life expectancy wake-up call that isn’t all bad.”

That was Brock staring down the hardest news of his life and still finding the light in it.

Even then, he kept showing up. He emailed before an MRI to say he would miss a meeting but catch up soon. In March, still in treatment, he approved a board resolution and apologized for his “extended AWOL stint,” promising to rejoin us. He kept caring about the ministry when most people would have had every reason to let go.

His wife, Julie, told us that through all of it, he stayed the same person. Full of love. Sure that people can work together to make a difference. Hopeful for the world. Love at the center, right to the end.

He signed every email the same way. “A Unitarian Universalist Ministry in Community-Building.” That was not a title. It was a life.

How we will remember him

Brock is now of the ages.

We will not memorialize him with a plaque. We will memorialize him with practice. With outcomes. With proximity. With love at the center, this season and every season. Every neighbor we walk beside. Every comfortable heart we move toward courage. Every gift that becomes part of who a community is. That is the monument Brock would want.

Be in peace now, dear friend. We have the work from here.