The Rev. Daria Schaffnit has served as pastor at First Presbyterian Church for nearly six years. At the end of October, she will bid the congregation farewell as she heads to a new post at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton. (Submitted photo)
First Presbyterian’s Rev. Daria bids village adieu
- Published: October 17, 2025
After nearly six years leading First Presbyterian Church of Yellow Springs, the Rev. Daria Schaffnit will step down at the end of October to become associate pastor at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Dayton. Her last Sunday service in the village will be Oct. 26.
“It’s very difficult,” she said of the decision to leave. “Through this whole process I keep thinking of people in the church and going, ‘I don’t want to not be their pastor. I love that person.’ It’s a fantastic congregation. They’re lovely people.”
Since Schaffnit returned in January 2020 to Yellow Springs — where she grew up and graduated from YS High School — and took the pulpit at First Presbyterian, the congregation of the 166-year-old church has continued and deepened its commitment to antiracism and affirming and welcoming LGBTQIA+ members, as well as offering the church as a community space as part of its mission.
And Schaffnit’s congregation has widened beyond the walls of the Xenia Avenue church building. Schaffnit’s open-door “coffee shop hours” became a local fixture in cafes around the village.
“My coffee shop hours often involve somebody who isn’t a church person, but who wants to come and talk to me about whatever,” she said. “I have felt like I’m kind of a pastor to Yellow Springs.”
Following her final service at First Presbyterian, Schaffnit will hold extra coffee shop hours that week — a last chance, as she put it, “for people to come sit and talk if they want to.”
Sharing sustenance with members of her community is, she said, part of her approach to leading ministry with love and fellowship. At First Presbyterian, she instituted “brunch church” in Westminster Hall, where attendees shared food while worshipping together.
“That’s another thing I’ll miss,” Schaffnit said.
Schaffnit has also turned to breaking bread with others in times of adversity, she said. She recalled that when she and her wife, Jeanenne, attended Westminster Presbyterian Church in Xenia — the church Schaffnit grew up attending with her grandmother — in the early 2000s, they were barred from certain activities, including serving communion and posting their wedding and anniversary announcements in the church newsletter.
“It was hurtful,” Schaffnit said, but she and her wife decided their best course of action was to love their neighbors even harder: They became deeply involved with a number of church committees, serving home-cooked food during “huge coffee hours.”
“I think it’s hard for people, when they’re working with you toward the same goal, or when they’re being fed and treated well by you, to dismiss you,” she said.
Schaffnit would take the same tack in 2005 when she began attending United Theological Seminary in Dayton. She received pushback from some folks she met there who, when they found out she was married to a woman, told her they would pray for her to “come to Christ.” She responded by baking treats every week to bring to class.
“It ended up being really good for me, because it taught me Biblical self-defense, and my approach was just to make people good food,” she said. “I thought, ‘They can’t hate me too much if they’re eating my brownies.’”
Schaffnit brings the same gentle approach to the pulpit, where she said the best path forward is not to shout down invectives, but to model kindness and acceptance.
“Arguing doesn’t convince people so much as hearing you speak well of something or someone, and I think that’s how people will hear me,” she said. “We all have our clanging gongs, but even when you disagree with people, they’re still your siblings.”
Schaffnit aims to take that spirit of openness and warmth to her new post at Southminster. She said she wasn’t looking to leave her Yellow Springs congregation — but the shift began with a quiet pull. Driving her 9-year-old son, Elijah, from their Kettering home to his school, she said she passes Southminster four times a day.
“And I started feeling this tug,” she said. “I was like, ‘I have a church I love. I’m not interested, thank you.’”
Then a friend messaged her to say Southminster would soon be looking for an associate pastor, and a few colleagues told Schaffnit they thought she would be a good fit for the position.
“Affirmation was not what I wanted, but I thought, ‘Well, I guess if I’m supposed to be there, I’ll end up there,’” she said.
After several interviews and long talks with church leaders — including a four-hour conversation with Southminster’s senior pastor — Schaffnit felt the same sense of affirmation she had resisted before.
“I wasn’t expecting to get it,” she said. “But when I did, I thought, ‘OK, this must be where I’m meant to go.’”
The new position will have her co-leading worship, preaching once a month, providing pastoral care and supporting youth and children’s ministries. With a membership of about 400, Southminster is a larger, more structured environment than the tight-knit congregation in Yellow Springs — “a purple church,” she called it, meaning politically mixed. She said she views the new role as an opportunity to love and care for a new community, and help it dig deeper into its own open and affirming identity.
“I think people there are hungry for a place that feels safe and like home,” she said. “They’ve made a statement that they want to be inclusive of all types, including sexual orientation and gender identity, and I can help with what that looks like in practice.”
As she prepares to say goodbye to her congregation at First Presbyterian Church of Yellow Springs, Schaffnit said she’ll dearly miss her congregation, and mourns the weddings and funerals she won’t be able to perform for congregants once her tenure is ended. Nevertheless, she’s mindful of setting a healthy boundary in that regard for whoever follows her into the pulpit.
“I’ve heard stories about former pastors coming back and expecting to perform weddings or funerals, and that can create problems,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of those pastors, even though I love these people so much.”
But her ministry in Yellow Springs isn’t truly ending, she said — just changing form.
“There’s a loophole, because I can still be pastoral toward the people I know in town who aren’t part of the congregation,” she said. “And it will always be my town.”
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