Rick Ufford-Chase, far left, leading the way along Arizona 286 with fellow members during last week's 75-mile migrant trail walk.

A.E. Araiza / Arizona Daily Star

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The Tucson leader of the national Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will end his two-year term next week, hopeful that he's inspired faithfulness in a denomination that is divided and losing members.

Rick Ufford-Chase, 42, has traveled to 13 countries and 44 states during his two-year stint as moderator, with an emphasis on inviting members of the next generation to invest themselves in church as a place to live out their faith.

Though he has critics, most agree he is an energetic force who inspires action. One of his favorite expressions is telling worshippers to take a risk and "get in the boat with Jesus," meaning get out in the world and perform mission work with those on society's margins.

Ufford-Chase leaves today for Birmingham, Ala., where the Presbyterians will hold their biennial General Assembly, a gathering that will address controversial matters that have endured throughout Ufford-Chase's term — the church's call for divestment from companies that support Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the ongoing debate over whether to ordain sexually active gays and lesbians.

The divestment issue triggered hurt in the local and national Jewish community. And though both sides continue to discuss the issue, their perspectives on Israel and the occupied territories remain at odds.

On Thursday evening, Ufford-Chase is expected to hand over the title of moderator to one of four candidates for the post — two men and two women, all pastors. The moderator is one of three leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and has arguably the highest profile.

After leaving the post of moderator, Ufford-Chase hopes to continue working on peace and economic-justice issues. He also is looking forward to spending more time with his wife, Kitty, and their 11-year-old son, Teo, and doing more work with No More Deaths, the local migrant-aid movement he co-founded.

As the youngest moderator in recent history, observers say Ufford-Chase gave the church a much-needed— though not always well received — vision for the future. That vision is of a multiethnic church doing mission work rather than an aging group of Anglo bluebloods gathering only on Sunday mornings.

"He's lifted up a concern about God's justice in the world," said Clifton Kirk-patrick, who holds the title of stated clerk for the denomination, an elected position that required he work closely with Ufford-Chase. "He's leaving a legacy of hope, and he's done it in an interesting way. … He's not just concerned about the church for itself, but for the world and the people that Christ loves."

Unlike many moderators, Ufford-Chase is not a pastor, though he is an ordained elder at Tucson's Southside Presbyterian Church. He once sought a career in ministry, but left the seminary because he said he did not hear the call to ordination.

Rather, he chose mission work and came to Tucson at age 22 to join the Sanctuary Movement, which helped illegally smuggle people from war-torn Central America into the United States in the '80s.

As the founder of BorderLinks — a Tucson group that educates the public about issues on the U.S.-Mexican border — Ufford-Chase also has worked to create national awareness of the crisis in Arizona's borderlands, and he is openly critical of current U.S. immigration and trade policies. He has had hate mail about his stance on the emotionally charged issue from those who believe he's misinterpreting Scripture.

But he also has inspired groups of young people, many of them Presbyterians, to travel to Tucson and be part of the No More Deaths movement. The movement is entering its third summer of giving 24-hour emergency aid to the migrants who illegally walk across the border from Mexico.

"He is the most charismatic speaker I've ever heard. I really wanted to be part of what he was doing on the border," said the Rev. Jonathan T. Scanlon, a 27-year-old Presbyterian minister who recently spent nine months working with No More Deaths after graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Scanlon, now in a pastoral residency in Atlanta, hopes to use social justice and peacemaking in his own ministry to inspire young people in a denomination that has shrunk by 50 percent since the early 1970s.

Ufford-Chase says it will be like "turning an ocean liner" to stem the decline in worshippers. Yet he remains positive.

"There is a hunger for something real that people are not finding in pop culture," he said. "I'm more hopeful than I was two years ago about people who genuinely want to be faithful and good, and to be part of something meaningful."

Ben Terpstra, a 13-year-old from Oak Ridge, Tenn., was unexpectedly inspired by Ufford-Chase during a talk at Maryville College in February, 2005.

"I figured I'd be sitting in my seat listening to an old guy talking about something I didn't understand," Terpstra said. "But I thought he was really cool. He talked about mission work on the border and also in Iraq and Afghanistan."

At the end of Ufford-Chase's talk, the teen asked how he could do God's work, as he was too young to go on a mission. Ufford-Chase said that if he gave up TV, he'd ensure Terpstra could go on a mission. Last week, the teen accompanied Ufford-Chase on the 75-mile migrant trail walk — a seven-day trek through punishing heat that's designed to raise awareness about the annual toll of migrants who die each year while crossing into the United States.

"I still can't really imagine myself trying to do what they are forced to do, but it's gotten me to think more about these issues," Terpstra said. "Church doesn't have to be about what happened 2,000 years ago. Not to say we shouldn't think about that, but religion isn't this ancient thing. It's modern and current in the action we take in our lives."