Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

I have attended the new ministry celebrations for two absolutely amazing women priests who have now become rectors in the Diocese of Olympia. Rachel Taber-Hamilton is now in charge of Trinity, Everett, and Carla Pryne is the new pastor for Holy Spirit, Vashon Island. Both are women of deep integrity and experience and both display the now changed face of our church.

Carla and I actually met as 22-year-old seminarians at Yale Divinity School in the fall of 1976. She was just back from a post-college trip to Eastern Europe and neither of us I am sure ever pictured we would end up serving as senior clergy together. Since we left seminary she first served in a Seattle Congregational Church because of the struggle women faced in the early 80s becoming Episcopal priests. She then became Canon Pastor at St. Mark’s Cathedral before leaving to found Earth Ministry. She made an international reputation for her environmental work, but was always drawn back to parish ministry. She was an associate at Immanuel, Mercer Island, interim at St. Alban’s, Edmonds and then at Ascension, Magnolia and now she is the rector of an island church where she will serve well and with joy until she retires.

Rachel fought a hard fight to be ordained and our former bishop Vincent Warner championed her cause. She was an associate at Trinity, Everett, then rector of the continuing congregation of St. Stephen’s, Oak Harbor, when the bulk of the people bolted for the “new Anglican expression in America.” She was then off to Maine as a hospital chaplain before returning to take the call as rector of Trinity, Everett.

These are both wild women who know how to read the “signs of the times” and come from liberation backgrounds. Carla’s fierce environmental commitment and Rachel’s heritage as a Native American have shaped their ministries. They now head congregations, but each retains a heart stirred by the passion of a Liberating Gospel.

So they now join me in the never ending ministry to the building and the altar, to the care of the sick and the formation of the newly initiated. They share in the councils of the church and most likely will also like me go to bed at night worried for the health of their communities.

We are your new rectors, people in middle age who as young adults saw a new world of justice and peace and have given our lives to help bring it into being. Now we run Episcopal Churches. Watch out what might happen next.