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Susan Sherrill Axelrod: Canon to the Ordinary Tina Pickering was telling me, Louise, that your job is really kind of unique in a diocese—that not every diocese, even remotely, has someone in your position. Can you explain what you do and what makes it unique?
Louise Howlett: I think that Bishop Rob, along with Tina, (CFO) Benge Ambrogi, and others in the D-House staff came up with this idea. I started out very, very part-time as a pastoral assistant to Bishop Rob. Because I'm a licensed therapist and a longtime priest, I brought a skill set that could be helpful in pastoral care, or giving advice around conflict in a parish, or with concerns about clergy who may be hitting challenging times in their lives. Gradually it developed into a half-time position. I have my practice half-time, and I'm here half-time, and it really is an opportunity to support Bishop Rob in pastoral care of clergy—helping the helpers—and supporting collegiality, strengthening ministries, strengthening relationships around the diocese.
We have a pretty small, but spread out, diocese, and a lot of clergy can feel quite isolated. I think we've done a wonderful job of helping clergy feel supported, both from the D-House level, but also by each other.
SSA: What are some of the ways in which you’ve connected clergy to each other?
LH: One of the first things I did was start spiritual direction groups for clergy, and now I have five. During Covid, we learned we could be effective online, and so even across space and time, we can have two hours once a month to be in silence together, to share reflections and really build a deeper relationship with one another and a sense of support and the safety to be vulnerable. Because we've identified that a primary goal is to support this kind of strong fellowship, I’ve also worked with the Clergy Formation Committee on quiet days and retreats and conferences.
New Hampshire is fortunate to have a bishop who leads in the way that Bishop Rob does, which is very collegial and collaborative and that trickles down into the kinds of relationships we have. We don't have a lot of jockeying for a position or competitive things going on, we have a lot of laughter, a lot of warmth, a lot of mutual support.
SSA: That's great. And for a rural, sparsely populated state, I can totally understand how some priests would particularly feel isolated. And one of the silver linings of COVID is that we know we can come together online using those tools.
LH: I'll say even the urban clergy can feel beleaguered and alone in the weight of their work, so it’s important for rural, urban, and suburban—all of us.
SSA: How many clergy people are there in New Hampshire?
LH: We have about 45 in parishes and gospel-oriented communities of different types and sizes. We have a variety of priests in charge, some deacons in charge, we sometimes have lay leadership. And, we also have a tremendous number of retired clergy, many of whom are quite active in ministry here.
Many of those who are retired come to our clergy events as well as our weekly lectionary Bible study with the bishop, and we have periodic Zoom calls or town halls if there's an issue that we need to talk about as a group that we can do on Zoom and a lot of retired clergy show up to those as well.
SSA: What’s been the biggest sort of surprise to you about this work?
LH: I don't think this is a surprise exactly, but I have really enjoyed it; I totally look forward to coming to work each day. It's an hour drive each way, so I'm thankful I come to Concord only two days a week, but I really miss it when I don't come— if there's snow or something. I love being in D-House with other people and people dropping in. I love being in the city, because I live in a rural area.
So that's not a surprise, but it's been a nice balance. I am at D-House Tuesdays and Thursdays and then work from home Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, both doing diocesan work and seeing clients on Zoom. The rhythm of my week is very enjoyable—the intense close one-on-one or one-on-two work with clients, and then backing up and working on programs, reaching out to people, having other conversations that may be less intense, but sometimes quite serious.
But I feel like there's a lot of good synergy between the two parts of my job. So that's just been a real pleasure, it's helped me feel like in my sixties I can still be working full-time, making an important contribution, and not being stressed out.
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Susan Sherrill Axelrod: Let’s start with, what is School for Ministry (SFM)?
Kelly Sundberg Seaman: Our task is to equip people to minister. That might be someone who has had their call to the priesthood discerned and affirmed, or it might be someone who has a call to preach, to break open the gospel in their community or beyond. And so, what we do is provide people the chance to be equipped for those vocations, both by what they need to learn academically, but also to have that learning take place in community, so that people are growing spiritually, and they're learning in company with other people, and they realize that they're not alone in practicing what they're going to be doing, but they are always going to be accompanied and part of a community. Doing this work together is a really important value of SFM.
SSA: When was SFM founded here in the Diocese of New Hampshire?
KSS: Our first academic year was the first fall of COVID, so 2020. Bishop Rob and Canon to the Ordinary Tina Pickering had already been in conversation with Seminary of the Southwest, the home of the Iona Collaborative, the program SFM is affiliated with, for at least a year.
SSA: How many people have come through SFM at this point?
KSS: We’ve got six people ordained in New Hampshire, another priest ordained by the Diocese of Maine, and one ordained in Western Massachusetts. Counting the folks who are studying now, we have about a dozen lay preachers who have come through SFM, and six people enrolled now who are postulants or candidates for the priesthood—in New Hampshire, Maine, and Western Massachusetts
SSA: The need for this, as I understand it, is because church leadership is at a crisis point. There’s a big gap between the number of open positions in the Episcopal Church and the number of priests seeking a position. More positions than priests; retirements outpacing ordinations. And this came out of a desire to look at ways that people could serve the church as they felt called to serve it, but that didn't require them to take the traditional seminary track.
KSS: Right. The landscape of, and not just for the Episcopal Church, the landscape of seminaries, accredited seminaries, and formation for mainline churches has been shifting. So many things factor into this. There are plenty of denominations who have never assumed that you had to go away and get an accredited master's degree to be a minister. But what kept emerging was (and we're far from alone in terms of a diocese that does this kind of work or recognizes this kind of ministry) is that the investment, not just in tuition, but the cost of relocating a life or a household to a residential seminary, and then having done that, re-uprooting back to serve a congregation, the cost of that, including the financial cost and including potentially educational loans, was out of line with the number of full-time jobs that would repay that investment. That's part of it.
And the other side, another way of talking about the cost of sending people away to seminary is that if somebody is already deeply involved in pastoring, leading, ministering in their community, is it the best use of those gifts and those relationships to pull that person out and send them away? There's a lot of benefits to forming somebody at home. It brings its own set of complications, but to make it possible for people to be formed without costly disruption responds to a lot of real issues on the ground. That said, there are always going to people who are going to be best served by going away for an accredited Master of Divinity at a residential seminary.
SSA: I think about when my dad went to seminary, he'd come out of the Navy, he'd finished up college at home in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, after being kicked out of Princeton, felt the call and went to the pastor of his local church. And the guy said, ‘Go get some real-world experience.’ He worked at the Hartford Insurance Company and then moved into a dorm at Yale Divinity School with my mom and me. He was on scholarship and they had absolutely no money, which was okay because they were young. And when he graduated, they were happy to go wherever he got a job. But that was in the 1960s. I would think today, even a young person might not want that lifestyle, and if someone is coming into this profession in midlife, already connected to their community, it would not be at all appealing.
KSS: Right. Every diocese is realizing that not everybody needs to go through this same formation process, that to let somebody learn at home in every sense of the way makes it more likely that they're going to be equipped to continue to serve at home. And that at-homeness also helps to anchor the Episcopal Church in many different kinds of communities. But I want to point out that School for Ministry also works for people who could have gone to seminary, and it’s not a given that if you go through the program you're never leaving home.
SSA: Yes, it’s still a ‘portable profession.’ So, how does School for Ministry work? Is it a remote experience?
KSS: So, our association with the Iona Collaborative at the Seminary of Southwest in Austin, Texas, brings that graduate level instructional content to our students, with recorded lectures by seminary faculty, and course syllabi based on these from SSW. We use a “flipped classroom”: the content delivery—the prep work, the reading and the lecture-watching—happens on the students’ own time, and then, during our monthly study weekends, the time together with your peers and your instructor is to go deeper to make connections. Those seminar groups, the once-a-month study weekends, are local and led by priests in New Hampshire. We’re on site in fall and spring, and on line (over Zoom) during the winter
SSA: And New Hampshire is not unique in this. There are 30-some dioceses around the country also using this program.
SSA: Yes. This has been at the core of Southwest's identity. This is the way they're being a 21-century seminary is not just focusing on the people who are there on the ground in Austin, but on partnering with dioceses who are doing local formation. And, they're also leaning into supporting, nurturing, and continuing to educate not just clergy who are being bi-vocational or being a priest, but congregations. Because what they've found is that when a congregation makes that shift from having one full-time professional pastor to having somebody who's with them less than full-time, that makes real changes in the system of the congregation as well. And the fact is, it's not just the priest who is bi-vocational. The whole congregation is bi-vocational. And lay people step into leadership. They need formation, they need support, they need education, they need peers.
SSA: So, there are programs, say, for a senior warden who is taking on more leadership, perhaps because the priest is only half-time?
KSS: Just this year the Iona Collaborative is launching what is essentially group spiritual direction for leaders in these congregations. They're really investing in those lay leaders whose title may still be senior warden, but it's a very different job to be senior warden to someone who is collaborating with a full-time rector than a senior warden who is collaborating with somebody who's being a hospital chaplain half the time and is your priest half the time. That's where that formation for all the baptized comes in.
SSA: So, what do you see down the road?
KSS: Oh gosh. There is so much. People are hungry to go deeper in their faith, and people also see that they need to be equipped with skills. And all of this contributes to the role of formation in helping congregations grow healthier and healthier and more and more vital. So, there is plenty to do from the various straightforward practical things like, “how to lead morning prayer” workshops, to how do you offer pastoral care, to congregational development work. There's more than enough to do.
SSA: The word formation: I don't remember hearing that ever in conversations with my dad; is that a fairly new term?
KSS: It's replaced “Christian education,” for the most part. And I think it's useful because when you stop to think about what it means, it maybe makes it more likely for people to remember that growing in faith, growing in spiritual maturity is not just a head thing where you learn more. It's about forming your life to the life of Christ, or to be formed into the body of Christ. If the word is working as a label for the practice, it works because it reminds us that it's not just about learning stuff, it's about being formed, being shaped, being molded, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, all those things.
SSA: What excites you the most about this work?
KSS: Seeing someone claim for themselves and really embracing with their heart, living their faith and bringing their whole self to their faith. And that, as a baptized person, this is their blessing and their call and their gift, and this is what you do. And it's when that spark lights that, ‘Oh, I've got work to do. Not just go to church on Sunday morning, but I have a ministry.’ When that happens, you go, ‘You're on fire, go, go, go, go.’
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