Actually, I have two job titles at St. Paul & St. James: Minister of Christian Nurture and Children’s Missioner.
I’m now the senior staff member at St. PJ’s, having begun work here in 1979, when St. PJ’s was still St. Paul’s. For three years before that, I was a volunteer Sunday School teacher.
I was born in Illinois, but grew up in Washington, DC, Paris, and London, thanks to my father’s career in the US Foreign Service. My road to the Episcopal Church ran through Anglican schools in London and my brother’s stint as a choirboy in Washington Cathedral. I was baptized at 14 and started teaching Sunday School as soon as they would let me. I majored in English at Bryn Mawr and went on to a Ph.D. in medieval English literature at Yale.
Eventually it dawned on me that though I might set out to do literary criticism I always ended up doing theology, and that I cared more about preparing kids for confirmation than about teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates. If ordination had been open to women when I graduated from college, I might have applied to seminary. Instead, I got married, finished my Ph.D., and had a baby. When the baby was two months old, St. Paul’s offered me a part-time paid position as Christian education coordinator. Twenty-five years later, I’m still here: the work and I have grown together.
For sixteen years, my job was officially ten hours a week. During that time I was able to be home with my three daughters, minister with a generation of children and their families, and develop a large and still-growing body of programs and resources that were first tried here and then shared with the larger church: lectionary cartoons (The Sunday Paper); resources for communion and baptism (Alleluia! Amen and New Life); pageants and seasonal celebrations (Go, Tell It on the Mountain, Risen With Christ, and I Love Christmas), and now the Beulah Land feltboard story materials that we offer through Beulah Enterprises right here at St. PJ’s. In 1992 Cowley Publications asked me to write Offering the Gospel to Children.
In 1995, with my two older children in middle school and high school and the youngest in preschool, my job became a full-time one as the newly merged parish of St. Paul & St. James established the Children’s Mission of St. Paul and St. James. I’m still doing the Sunday School, but as Children’s Missioner I’m also responsible for after-school, evening, and summer programs with inner-city kids, and welcoming families that join the parish through the Children’s Mission.
As parish educator, writer, artist, and evangelist, my work has involved a continuing effort to find creative and responsible ways of offering the Gospel to children. I couldn’t have done any of it without the support of clergy and colleagues here at St. PJ’s, and my family: my husband Arnie and our daughters Grace, Margaret and Marion.
