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Since her graduation from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1982, Smith has resided in Huntington (W. Va.), Cincinnati and five Kentucky communities (Newport, Lexington, Danville, Louisville and Henderson). In our diocese, she has been interim rector at St. Paul's Church (2002-2003), Church of the Advent (2003-2004), both in Louisville, and St. Paul's Church, Henderson (2006-2007).Although Smith has done "tenured ministry" a couple of times, including more than four years at Church of the Redeemer in Cincinnati, she has primarily served congregations as a supply priest and interim rector.
Among the second wave of Episcopal women ordained to the priesthood, she said she had found interim ministry "to be the most open track for a woman who believes that she is called to be a head of a parish" because there are still a lot of congregations that will tolerate a woman priest in an assisting position but not as its primary person.
While being an interim rector is challenging because it means engaging and disengaging with congregations every 12 to 18 months, she said, it has also enabled her to meet people she never would have met and caused her to develop skill sets for the different congregational ministries she has undertaken. As a result she brings a breadth of church experience to diocesan ministry.
The call to become the new canon could not have been better timed. Her position as interim rector of St. Paul's Church in Henderson had recently end after 19 months when then Canon to the Ordinary Jay Magness accepted a call to serve as interim rector of a prish in Virginia. She said that when she learned about that Magness was leaving, she knew she could "do that job in a New York minute" and sent her resume and a note to the bishop. Though he never saw it because was out of town at the time, he apparently had the same idea, for when she next saw him at St. Paul's he told her the wanted to talk with her about the canon to the ordinary position, she said and added laughing, "It was really a harmonic convergence."
After only one week on the job, Smith said that she has only been surprised by "how natural it feels so quickly." Not only did she already know the diocesan staff, but she feels she has been preparing for the position for since her ordination if not before when independent intellectual, professional and spiritual streams in her life converged with her decision to become a priest.
Not a cradle Episcopalian, she became fascinated with the denomination while visiting an Episcopal Church in Beckley, W. Va., and watching its rector, the Rev. Worth May, "who was radiantly in love with what he was doing at the altar. It became clear that was holy time. I was fascinated by that because at my home church the pastor did a lot of shouting and getting red in the face." Her options to do church work were few since she wasn't an Episcopalian and the priesthood wasn't an option then anyway.
As a first-year student at Randolph Macon College in Lynchburg, Va., however, she became particularly intrigued by the "vocational clarity" of another undergraduate woman, Carter Heyward, who was a couple of years older and later was one of the Philadelphia Eleven who were "irregularly ordained" priests in the mid-1970s before the Episcopal Church allowed women's ordination.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science, Smith became a psychiatric social worker in an outpatient mental health center during a "fascinating time" when state mental health hospitals were releasing people who had been institutionalized for years, she said. She also was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and together with her rector established an ecumenical crisis hotline and intervention center, of which she eventually became executive director. She decided to become a priest, after her rector helped her eliminate the reasons she gave for not considering the priesthood.
Over the course of her career, she has served more than 40 congregations, which have ranged from an urban cathedral to a church with five members and a piano she repaired with dental floss. Not only does she have long experience in staff management, ministering to organizations and congregational development, but she is also accustomed to working with organizations across a broad geographic spectrum. Before she went to the seminary, she was on a career path with the Girl Scouts, supervising a professional staff and the council overseeing 17 to18 counties in West Virginia and Ohio.
This experience will be useful because the canon not only manages the diocesan staff and the diocese's daily operations under the authority of the bishop but is also responsible for the diocese's congregational development.
Since the Rev. Mark Linder, retired rector of Christ Church, Bowling Green, has taken over the former canon's clergy deployment responsibilities, the new canon will now be free "to do routine pastoral care and development" with all of the diocese's 37 congregations, including those that are healthy and not in transition. This will enable the canon to help nurture "really healthy" congregations "so we can make them stronger," said Smith. "I envision less crisis management and more routine congregational development."
With that end in mind, she has already introduced one practice at weekly staff meetings: Each will begin with prayers for the diocese's congregations, organizations and clergy identified in the weekly diocesan cycle of prayer. "I want to make sure that we on the staff are a community of prayer for the diocese."
