One pulpit, shared by two part-time ministers who happen to be married.
The temporary arrangement has been the answer to a prayer for Christ Episcopal Church, whose members had been searching for a part-time priest to lead them spiritually without strapping them financially.
For the Revs. Randall Balmer and Catharine Randall, whose careers as college professors, writers and public speakers keep them plenty busy, the arrangement with this small but devoted congregation satisfies a spiritual need the couple have longed to fill.
“What is so great about it is immediately, they understood that we were a team … working together,” said Balmer, a prize-winning historian who has written a dozen books on faith and religion and is professor of American religious history at Barnard College in New York City and a visiting professor at Dartmouth College. “I love being a professor and a priest. For me, one informs the other.”
“It’s wonderful; I’m so happy,” said Catharine Randall, a professor of French at Fordham University in New York and the author of eight scholarly books and several articles and publications related to religion and spirituality.
Read it all from the front page of today’s Hartford Courant.
We will see more of this in CT with such a large percentage of small, financially strained parishes.
To judge form the photo, it looks like they don’t have more than 30 people in a nice building. Why don’t they sell up to an ACNA congregagtion looking for space and rent a school hall?
ACNA is not exactly a big presence up here, azusa. Certainly, I don’t know of any that are “out in the sticks” like Christ Church is.
by the way, attendance is pretty light in most churches in CT during the snowy months. you can’t judge ASA by a mid-winter picture.