Mary Catherine Sulerud
Born: February 14, 1951
Married to Peder A. Sulerud, 1 child
Ordained to the Priesthood in 1989
BS St. Cloud State College; M Div Virginia Theological Seminary
Canonical Status: Washington, DC
Current Position: Canon for Deployment and Vocational Ministry
Previous clergy Positions: Interim Canon Precentor, Washington National Cathedral; Canon for Stewardship; Rector, Church of the Ascension, Silver Spring, MD; Assistant to the Rector, Grace Church, Alexandria, VA.
Question: Why do you want to become a bishop? What special gifts would you bring to this Diocese? What are the pluses and minuses of being a bishop in the Episcopal Church?
Answer: Having spent a morning working with the Bishop of Washington about strategies for a conflicted congregation and listening to the anxieties of eleven deacons about to be ordained priest I wondered if I had a cogent answer as to why I want to be a bishop, let alone a desire to be one. In many ways I don’t. Being in the process is an exercise in discernment for me about the episcopacy. I am drawn to the call because of the capacity of the bishop to bring unity among the many diverse missions of congregations within a diocese and the hope of bringing the gospel and the church to the next generation through this unified mission. The bishop is given a unique opportunity as a teacher to call the people of the diocese to examine their history, their expectations and their hopes and dreams for the future and ask questions as a reconciler about the new history to which God is always calling us to make. I want to be bishop because I am wrestling with a call to do more than I am able as part of an Episcopal staff to encourage people pastorally to embody their unique vision/mission of discipleship in the name of Christ. I do a terrific job embodying our Bishop’s vision, but I am wondering if that’s enough.
I bring to this the gifts of being a pastor, teacher, healer and reconciler. I don’t enter difficult situations to pick up the pieces, but to ask what would make the situations different, engaging people in being party to their reconciliation. I have never viewed healing as a cure or a cessation of disease or condition, but an opportunity to reequip the saints for discipleship and ministry. While I have often prayed and wished otherwise, I entered seminary and ordained ministry always in the thick of the controversy about human sexuality. I have been given two important gifts out of that, one, never to be afraid of controversy and conflict; two the capacity to value and reach out to those who differed most from me, serving as a “bridge”, seeking those things that we held in common and lifting up difference as part of the richness of unity, not its undoing.
I think there are three huge minuses in being a Bishop in this church right now. 1) We are hugely distracted from the mission of the church by the fight over human sexuality. This has now morphed into a conflict over who/what is the true Anglican communion/church because one side understands the issue not to be salvific and the other side sees it as profoundly so. 2) The ongoing confusion of civil religion with being a community of faith; 3) continued loss of the next generation because we don’t give them support beyond confirmation to mature in the faith as faithful, hopeful, charitable questioners of it and because we ignore one of their great concerns stewardship of the environment. The three pluses are of course an opportunity to address all of the above!
Question: What are you passionate about in you ministry, your personal life, and in the world around you?
Answer: I am passionate in my ministry about being a companion to those who discerning a call to any ministry, lay or ordained. When I am privileged to listen to these journeys and help those participating in them by being present and asking reflective questions, it becomes an intense renewal of my own sense of call. I delight in having work that is entwined by the calls of individuals and communities. I am also passionate about being part of the “birth team” for the proposed guidelines for a “vocational” diaconate in the Diocese of Washington, the first ever for this diocese. I also love working with congregations in transition, searching for their next ordained leader.
In my life my husband and I share a passion for travel and being in and among people of different cultures. We especially like it when we have the time literally to live as “aliens and strangers” among those who are very different from us. This sort of encounter has broadened my understanding of God, God’s people and my own cultural assumptions. It has also helped me occasionally open my eyes to prejudices that I have that I didn’t even know existed. (One moment with respect to this was ordering LEVAS II for the parish to use because I served as a rector of a racially diverse parish only to discover that the diversity was far more complex than I understood. It was a mix of members from a number of West African countries and who were Afro-Caribbean and African-American. The former had no relationship to the hymnody of LEVAS II, being Anglicans and the latter did. They were very kind to me as I sorted through those bad assumptions!)
I have had a long standing commitment personally and pastorally to environmental issues and am now trying to figure out how to be more active globally in this area. If we help people economically and do not contextualize this aid in light of global warming and pollution in the world and curb our addiction to oil all of those wonderful MDG’s will be for not.
Question: Please share 2 or 3 critical moments from your spiritual journey that helped you become the priest you are today.
Answer: The first critical moment in my spiritual journey that shaped me as a priest was the lay ministry that I was part of in my 20’s leading worship in a nursing home. I learned that regardless of how much dementia a person may be experiencing there are certain memories that are never forgotten, such as the ability to say the Lord’s Prayer and sing the Doxology and often the 23rd psalm. Prayer and the ability to speak to God stay with us no matter how well or how poorly our brains are functioning. The other realization that I had was that visits by outsiders had a powerful impact on the staff, especially nursing home managers. In this nursing home full of people on Medicare their outward and visible standard of living shifted up a bit. Leaks were repaired, floors mopped and people were dressed and clean when we began arriving regularly to lead worship.
The second moment was the long-standing challenge of leading a congregation as a rector and being a parent with my husband of a teen-age daughter who was seeking new, creative and interesting ways to be outrageous, skip school and generally live into every bad dream we have about our kids. This was going on at the same time that we were attempting in the parish to address 30+ years of deferred maintenance and a growing congregation that was “house poor”. I learned to die to my ambitions and expectations for both the congregation and my daughter and to try and listen to the congregation, our daughter and God. In the case of the congregation we did things we never dreamed were possible. In the case of our daughter it allowed us to stay connected, and it gave her the space to get close to the edge of life without falling away completely.
The third moment was being part of a congregation that was a founding member of Action in Montgomery an interfaith Industrial Area Foundation organization that organized local congregations around agreed upon goals to transform the community to serve the poor and others who were disenfranchised from the civic life and welfare of a very wealthy county in metropolitan Washington. The congregation was one that was very active in outreach and overseas missionary work, but really burning out from these ministries. What AIM gave us was an opportunity to address the systemic local issues that underlie homeless and hungry people, seniors who are stuck at home and unable to get out to medical appointments because transportation via taxis is too expensive, kids who walk to school on busy streets without sidewalks and without access to school buses because they speak Spanish and live in apartment complexes. We were able to make common cause with other faith traditions and see transformative action as a result. It reinvigorated the outreach because people could serve both immediate needs and some of the causes of those needs.
Question: Describe how you have displayed respect for the dignity and worth of every human being.
Answer: Sadly I haven’t respected the dignity and worth of every human being, but here’s where I may have gotten it. When serving in a hospital as a seminarian in CPE I was rebuked by a man for being a woman preparing for ordination. I was haunted by his words and his anger and mostly gave him the silent treatment when I visited others who shared his room. Finally, one day I went to him and said that I understood that we didn’t agree about women “ministers” and wondered if we could simply pray together. We did and I always included him in my prayers with everyone in his room while he was a patient.
After being active in an Episcopal congregation in which gay and lesbian members were fully welcomed I went to Virginia Seminary with a very conservative class theologically. My relationship with my classmates and my desire to fit in made me question my belief in the ordination of gays and lesbians, particularly when they are partnered. While serving as an assistant a clergy friend asked me to work as a spiritual director with a young woman who was a lesbian with a life partner whom he felt was called to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. After a year of trying to find some way of making everyone okay about who should be ordained I realized that I wasn’t being at all fair to this young woman and her needs and her calling. It wasn’t long after sharing that with her that I realized that God had wonderfully created all of us, regardless of our sexuality. I realized how sinful it would be of me to ask her to be someone she wasn’t for the sake of people who were opposed to her calling because of her sexuality. She went through the process in another diocese and was not made a postulant for holy orders. We remain good friends and I remain grateful for the way in which she opened my eyes to a deeper reality of God’s creative and redemptive Spirit.
Question: Please describe how you have responded personally, and in you ministry to decisions made at the 74th and 75th General Conventions?
Answer: I work in and for a diocese that is, and is perceived as being very liberal or progressive. However that label belies a far more complex reality. Many of our congregations are in fact quite moderate to traditional. There are a few quite traditional congregations. I think that 2003 had a very great congregational impact and 2006 was full of great hope around the election of the Presiding Bishop and great sadness for many gay and lesbian clergy at the stasis around the enduring questions about their ordination and blessing unions.
In 2003 I was personally quite supportive of the election of Bishop Robinson. (There was in fact an interview of me on the BBC about this, speaking in support of our Bishop and the Convention’s action.) With respect to the diocese, the staff members were equipped to work with clergy, vestries and congregations to help them listen and respond faithfully to people who were unhappy and people who were very supportive. For me the greatest challenge was helping people be angry in appropriate ways, listen to anger without being bullied by emotional bad behavior and disrespect. It is alright to have boundaries and to assess how much raw emotion people can handle at any given time.
The other part of this that I wish were addressed about 2003, and we only did this on occasion, was to spend sufficient time in our most distressed congregations to develop enough trust to ask the question if the anger was about human sexuality or something else. In several cases we had congregations that had been in decline and thus the decision of the 2003 General Convention to elect a gay bishop with a partner was understood as their death knell, the reason for more people to leave. In places that are struggling in which we’ve really focused on a variety of congregational issues related to mission and the fears and anxieties around loss and change we’ve actually seen some stability and in some cases growth.
Equally true I have supported our Bishop as he has established alternative Episcopal oversight in one congregation as a way of helping them stay at the table and be faithful to their theological convictions. This has led to this congregation becoming reengaged enough to host diocesan events.
In searches in some of our more traditional congregations the willingness of gay and lesbian candidates to be in those searches in faithful ways has led to some extraordinary openness to calling a rector who may be gay or lesbian. It has also opened the eyes of congregational leaders to the reality of who is sitting in their pews and working on behalf of the kingdom.
The most recent General Convention has meant that I need to be very attentive to insuring that our gay and lesbian clergy get a fair hearing in searches, a chance to be at tables and be in conversation with the leadership of congregations
Question: As a bishop, how would you respond to the controversies of the church today?
Answer: It’s very difficult for me to be very specific about controversies without one in front of me. However, here’s my general MO and I can’t imagine it would be very different regardless of what ministerial order I was in.
When faced with a congregational controversy there is simply no substitute for a conversation with the leadership of the congregation to listen, gather information, reflect and pray. I don’t like to engage in these meetings alone and often go out as part of a team with other staff. Some controversies are in fact amenable to dialogue once expectations and concerns have been expressed and a movement forward identified. I am a great believer in using mutually agreed upon consultant help in conducting dialogues.
I also think that there is no substitute for ongoing communication from the bishop after General Convention and House of Bishops’ meetings that is both written and personal through visitations and open area meetings. This puts people into a relationship with the bishop in which issues can be discussed outside of the realm of governance. I also believe in using the diocesan council (or executive board) and the standing committee as councils of advice to the bishop as is done routinely in this diocese.
We are engaged in this diocese in a fair amount of work in the area of racial reconciliation. The current election process is a reminder just how charged any conversation about race is in this country. I think we’ve adopted a helpful model for having these conversations and a number of strategic processes that are moving us into some different ways of thinking about race and the inequality that attends to our treatment of those who are not white. A task force appointed by our diocesan council elected to move away from “anti-racism” as the hallmark of this work and instead began looking at models of reconciliation instead. This has led to extensive training in how to have conversations about race and talk to each other about systemic injustice related to racial prejudice that may be rooted as much in attempting to do the “good” as it is in doing what is wrong. What is different about this training is that it encourages and equips people to go back to congregations and engage them in the conversations and work that they experienced in the week-end of training. At the same time we have a task force looking at the history and ministry of our historic African-American congregations and what the future holds for them in light of changing demographics including a more pluralistic culture ethnically, linguistically and racially. We are also beginning to examine the impact of slavery in this diocese and what this means for our common life and mission now. This isn’t a perfect model for addressing controversies, but I credit our Bishop for supporting what wasn’t the “norm” in this area as a way of perhaps breaking open our lives. I think this is well worth emulating.