I have informed the Church Pension Group of my intent to retire on December 31, 2025. It’s been quite the journey!
I first began to discern a call to ordained ministry during
my junior year abroad, in St. Andrew’s, Scotland. I am grateful that the young woman
I met on the first day of international students orientation that fall of 1983, Hathy MacMahon,
was there throughout that process and for these past forty years. I know many
clergy who had “first careers” and the partner who married a lawyer or teacher
or accountant has to “adjust” to being married to a priest. Hathy has been
there the whole time, as my ordained life has unfolded in Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and now Rhode Island.
My dad died suddenly and unexpected on April 30, 1982 – as I
was just at the end of my freshman year at Georgetown. I had gone there with
the plan to become a lawyer, and I was drawn to Washington, DC because I was
interested in politics. But at the time of my dad’s death I was in a required theology
class called “Problem of God.” The following year I took another required
class, “Introduction to the Bible.” Katharine Bates was an excellent Sunday
School teacher at the Hawley United Methodist Church and she gave me a solid
foundation – but Jouette Bassler made the Bible come to life for me, and raised
questions that did not have simple answers. By the time I headed off to St.
Andrew’s I was wondering if I might be called to become what at the time I
called “a Protestant Jesuit.”
When I came back the Board of Ordained Ministry of the Wyoming
Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church seemed amused at this
seemingly oxymoronic call. But they let me slide, and a few months after
graduating from Georgetown I found myself at Drew Theological School, on the
path toward ordination in the United Methodist Church. Hathy and I got married
(at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Lincoln, Massachusetts) at the end of my
first year at Drew, and she left a job at Dana Farber to join me in Madison,
New Jersey for my middler and senior years.
It was mostly because of her that we ended up at a Thursday
morning Eucharist at Grace Church in Madison, where the new rector (a guy named
Bob Ihloff, who would later be elected Bishop of Maryland) asked if I’d be his
seminarian during my senior year. When I told him “you know I’m a Methodist,
right?” he basically said, “who cares? Grace is next to a Methodist Seminary!”
I was far enough along in the process with the Methodists and not yet ready to make a denominational change. So on
a hot summer night in June 1988, I was ordained at Elm Park United Methodist
Church in Scranton, PA. Hathy had a good job in New Jersey and we were house
sitting for a professor who had gone for a stint out to the west coast, so I
enrolled at Princeton Seminary in a ThM program in Church History. I also
accepted a call to serve part-time as the pastor of the Hampton United
Methodist Church in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. One year later I received a
call to become the Protestant Campus Minister at Central Connecticut State University
in New Britain, Connecticut. We packed up and moved and I felt on my way to
becoming a “Protestant Jesuit.”
Over the years I’ve preached at maybe a dozen or more
ordinations. I usually make the bishop who is officiating squirm when I say
that I believe that the notion that priests are “essentially changed” when a
bishop puts her hands on a priest’s head is a stretch for me. Rather,
I believe ordination is existential – or to say it another way, we become the priest/pastor
we are meant to become over time, shaped by (for better or worse) the people among
whom we serve. At CCSU, I worked closely with a Roman Catholic colleague and
also a Reconstuctionist rabbi; I learned that ministry is not done in silos but
is always at it’s best ecumenical and even interfaith. I learned from faculty
that you can be “wicked smart” in Economics and still have a Sunday School
education in theology – and that part of the work of a Campus Minister is to
help people grow in their faith, which is sometimes hard to do in a parochial
setting. I learned that “kids” may not attend much “church” but that doesn’t
mean they aren’t asking big life questions about purpose and meaning. I am proud
that four of my students ended up ordained and my four years there changed me
for good. (Who can say if I was changed for the better?”)
Hathy, the lay Episcopalian, and I, the United Methodist
campus minister, went looking for a church home. We went “church shopping” in
New Britain and landed at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, where the rector was a
guy named Malcolm (“Father Mac”) McDowell. He also happened to be president of
my campus ministry board. Over the course of the next couple of years the seeds
that had been planted at Grace Church in Madison began to take root and grow,
and I spoke with Mac and then Bishop Arthur Walmsley about what it would take for
me to become an Episcopal priest. A new way to imagine being a “Protestant Jesuit”
in a denomination that saw itself as a “middle way” between Catholic and Protestant.
Honestly, Bishop Walmsley made it pretty easy for me – easier than it often is
for folks to make denominational changes. He just had one request/demand: that
when ordained, I accept a call in a parish so that I could live more fully into
this new chapter.
I never felt I was “renouncing” my first orders. In fact, I
felt I was being true to the Wesley boys, John and Charles, by returning to
their spiritual home. I still feel that way. I was feeling called to a more liturgical
and sacramental denomination but John Westley’s commitment to the poor and
social justice and even his “strangely warmed heart” continue to resonate with
me, and I remain grateful for all that the United Methodist Church did to set
me on my path. Even so, when I arrived at Christ and Holy Trinity Church in
Westport, Connecticut as transitional deacon and then soon after a “baby priest”
I felt I’d come home.
I was loved into becoming an Episcopal priest at Christ and
Holy Trinity and mentored by the rector, John Branson, and a colleague who
would become a lifelong friend, Pete Powell. Pete was never subtle. I told him
one morning I needed to get “robed” and he responded, “Methodists robe.
Episcopalians vest.” When I preached a great sermon he cheered me on, but just
as often he would say, “why did you stop short of where that was headed? What
if you had done this?” I was thinner skinned then than I am today but even at
the time I was grateful for something few clergy ever get: honest, critical
feedback.
But more than Arthur or John or Pete, it was the laity at
Christ and Holy Trinity that helped me to discover my vocation. I fell in love
with being a parish priest because of them. So when John went on sabbatical
about four years in, and I got to move from the second chair to the first chair
for a few months, I knew that I was called to parish ministry. I began to look
for my next call and landed at St. Francis Church in Holden, Massachusetts on
February 1, 1998. I stayed for just over fifteen years.
Again, God’s people there changed me for good. (Who can say
if I was changed for the better?) In addition to my work as their rector, I got
to chair the Commission on Ministry for my diocese. I got to do a DMin degree
at Columbia Theological Seminary which led to a part-time adjunct gig teaching
the Bible at Assumption College. (Protestant Jesuit?) Fifteen years, in my
view, is just about the right tenure to serve a congregation. I don’t think the
real stuff starts to happen until at least eight or nine years in. Those last
six years or so were transformative. Baptisms, funerals, weddings – but mostly
the day in and day out of walking the journey with people trying to follow
Jesus was grace upon grace for me. I was happy there.
When the Standing Committee asked if I’d chair the Bishop
Search Committee for our diocese in 2012, I immediately said yes. I had never
felt called to that ministry myself, but I knew it mattered. I wanted to be
helpful to my diocese. At the end of it all, Doug Fisher was elected to serve
as bishop and soon after he asked me to serve as his Canon to the Ordinary.
We were not looking to leave Holden. But it felt like a
call, and I said yes. We moved out of the rectory and shed some tears. I would
stay on with Doug for the next eleven and a half years.
Diocesan work is very different from parochial ministry or
campus ministry. I believe I did my job well and there was a lot of it that was
rewarding. I was once more leading from the second chair, which only works when
you like and respect the first chair! I felt like an imposter the first year or
two and honestly was grieving the loss of a gig that I had felt fulfilled in.
But in time I came to see that this work, while hard, was meaningful and
stretching me in good ways. Again I felt changed for good. I got to connect with
the breadth and depth of my denomination in ways that never would have happened
from Holden. I came to love the work.
And, more than a decade of diocesan work can take a toll as
well. I sometimes wonder if the Lutherans have the right idea by electing
bishops to terms – which presumably might mean their “canons” also serve for
nine or ten years. My boss (who is still my bishop) likes to say that in a
parish you get to “pop the champagne” when things go well; but in a diocese
that rarely happens. There is always the next thing. It’s harder to measure
systemic change; I’m sure it happens but a diocese is far more complex than a
parish. The pandemic began to awaken in me a call to return to parish ministry.
During my tenure as Canon to the Ordinary, a lot of my time
was spent on clergy transitions. In our denomination (unlike my previous one,
where the Bishop and Cabinet appoint clergy to their congregations) it is
a call system. I worked closely with vestries and search committees and clergy
looking to find a new call. I loved that part of the work. I also spent time
with interims and I had developed some very strong opinions about what that work
ought to be about and how often the opportunities were missed. I had an
argument once with an interim at one of our larger congregations who was
literally “breaking things” that had
been working. She told me, “if they don’t hate me when I leave, I haven’t done
my job.”
I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.
I saw interim ministry as more intense with it’s “time certainty” than an
open-ended call, and I saw it as very specific about getting some things done
to prepare for the future. But I also saw continuity with all parish work which
is always (always) about loving God’s people. And so I began to wonder (and my
heart felt strangely warmed when I did) about finishing my ordained life as an
interim priest in a congregation that needed to do some work and was ready to
do that work.
In October 2024 I accepted a call to serve as the Interim
Rector at St. Michael’s Church in Bristol, Rhode Island. When I retire I will
have served there for fifteen months – a good amount of time for an interim. Whatever
I will have accomplished, I don’t think they will hate me for it.
It strikes me that my first ministry at Hampton United
Methodist Church and now this one at St. Michael’s were the shortest tenures I’ve
had in a “career” that had four, five, fifteen and almost twelve year tenures in
between. I believe in longer-term ministries, full stop. Ministry takes time.
But I’m grateful for the intensity of these two book-end calls at the beginning and end of this nearly
forty years of my active ministry. Although in two different denominations, each of them remind me that lots can still happen in a short span of time, especially when you are "all in." Ministry always happens just one day at a time, whether it last for fifteen years or fifteen months. I'm grateful for it all, and I look forward to having fun this fall
at St. Michael’s all the way to Christmas.
People keep asking me what I will do next. I think it’s the
wrong question. I will still be Rich Simpson. I will be a son (my mother will
soon turn 80) and a brother and a husband and a father and a father-in-law and
a grandfather and a friend and neighbor. I’ll keep cooking. I will BE myself.
As a CREDO faculty member, before I was a conference leader I did the
vocational work and I always told people that they were more than priests –
they were beloved of God, baptized followers of Jesus – and that whatever work
they might be doing at any time that was true.
Even so, I get what people are asking. In terms of what I’ll
do, I will (God willing) continue to serve as CREDO faculty. I've begun to do some coaching and a little bit of spiritual direction and that feels right. I’ll take January-March
as a kind of sabbatical time although I hope (God willing) that I’ll get back
to the Holy Land in February to co-lead a pilgrimage, having recently made the
very difficult decision to postpone a pilgrimage we’d planned for this October.
I’ve agreed to cover a sabbatical from April – June at St. John’s in
Northampton. After that, who knows? Only God. But what I will do is say “yes”
to those things that bring me joy, things that are life-giving. Most of my ministry
has been but there has also been a fair amount of emotional labor that I’ve not
unpacked above!
Walter Brueggemann published over 100 books over his long
career. (May he rest in peace, and rise in glory.) I own many of them and have
read all of the ones I own. I was a bit of a fanboy of his when he used to show
up at the Trinity Institute, or the Festival of Homiletics. But when I did my DMin
at Columbia Theological Seminary I got to sit in his office and discuss
ministry and I got to sit in his class to deepen my appreciation for the psalms
and the prophets, especially Jeremiah. He was an extraordinary teacher and
human being.
Through all of that, I think I could summarize Walter's life’s
work (and I hope by extension in some small way, mine) as being committed to cultivating imagination, by which he meant that the Church
is called to offer an alternative reality to the consumer-militaristic culture
of modern America. We (ordained and lay) help people to imagine that it could
be otherwise by critiquing the dominant culture and also energizing people
toward God’s will for justice and compassion. I hope that my life work has been
about doing just this, and that this work will continue even when I am
receiving a check from the Church Pension Group each month. I am grateful for
it all – beyond measure. And ready to embrace the next chapter, always with God’s
help.
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