A Gospel of ChangeAlumna Katharine Jefferts Schori reflects on a lifetime of inciting, and embracing, transformation.

On a recent Sunday in Wyoming, Katharine Jefferts Schori, M.S. ’77, Ph.D. ’83, led a congregation in a Eucharistic prayer. It was an unconventional one written in 1985 by Linen Greenough. The prayer described the shouts of wind and birdsong that emanate from the prairie, the towering peaks of the mountain ranges, and the trout, deer and elk with which Wyoming’s human inhabitants share their space. “Our lives are lived between sunrises and sunsets and brilliant colors,” Jefferts Schori read out. “But at night the limitless stars have a way of pushing back the boundaries of our lives, and we dream of heaven and your wonder.”

Delivering the prayer, Jefferts Schori was struck by the ways that a community can adapt demonstrations of faith to its own reality. “I’d never seen anything quite like that,” she said when we spoke over the phone a few days later.

She led the service as part of her work as interim assistant bishop for the Episcopal Church in Wyoming — a role that functioned as a coda to a career in the church that has spanned nearly four decades and five states, and seen her ascend from being a priest at the Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis to becoming the first woman to lead the Episcopal Church, steering the institution through a period of dramatic turbulence.

I’ve always had a penchant for supporting the underdog, because I’ve been there, as a woman.

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But long before Jefferts Schori was elected presiding bishop, she was a graduate student in teuthology, the study of cephalopods. She’d been a precocious student, the child of a physicist and a microbiologist, and started her studies at Oregon State in 1974 at age 20. Not long after she arrived in Corvallis, a childhood friend died in a plane crash, and she turned to the church for solace. She’d been looking for community, she said, but began to see all these overlaps between science and faith. They were united by notions of mystery, creativity, creation and asking questions.

“I think a lot of people, particularly in that era, thought that they were completely separate,” she said. “I’ve often used the image of having two eyes that see things differently.”

By the time she’d graduated, she said, academics across the country were facing increased competition for federal research dollars. (“The faculty is spending an inordinate amount of time going after grants, rather than thinking,” one department chair at the University of Chicago told the New York Times in 1982.) Much of it was going to defense research; there were very few jobs out there for a woman who studied squid.

Then, something happened that would keep happening over the course of her career: She received an invitation. Or plural invitations, really. Marcus Borg, the late chair of religious studies at Oregon State, asked her to teach a class in his department, and other members of her church congregation asked her if she’d ever considered becoming a priest.

In 2001, six years after Jefferts Schori was ordained, she embarked on an ambitious sabbatical, touring the Western states and interviewing church leaders to learn how their congregations had changed.

As she was leaving Sparks, Nevada, the priest there asked to put her up for election as the bishop for the state. “I just laughed at her,” Jefferts Schori said. “I said, ‘That’s just totally
crazy. I’m too young; I’m a woman; I haven’t been a priest for very long. Ha, ha, ha.’”

And then she won.

This now-familiar scenario unfolded again a scant few years later. The election for presiding bishop — the leader of the Episcopal Church — was approaching, in 2006, and a handful of her peers suggested she consider candidacy.

All of the familiar self-doubts were there: her age, her gender, her relative inexperience — not to mention that most of the presiding bishops up until this point (all of whom had been men) had come from larger, more urban districts on the East Coast. “Yeah, right,” Jefferts Schori recalled thinking.

At the time, the Episcopal Church was in the midst of a vicious debate over gay rights, which had produced divisions within the Anglican Communion at large.

“There were people saying some pretty horrible things against each other,” said Charles Robertson, who served as her canon — essentially, her senior adviser— after she was elected primate. “Let’s put it this way: not unlike the political climate of more recent years,” he said.

Jefferts Schori would be among the most liberal leaders on the ballot; she had supported the election of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop, in New Hampshire, in 2003, as well as the blessing of same-sex partnerships.

She won again.

She sees [conflict] as…not unlike an ecosystem disturbance, in which a sudden change to an environment may spark new growth.

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The mere fact of Jefferts Schori’s election as the first woman to hold the position of presiding bishop made it impossible to look away from issues confronting the church. A contemporaneous National Public Radio report noted the parallels between debates over the role of women in the church in the ’70s and over gay rights in the ’00s. But her own experiences also made her especially suited to the challenge.

“I’ve always had a penchant for supporting the underdog, because I’ve been there, as a woman,” Jefferts Schori said.

The year she came to Oregon State was the first that women were permitted to embark on overnight research trips at sea. Explicitly conservative attitudes toward women in science were only just starting to budge. She recalls one voyage when a captain refused to speak to her directly — and she was the chief scientist on board.

Jefferts Schori describes herself as someone who, by temperament, does not shy away from conflict. Instead, she sees it as a productive site of potential evolution — perhaps not unlike an ecosystem disturbance, in which a sudden change to an environment may spark new growth.

Steering that evolution, as she tells it, is the primary role of the bishop. “If you stay in one place and never invite another thought or another perspective, you’re dying inside,” Jefferts Schori said.

On reflection, this might have been her greatest contribution during her tenure as presiding bishop: “I think I helped the church, and the people in the church, realize that new things could happen, and the world wouldn’t fall apart.”