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Today’s guest is the Rev. Lee Ann Tolzmann, who currently serves on the staff for ECCT as Canon for Mission Leadership, and we’ll talk about what that means.

Lee Ann grew up mostly in Virginia Beach, Virginia, but graduated from Glastonbury High School in Connecticut. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and General Theological Seminary. Lee Ann was ordained in the Diocese of Maryland, she served as the Assistant Rector at St. Andrew’s, Glenwood (Howard County, Maryland), and Rector of the Church of the Messiah in Baltimore. Lee Ann came to Connecticut in 2008 to serve as the Rector of St. Paul’s Church, Riverside. In 2015 she accepted the position of Canon for Mission Leadership for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. Lee Ann’s main role is working with parishes in transition and helping to find proper placements for clergy in transitions. She also helps to break down the misconception of what “ministry” looks like — mainly that it doesn’t look like a full-time rectorship anymore.

She is married to David, owner of the Labyrinth Company and one of our first guests on the podcast.  They live in Berlin, CT and have two grown daughters.

Welcome Lee Ann! 

Alli starts with a tough question: What does ministry look like right now and how has that shifted over time, and is it the same in other dioceses? Lee Ann jumps right in to tell us about the changes and how churches are responding. It’s not as bad as it could be ...

She describes the difference in the various titles ECCT uses for parish priests, primarily between rector and priests-in-charge, and ECCT variants of those priests-in-charge.

We talked about the challenge of finding priests who can serve as missional priests-in-charge in particular, defined as less than half time. Some are only 10 hours a week – the minimum needed. Retired priests are less likely than in prior years and decades to take on these jobs, and training and formation is slowly adjusting to allow more people to be ordained who will also have other employment, generally secular. The need for more part-time clergy is increasing and the number of available priests isn’t really keeping pace with that need.

Alli asked if enough young people are being ordained to replace all the current Baby Boomer generation priests who are now retiring; Lee Ann gave more statistics and noted that in the 1980s and 1990s bishops chose not to ordain younger people, and while this has now changed, that affected both the supply of priests and prevented the church from receiving the charism that younger clergy bring.

But the fact is, she said, we don’t have, and aren’t going to have, enough priests in ECCT for  every parish to have its own priest, and the change in model is very difficult for many lay leaders to accept – even though that model was an anomaly in the Anglican Communion and in The Episcopal Church.

We switched topics, and Karin asked Lee Ann to share how she came to be a priest, herself, about living in Baltimore, and about her time serving in parishes in Baltimore and later, in ECCT. She arrived in Riverside right after the financial crisis hit, in 2008, and found preaching to be especially important in that community at that time.

We asked for her reflections on the future of the church, and she’s hopeful – as long as the focus is on what God is doing, and following that -- and not on “growing the church.”