Summer 1979
St. Margaret's Episcopal Church,
Belfast, Maine

When my friend, the Rev. R. Truman Fudge declared he was taking a sabbatical in 1979. I saw a solution for everyone. I offered to live in the rectory in Belfast, take the Sunday liturgies, attend the occasional vestry meeting and have 9 weeks in Maine in the summah. The good folks at Grace Church, Elmira agreed to the plan.

It happened that Father Fudge was a book collector and had an enormous theological library. I spent each morning from 9:00 to Noon in study. At the end of the summer I had read almost 30 books, planned sermons for a whole year, ate a lot of clams and lobster.

The interim task was to intepret Father Fudge's radical theology of the baptized to the wondering leaders of the parish. This year in which the current Book of Common Prayer was published was the rest of the Church's introduction to what some people call "lay ministry". We had been taught that the ministry belongs to Jesus and is shared with the faithful through baptism. Bishop Alexander of Atlanta claims that this is the most important transformation in the church in the 20th century.