Hey, everyone. Joshua here. First, I’d like to express my deep gratitude to all of you who read my last post about discerning a call to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. Since sharing my story publicly for the first time, I’ve been shocked by an unexpected outpour of love and support and solidarity. My inbox has been flooded with messages from people sharing their own heartbreaking and eerily similar experiences with the Episcopal discernment process. My friend Atkinson is one of those people, and has graciously given permission for me to share their story with you.
Discerning
When you apply to start training to be a priest in the Episcopal Church, you often write what’s called a “spiritual autobiography,” the story of your life that demonstrates how God calls you to that vocation. This might be called a shadow version of that: a story of my life that demonstrates how, after a decade or so of discernment and formal training, I didn’t become a priest. How “the process” instead caused me lasting spiritual and moral, as well as financial, injury; how it shattered my sense of belonging within the church into which I was born and baptized.
I was moved to write about this time after reading Joshua Smith’s outline of his time in priestly discernment, published on his Substack in December 2023. I found his account striking in its thematic similarities to my story, even though the locations, people, and other details were so different. It suggested to me that something might be learned from reading our shared experiences together. I am deeply grateful to him for the opportunity to share this piece with his readers. My hope is to contribute to a conversation that may even yet lead to the greater glory of God, whom we know in the Christ who takes on our deepest frailties and in the church which that same Christ will never abandon.
I want to be clear that my story contains no villains. No one wanted this outcome for me, and my experience was shepherded by a community of good and thoughtful people. I believe that we all sincerely trusted the process. But even so, the outcome was irreparably harmful for me, in patterns that have grown too familiar. I have come to believe that something bigger than individual frailty is awry. Something is in the church’s culture and processes, its HR systems, its sacristies, its pension structure, its pulpits. Writing my story has helped me think about what the shape of this thing might be. I share it for those who are thinking about it, too.
Invitation
So. For as long as I can remember I have lived with recurrent, severe psychiatric symptoms in a pattern typical of the effects of ongoing trauma in childhood: depression, suicidal ideation, self-harming behaviors, dissociation and memory problems. I have undergone many kinds of treatment, of which by far the most fruitful has been psychoanalysis. This intensive process of learning to connect with my self and its authentic desires has been a source of deep healing and over time has transformed my life and my capacity.
My father and both my grandfathers were Episcopal priests, and I grew up singing in the choir, serving as an acolyte, and studying in Episcopal schools (on hefty scholarships). My first sense of vocation was to higher education: I started studying Biblical Hebrew in high school and fell in love with the languages and literature of the Bible as an undergraduate religion major. I earned an MTS in Biblical Studies in 2010 and got two years into a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Assyriology, before dropping out due to the combination of burnout, a mental health crisis, and the ongoing collapse of the academic job market.
That thing we term “the call” first came to me around 2012, shortly before I left my PhD program, during one of the times I was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric unit for suicidal ideation. I’ve never been more sick than that period. I did not expect to live to thirty. But I found that what persisted in this crisis of the self were a desire to make meaning with my fellow patients and a gift for fostering communities of shared care. As I started to make progress in therapy over the next year or two and thought about what kind of life I wanted to build, I channeled these experiences into participation in lay Eucharistic and healing ministries within my parish. Over time I came to believe that God was pointing me toward becoming a priest.
I knew, of course, that “God called me to be a priest in the psych ward” was going to be an alarming and scandalous call story for the Commission on Ministry. It felt alarming and scandalous to me. (Still does!) I also knew it was the best true story I had to tell. I felt that the paradoxes of the Gospel were being revealed within my life. I was painstakingly learning to discern the intimate mechanisms of God’s power, which is really, literally, made perfect in weakness. I prayed about it, and I chose to trust the church with this story: not to conceal or downplay my history of mental illness, but rather to name radical limit and contingency as the defining ground of my priestly vocation.
I began meeting with a priest from my parish in early 2013. I was encouraged to pursue discernment, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2018 that I entered seminary as a postulant. This lengthy timeline had some concrete reasons. I took several years to test a vocation to lay work in the church, in youth ministry and communications, work which I enjoyed but which kept pointing me toward becoming a priest. Later, just as I was applying for postulancy after a joyful and affirming parish discernment process, my spouse and I separated pending divorce, and the Commission on Ministry strongly recommended that I take an additional year of discernment. I did not believe that I needed more time, but I could see that the COM needed to see me taking it. Most of all, it was a shared point of faith that time was on our side, that nothing was lost and everything gained by a prolonged path to ordination. Even when l was finally admitted as a postulant, I learned to softpedal the urgency and confidence I felt toward my call. They were not welcomed, and I was unused to trusting my own discernment of the Spirit.
Formation
I found divinity school to be socially and spiritually rich. But I was haunted by past grad school experiences and could not access appropriate mental health care through my student insurance; my hard-won therapeutic progress started to slip without support. In spring 2020, the pandemic hit. I threw my energy into liturgies that I hoped might hold dispersed and grieving congregations, supporting online worship at churches in Napa Valley and Washington, DC, as well as organizing prayer and worship with my own seminary classmates. At the conclusion of a seminary experience spent half in isolation, I had passed the General Ordination Exams and had fruitful internship experiences as a summer camp chaplain and parish seminarian. But there was one more major training component to complete before I could apply for candidacy, the next stage in the ordination process: a required CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) unit.
I graduated in the spring of 2021 and took a “gap” job at an Episcopal retreat center while I completed a part-time CPE unit. What was advertised as a junior ministry role ended up being a full-time-and-then-some operations and project management gig. The ministry opportunities had been added on top to attract someone like me, largely because the challenging organizational culture made it hard to retain staff. It was not a healthy or sustainable position. But I believed in the mission, cared about the community, and feared that quitting early would make me look unstable or fragile. And I got to lead services in the Daily Office and preach several times a week—the very deepest longing of my heart, the daily bread which never failed me. Between worship and walks in the woods, I thought I could make it work for a while.
I didn’t manage to organize CPE until spring of 2022. For six months I worked sixty to seventy hours a week, driving across the state between hospital and retreat center. In August my supervisor left, and I absorbed a plurality of his responsibilities without a pay raise or title change. I was living long distance from my girlfriend; still grieving a pandemic; resentful about how long this process was taking, and scared at how few people from my diocese seemed to remember I was still inside it; far from my city and community, with no clear path to move home; working in a context where most clergy did not treat me as a peer in ministry, even when my role entailed offering them spiritual care. I applied for candidacy in the fall of 2022. In my Ember Day letter around that time, I mentioned that I had been depressed and asked for the bishop’s prayers. This was a bad mistake, of course.
Unraveling
In late fall of 2022, the bishop called me to a meeting, concerned that the practice of ministry was worsening my mental illness. I tried to convey that I found the work of ministry itself to be joyful and fulfilling, and to describe the difficulties I was in with grace and without bitterness. After some conversation the bishop told me to spend time in discernment and referred me to other advisors for pastoral counsel, as well as another mandatory psychiatric evaluation. Though I did not feel that I was communicating myself well, I still trusted his good faith and judgment.
In the months that followed I prayed and thought, on my own and with other good and thoughtful people. I thought about the ten years I had already spent in this journey, how readily I had given them to the church and how easily the church had spent them. I imagined quitting: shedding those years papery and free like a snake’s skin the way I had the day of my divorce, the day I left my PhD program. I thought about what a priest is, to their community and to themself. I thought about what these years had made of me, and what they had unmade. I thought about what I wanted and what God might yet dream of for me.
What it came down to was, I wanted this particular set of assholes. I knew who I was, and who Jesus was to me, and I knew what the church was, too. Not the universal church that is Christ’s beloved body, but the Episcopal church in North America. These cranky, abusive, racist, terminally charming assholes whom I was born to, baptized into, and found Jesus with. I knew I could be happy among other people, but these were my people, where I felt uniquely equipped for spiritual leadership.
So then I thought about what I would need to flourish among these assholes. I thought hard about the sources of my current flare-up, the pain points from my past that this environment was activating. I thought about the parts of myself that this ordination process had demanded I muffle or disavow, and about the palpable sense of surveillance and mistrust I had been living under for so long. I thought about the pervasive exploitation and abuse of power I had encountered as a lay employee of the Episcopal church. I thought about the closets I had come out of joyfully and the closets I had been pushed into. I thought about what it would take for me to honor God as a priest who is disabled.
I think that in a ministry context people generally encounter me as faithful, charismatic, diligent, and sharp. I am truly all those things, for better and sometimes for worse. But I really am disabled, too. In addition to capacity and skill, I have particular vulnerabilities and particular support needs. Mostly, I’m just really sad, all the time. Even when I am thriving, I am nearly always also living with suffering. I cannot successfully inhabit spiritual leadership outside of that reality.
I decided that I could no longer defer my own well-being for the sake of my future in the church: I had to take better care of myself. The follow-up psych evaluation said (by my reading) that I had much the same strengths and vulnerabilities as had been observed when I was first admitted to postulancy, but that I was untenably depressed and would need more support than I was getting. So I signed off for the report to go to the diocese and set about getting myself more support. I gave my two weeks’ notice, packed up my apartment, and moved in with my fiancée, finally physically home in the diocese where I was seeking ordination. I went back up to twice a week with my longtime therapist. I spent the spring applying for jobs, taking long walks in the woods, and preparing what I was going to say in my meeting with the bishop.
But when the meeting came in May of 2023, the decision had already been made, based on the psych evaluation and my Ember Day letters and interviews. My time of postulancy was at an end. The bishop and COM had not asked to speak to my therapist or to my supervisors in recent ministry roles. I was blindsided.
I waited to hear from someone at the diocese about follow-up support and spiritual care. I didn’t hear from them. I didn’t hear from my sponsoring parish. For months I didn’t hear from a single person in my diocese, clergy or lay. In August the bishop wrote back to a final Ember Day letter in which I had expressed my sense of betrayal and alienation from the sacramental and communal life of the church. It was a kind response, but written with a confidence that the outcome was just and an assurance that someday I would see God’s hand in all of this. And that was all.
Aftermath
I was expecting a crisis of faith, but what I got instead in the months that followed was a crisis of ecclesiology. My prayer life has been wildly fruitful, flowering in directions whose ends I don’t yet see. But it does not seem to me that the freedom and abundant life I find in Christ has much to do with the wasteful and exploitative systems into whose care I entrusted myself. In some sense leaving is an impossibility. Christianity is never a solo venture, and I’m still blessed with the same network of relationships and bound by the same tedious Anglican pieties. The Holy Spirit is the same, and she is never out of ideas. So I am seeking reconciliation with people and communities where it seems needed and possible to me, and God’s transformative, humbling grace is working overtime.
In an institutional sense, though, I think I’m done with The Episcopal Church as far as I can see. It does not serve God or help me rejoin Christian community for me to paper over what happened to me or pretend that the consequences have not been devastating. I am starting a new career at 38. After a decade working for the church, I have $40 in savings, about 35K in a retirement account, and more than double that in student loans. I do not expect ever to recover financially from trying to become a priest. Beyond the financial toll, I know, in a way I cannot easily articulate, that something has broken and reset itself in terms of my loyalties and my sense of how God’s work is faithfully accomplished in the world. In Christianity, I found for the first time a scaffolding within which I can truly recognize myself as deeply beloved of God and deserving of safety. Honoring the image of God in myself, now, means stepping away from an institution that has shown me so clearly that I am not valued or safe within it.
Atkinson Davenport is a nonprofit communications and development professional as well as a translator, historian, and writer. Learn more or get in touch with Atkinson at precesandsuffragettes.com.