Minister’s intellectual curiosity develops into religious vocation
The Rev. Liddy Barlow vividly remembers the words of the Scottish professor at the University of Edinburgh, where she was studying abroad for a semester as an undergraduate.
She was majoring in religion at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, mainly out of interest in the subject, but the religion courses at Edinburgh were geared more to divinity students, those planning to go into ministry.
As they explored their sense of vocation — a term often used by ministers to describe their work, a sense of sacred calling beyond a job or even a career — she increasingly realized she had more than an academic curiosity in the subject.
“I wrote a paper on the concept of vocation,” Rev. Barlow recalled. “I went to meet the aging Scottish professor. He’s reading. And then he stopped and asked, ‘Are you writing this paper to test your own vocation?’ ”
Her thought was: “How did you just see through me?”
The encounter crystallized her realization that she was indeed drawn to ministry, following a calling that was nurtured in her childhood church and would later lead to her ordination as a minister in the United Church of Christ.
For the past six years, Rev. Barlow has served as executive minister of Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania. The organization comprises local Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant denominational groups, seeking to foster Christian unity and make statements of common concern.
She has also been active in building interfaith ties — efforts that proved particularly urgent when she joined with other Christian and Muslim leaders in solidarity with the Jewish community in the wake of the 2018 antiSemitic massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue.
Rev. Barlow said her calling wasn’t overly dramatic but rather developed over time. She’s not alone in that.
The Post-Gazette interviewed 10 area faith leaders of various religions and denominations, and their experiences varied greatly. Some trace their calling to a sudden, powerful experience, while others point to smaller, less dramatic signposts along the way.
Some experienced their calling quite early.
Rabbi Yisroel Rosenfeld, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of
Western Pennsylvania, always expected to follow his rabbi father’s footsteps; the only question was where and how. He got that answer from the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who told him as a young rabbi: “The place I want you to go to is Pittsburgh and see what you can do to enhance the world out there.”
Bhante Soorakkulame Pemaratana, now the chief abbot at Pittsburgh Buddhist Center in Harrison, persuaded his parents when he was 10 to let him join a monastery in his native Sri Lanka. “I just liked the peace in the temple,” he recalled.
He has strengthened that commitment since then, and today he leads prayers and meditation sessions at the temple — adapting like everyone else to the era of COVID-19 by livestreaming the sessions for participants. He remembers his spiritual master teaching him, “If you want to spend your life for the benefit of five or 10 people, you can live that life. That means you have a family. But if you’d like to spend your life for the benefit of hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, then you can be a monk.”
Other faith leaders trace their calling to faith leadership to a powerful inner experience.
Episcopal Bishop Dorsey McConnell still gets emotional recalling the time he was studying in Paris after college, having left behind his childhood Episcopal faith and considering himself an agnostic. He was walking about the city one day, feeling as gloomy as the weather, when he heard the resonant bell of an Orthodox cathedral. He decided to go in, and the rhythms of the liturgy washed over him. “I felt what I realized was the power and presence of God in a way that the fog just lifted,” he said.
The Rev. Paul Abernathy recalls being ordained to serve the relatively minor role of subdeacon at his Eastern Orthodox parish. “I felt this fire well up inside of me, and it lasted for months,” said Father Abernathy, now pastor of St. Moses the Black Antiochian Orthodox Church in the Hill District. “When I felt the fire burning the most was when I was serving at the liturgy.”
The Rev. Rock Dillaman, lead pastor at Allegheny Center Alliance Church, is among the millions who made or reaffirmed a commitment to Jesus Christ under the influence of the Rev. Billy Graham. Pastor Dillaman recalled he had drifted from his childhood faith during his college years when, one summer night in 1968, he watched the evangelist on
television.
“He didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard 3,000 times,” he recalled. “... But at that point, I was ready.” Soon he also felt the call to ministry.
Bishop David Zubik of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh recalled that the turning point for him came when a high school friend dragged him along to a retreat in 1965 that neither really wanted to go to. The witness of young seminarians there, and of the retreat leader just returned from the reformist Second Vatican Council, was life-changing. “God really got me,” Bishop Zubik recalled.
Still others found their vocation later in life, changing careers into ministry.
Pittsburgh Area United Methodist Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi worked as a school psychologist for 17 years. As she increasingly got involved with her church, a fellow member “told me that God has called me to be a pastor,” Bishop Moore-Koikoi recalled later. “I said, ‘It’s nice that God has told you, but God hasn’t told me yet.’” But she soon sensed the call herself.
An early path
For Rev. Barlow, the path to ministry began as early as she could remember.
She grew up in Keene, N.H., attending a large Congregational church. In her teen years in the 1990s, she was active in its large “mission-centered youth program,” she recalled.
The church experience fostered her formation in its progressive religious tradition. What she didn’t know until later, though, was that she was witnessing the end of an era — one in which large, vibrant, mainline Protestant churches were common.
“As soon as five or 10 years after I had those experiences, the experience of most mainline churches around the country had totally changed,” she said. “I have the privilege of knowing that territory, yet I have so much of my career ahead of me in a different environment.”
Rev. Barlow’s interest in religious unity began early. She was active at her college’s interfaith chapel, and when the 9/11 attacks occurred at the start of her senior year, “my instinct and that of many on campus was to go to the office of religious life, bring sleeping bags, camp on the floor” and demonstrate solidarity across religious lines.
After college, she taught sixth grade in North Carolina for two years for Teach for America. She earned a master’s of divinity from Andover Newton Theological School, located then in Massachusetts.
The seminary stood next to Hebrew College, and she joined a small group of Christian and Jewish students who met regularly for meals and discussions. “It was enormously meaningful to form that kind of relationship,” she said.
She later came to Pittsburgh and worked at parishes in the United Church of Christ before assuming her role at Christian Associates, where she works with a board comprised of bishops and other local denominational leaders. She does guest preaching in about 20 different pulpits per year and estimates that, between Sunday and midweek activities, she has been to hundreds of churches across the region in the past six years.
Rev. Barlow, 40, and her husband, Gregory, have two young children and live in East Liberty.
‘A fresh set of tools’
Christian Associates has retained an unusually strong and robust commitment from its members at a time when similar organizations in other cities had waned, but Rev. Barlow also recognized early on it would need to adapt.
“The era of institutionalized conciliar ecumenism is at its end,” she said. “Seeking unity in the body of Christ is always an admirable goal. Now we’re at a moment where we need a fresh set of tools to do this work.”
That has included finding ways to cooperate with groups that haven’t traditionally been involved, including Pentecostals and other evangelicals, many of which are nondenominational. Some also may be wary of cooperating across theological lines, although Christian Associates already has broad spectrum of liberal, moderate and conservative denominations. She has seen slow but meaningful progress in expanding participation in some of the programming.
Rev. Barlow’s past interfaith work helped prepare her for responding to the Oct. 27, 2018, attack on the Tree of Life synagogue building in Squirrel Hill, which claimed 11 lives from three congregations. She was invited to participate in an interfaith vigil the next day at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Oakland.
Taking part in that vigil, and standing on stage with an array of clergy in support of the Jewish community, “I think those were the pivotal” moments of her ministry, she said.
At the same time, she acknowledges ongoing challenges, such as seeking to build relationships between churches across racial lines.
“That work is all about rebuilding trust,” she said. “I believe that showing up, physically putting our bodies in places where they need to be, is a spiritual discipline.”