St. Margaret's Episcopal Church

St. Margaret's Episcopal Church will celebrate the arrival of its new rector,  the Rev. Martha G. Kirkpatrick,  on Sunday, September 13.  She will conduct the 8 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. services for the first time, inaugurating her role as St. Margaret's parish priest.

She has already laid to rest one question that often arises for women priests in the Episcopal Church, namely how to address her. This is a matter of personal choice, and while many women in the priesthood are addressed with the honorific "Mother," St. Margaret's new priest prefers to go by her given name, "Martha." Her formal installation by Bishop Steve Lane will take place later this year. 

Kirkpatrick had a lengthy and distinguished career as an attorney specializing in environmental law in Washington, D.C. and Augusta before she was drawn by a call to ministry a few years ago.  She earned a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2007 and was ordained to the priesthood later that year.  She has been assistant rector at Grace Episcopal Church, Bath, for the past two years along with serving as the Environmental Stewardship Officer for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

She was called to be St. Margaret"s new rector last June, following a nationwide search by a committee of parishioners that attracted 40 applicants. She was the unanimous choice in a final secret ballot by the committee to  succeed the Rev. Kent Tarpley, who has moved  to a church in southwestern Virginia.

A native of Maine, she grew up and attended schools in the Portland area. She went on to attend Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, in the mid-70s, where she majored in history and government. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors in 1978.  Her next stop was George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to earn the Juris Doctor law degree from the National Law Center in 1981, again with honors.

Focusing on environmental law, she began her legal career as a pro bono attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston.  Her specialty area was water use, including protection of wetlands, oversight and leasing rights in the Georges Bank, management of coastal zones, and site selection for hazardous waste facilities.

From 1984 to 1991 she held various positions with the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington dealing with water use and quality.  She assisted in drafting legislation and worked on the 1991 reauthorization of he Clean Water Act.

Kirkpatrick returned to Maine in 1991 to become director of the Maine DEP's Bureaus of Land and Water Quality.  In 1999 she was appointed DEP Commissioner during the administration of Gov. Angus King, a post she held until 2003.

In changing her career path to enter the ministry,, she has not forsaken her environmental ethos. Her master's thesis at Harvard was on "incarnational ecology," a growing field of theological scholarship. A revised version of her study is published in the current issue of the Anglican Theological Review, in which she addresses planetary crisis as a challenge to the church, moving from scripture and received tradition toward and ethics of common cause.