St. John’s Episcopal Church in Presque Isle had more pews than people as a dozen parishioners spread out in the dimly lit church at a recent Saturday service. The Rev. Robert Smith shook each attendee’s hand during the sign of peace — a quick task in a small congregation.
Halfway through the service, the congregants joined Smith in a prayer about the church’s ongoing search for a new leader.
“May the Holy Spirit guide our search committee to speak and listen faithfully in this time of transition,” they said. “Bless the priest you are preparing to join this cluster and prepare us to welcome new leadership with love.”
St. John’s and two other associated Episcopal churches in Aroostook County — St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fort Fairfield and Church of the Good Shepherd in Houlton — have been without a spiritual director since the priest they shared retired late last year. Smith, who held the role before retiring more than a decade ago, has been filling in to lead services once a month as the congregations search for someone new to take over full-time.
For small, rural churches in shrinking denominations such as the Episcopal Church, finding new clergy can take months or years. Between 2015 and 2024, the Episcopal Church, a mainline Protestant denomination that separated from the Church of England after the American Revolution, lost almost a third of its regular attendees in Maine.
“There are more full-time jobs available across the whole church, across the whole country, than there are priests looking for jobs,” said the Rev. Suzanne Roberts, transition and deployment officer for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine. The church is currently hiring for five clergy positions in Maine, but only the Aroostook one is full-time, with the three congregations pooling their resources to pay a rector.
Rural churches often serve important functions beyond their congregations, Roberts said, hosting addiction recovery programs, managing or supporting food pantries, and serving as community gathering places.
“If a church closes,” Roberts said, “that resource and that safe space for the community is lost.”
Aroostook County has lost at least three Episcopal churches — in Caribou, Mars Hill and Limestone — since the 1990s. Members of the remaining churches, which each have their own space and ministries but pool resources for operating costs and staff as part of what the church calls the Aroostook Cluster, say their congregations are small but vibrant. Though the search for a priest has been long, their faith isn’t wavering.
“We’re not under any illusions that this is going to be fast, but we’re doing OK,” said Dory Smith, who was baptized, confirmed and married at St. John’s and serves on the search committee for the cluster’s new priest.
A careful search
When the Aroostook Cluster’s most recent rector, the Rev. Kevin Kinsey, retired, it kicked off a well-defined process.
Before churches can post a clergy job listing, Roberts said, parishioners have to go through what they call a “discernment process.” That involves forming a search committee and spending time describing the congregation’s identity and hopes for a new clergy member. The Aroostook Cluster’s search committee, made up of three members from each congregation, spent six months on this process before the diocese posted the job in May.
Since Kinsey’s retirement, the three small congregations with a combined weekly attendance of roughly 70 people have welcomed a mix of retired local priests and visiting clergy to lead services and have held morning prayers led by lay members.
In more densely populated states, Roberts said, congregations sometimes consolidate and sell off buildings to save money. But in a rural state, the distance between communities means this is less of an option. Two thirds of Maine’s Episcopal churches don’t employ a full-time priest, and the Aroostook churches were the first to pool their resources to support joint positions.
Episcopal priests in Maine often have jobs outside of ministry, live in double-income households or have already retired and taken on a part-time posting, Roberts said.
The Rev. Ginny Urbanek became an Episcopal priest in her 60s while living in Houlton. She reached the mandatory retirement age of 72 in 2018, but she still leads at least one service almost every weekend, covering for the Aroostook Cluster and other churches, including an Episcopal congregation in Winn and a Lutheran congregation in New Sweden.
Before her retirement, Urbanek served as a part-time priest at Good Shepherd. The church joined the Aroostook Cluster in 2021, three years after she left, extending the cluster’s range south by 40 miles.
“I’m retired now; I just turned 80,” Urbanek said. “However, I am busy because there is a lack of clergy in the northern part of the state, and people ask, and I say yes.”
Smith remembers when St. John’s was full enough to support a priest on its own. As a child, she said, the Sunday school had up to 90 children, but now the church averages just over a dozen attendees, most of whom are retired.
Even though the Presque Isle church is smaller now, Smith said, it’s still a family. Janet Scott, who has been a member since 2000 and also serves on the search committee, agreed.
“It’s the community that I hold dear,” Scott said, “and, unfortunately, that community has faded, mainly because we’ve had parishioners who’ve passed away.”
‘We’re doing just fine’
On a recent Sunday, two stuffed bears slowly wound their way through the pews, getting hugs and prayers from each of the roughly three dozen attendees at St. Paul’s in Fort Fairfield.
The bears — one tan, one black — were bound for relatives and friends in Bangor and Eastport going through difficult times.
Dan Foster, who was baptized at St. Paul’s in 1956 and played piano at the service, said the church’s ministry goes beyond structured initiatives such as the prayer bears and financial support for the Presque Isle emergency homeless shelter. Much of the church’s influence, he said, comes from parishioners supporting each other and their community in little ways, “constantly projecting a very loving, caring persona in a world that can be very cynical and hard.”
After the service concluded, parishioners filed into the church’s entry hall, passing by a fake tree with colorful paper leaves, each one with a good deed someone had done to support the environment. Most of the attendees stayed for a potluck meal of sandwiches, zucchini bread and cookies — a weekly occurrence after every service.
Ann Spinney, who moved to Aroostook County and joined St. Paul’s in 2021, said the congregation has been an important part of her social life since her move. She joined the Caribou Choral Society and a community band after meeting parishioners who took part in those groups.
During the search for a new priest, the church has welcomed a couple of new members.
“It would be great to find an exceptional spiritual leader for what we’ve really grown, and I don’t think we need to settle for anything less. And if that is going to take a while to get, I think that’s perfectly fine,” Dan Foster said.
John Foster, Dan Foster’s brother, is leading the search committee for a new priest, which is now in what could be a long waiting period for applicants. The church was more full when he was a kid, he said, but he thinks it’s more welcoming and loving today despite its small size.
“Having a priest that’s another cog in that family is really a great thing,” he said. “Every congregation is not for everybody, and we feel that we have a truly unique situation, but it has to be a unique situation that lines up with somebody else.”
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.