Q&A: Bishop Carol Gallagher looks back on 35 years of service in dioceses across the church

[Episcopal News Service] Compiling a concise biography for Bishop Carol Gallagher can be a daunting task. She has been active in ordained ministry for so long – 35 years – and served in so many dioceses and in so many capacities that the highlights make up no short list.

After her 1990 ordination to the priesthood in the Diocese of Maryland, she served in congregations in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware and then in 2001 was elected bishop suffragan of the Diocese of Southern Virginia. In April 2002, Gallagher, who is Cherokee, became the first Indigenous woman to be consecrated as a bishop in The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.

Gallagher, an Episcopal Divinity School graduate, served three years in Southern Virginia before moving to New Jersey in 2005 to take on the role of assistant bishop in the Diocese of Newark for two years during that diocese’s leadership transition. After Newark, she served from 2008-14 as assistant bishop in the Diocese of North Dakota, where she offered pastoral support to congregations that were not theologically aligned with the more conservative Bishop Michael Smith. Gallagher and Smith later served together again in a similar capacity in the Diocese of Albany, New York, in 2021 when that diocese was going through its own leadership transition.

Gallagher also served as assistant bishop in the Diocese of Montana from 2014-18 while remaining active in Indigenous ministries around the church, particularly through a leadership development program that was known as the Bishops Native Collaborative. She also earned a doctorate in urban affairs and public policy from the University of Delaware and wrote a book on congregational development that was published in 2008.

Since 2018, Gallagher has served in the Diocese of Massachusetts, first as a regional canon and now as assistant bishop. This year, she announced she plans to retire after a sabbatical in early 2025.  The diocese held a farewell celebration for her on Dec. 15, and she will conclude her diocesan work on Dec. 31. She and her husband, Mark Gallagher, have three adult daughters.

Gallagher, who turns 69 on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, spoke recently with Episcopal News Service by Zoom to look back on her long and eventful years of service in the church. The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

You were born in 1955 in San Diego. Did you grow up there?

My dad was a Navy chaplain and had been deployed to Korea and then came back. He was a Presbyterian minister and stayed in the reserves, but he took a call to Harrison, New York, which is 30 miles north of New York City, had a church [position] there for 28 years and retired to Cape May Point, New Jersey. For our family, [Cape May Point] is home more than anywhere.

Your father was of European ancestry, and your mother was Cherokee.

Yes.

And your father was a Presbyterian minister. Do you feel that was connected at all to your call to ordained ministry? And how did you find The Episcopal Church?

I had a sense of call when I was little girl, but in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I had no models for that, and I didn’t know what that meant. So I went to college in Baltimore. I met Mark, and we got married in 1975. Mark was raised Roman Catholic. I have a lot of friends who are Catholic and really fell in love with the liturgy. But I was used to really good music and really good preaching, and that was a challenge [in the Catholic services]. One of my friends invited me to go to St. John’s, Mount Washington [an Episcopal church in Baltimore]. We never went anywhere else; we both felt right at home.

Looking back at some of our old stories, I was really impressed by just how involved you’ve been in so much in the church for so long. Going back to your early days as a priest, there was an entity that formed that you were involved with, the Episcopal Council on Indian Ministries.

Yes, I was on ECIM fairly early on. And then in 1992 we did a service in the National Cathedral, and I was basically the primary liturgist for that, on the occasion of Columbus Day but celebrating the survival of Native people in the Americas. We had people from all over the world there in the National Cathedral. I really got involved when Owana Anderson was our staff officer, and Carrol Hampton, and they were really encouraging some of us [Indigenous clergy] who were young at that point to really take leadership roles.

In 1997, you also had a lot do with the covenant that church leaders signed with Indigenous people calling for 10 years of “remembrance, recognition and reconciliation” before the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. 

ECIM had decided that it was important for us to focus on understanding the role of Native people in the church. The idea was to move from “ministry to or for,” but “mission with and by,” and to raise up Native leadership. At that point, we probably had five or six native bishops – and wanting to encourage more priests and lay leaders, and move away from just being on the receiving end and beginning to talk about, what does it mean to be an Indigenous church? We did a lot of work with folks in New Zealand, our Māori brothers and sisters, and working with Native Hawaiians, across the spectrum – how do we raise up Native leadership? We were also setting up the Indigenous Theological Training Institute. The idea was to find a way to train up our Native leadership that was authentic to their own cultural tribal experience, rather than sending them to seminary and taking away from their experience. In that process, I started thinking about working on my doctoral degree and got a Ph.D. It ended up in urban affairs and public policy, but it was about, how do we develop Native leadership in the church.

You were in Delaware at the time and then felt called to the episcopate, in Southern Virginia. That was 2002?

I was elected in 2001. I really did not expect to be elected. I mean, I’m trying to think if there were any other women in the South as bishops at that point. There weren’t. The church was very different 22-plus years ago.

A lot of the stories at the time made note of the significance of your election and consecration as the first female Indigenous bishop in the whole Anglican Communion. It seemed that you appreciated the significance of that and also didn’t necessarily want to draw all the attention to yourself.

Well, one of the interesting things that happened – we held the consecration at St. Paul’s College, which was one of the historically Black colleges [with Episcopal roots], which is now closed. And one of the things I was hoping for is that – just like Barbara Harris’ consecration, which was at a very different scale [as the Anglican Communion’s first female bishop] – that it would encourage women of color to step forward to take leadership roles. And to be supportive of that, which is the harder part. Because the way we raise up leadership is often isolating. People have to do a lot on their own, and particularly in our tribal communities. People do best when they have a support system of mentors or elders walking with them part of the way.

You mentioned Barbara Harris and her significance, the significance of her consecration. She also was a consecrator at your own consecration.

I happened to be at Barbara’s consecration when I was in seminary. We built a friendship over the years, so she was one of my co-consecrators, along with former Presiding Bishop Ed Browning, who was my preacher. He had been extraordinarily supportive and really was one who wanted Native ministries to thrive and wanted to support women. I was really privileged to have him there, and to have Barbara there.

It was also interesting to me that when you were chosen as bishop suffragan in Southern Virginia, you were specifically asked to focus on helping small congregations, or mission congregations.

I loved it. Small congregations are incredibly vibrant and often get overlooked. Oftentimes, [at those congregations] there are just the same few people that do the same things over and over again, but they do it with such love and care, not only for Jesus and for the church, but for their community. That’s where some of the greatest ministry happens, but it’s not headline material. I went to one parish in Freeman, Southern Virginia, not too far from St. Paul’s College. And the man that I met with, who was at that point a lay leader, took me into the church. I was there to do some work with some folks who were trying to get educational pieces after school for the kids in that community. And he went on a walk through the church and showed me the various different pews, and he could tell me who had carved which pews and who had carved the pulpit. There was a sense of this living tradition that often gets overlooked but is really lively – people who are really committed, even when their finances and everything else are really challenged.

Have you noticed any sort of changes over the course of the last 20-plus years in the challenges of small congregations, or maybe just that we have more and more of those small congregations? Any difference from when you first started doing that work?

No, I just think small congregations that have to either employ part-time clergy or collaborate or have shared leadership are becoming more the norm. It’s always been the norm on our Indian reservations. It’s been the norm in many of our rural places. Now it’s become the norm in rural and urban and everywhere. In Massachusetts, we have a lot of challenges with the buildings that are hard to maintain. Figuring out how to keep a community alive and honor what they did in the past and what they’re doing in the present and not burden them financially is really hard.

I’ve also found it remarkable how many different dioceses you’ve served: three years in Southern Virginia and then a couple years in Newark. Then North Dakota, and now Massachusetts. You helped out with Albany a little bit. Also previously Montana – that was part time?

I was half time in Montana, and then the other half of the time was the Bishops Native Collaborative. During that time, we were training up a lot of lay leadership. We trained some deacons. There were a group of us bishops who had the majority of Native ministry in the Episcopal Church, so Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Navajoland. Dave Bailey [the former Navajoland bishop] and this whole group, we worked really closely together. Michael Smith, who is the former bishop of North Dakota, and I and others would go around and train local folks. Like for Alaska, many of those little villages have little churches, and they’re active, but they don’t have clergy leadership all the time. [It involved] teaching people how to lead worship and just all of the pieces to make a church function. That was a real joy.

Tell me about your relationship with Bishop Michael Smith. He also was at your consecration as a bishop. He was a priest at the time.

I was ordained [a priest] maybe a year before he was, but we’ve been involved in Native ministries since before I even finished seminary. At this point, Michael and I are the only two active Indigenous bishops our church right now. [Smith is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.] He and I are theologically not opposites but very different, and what I was able to provide in North Dakota – if there were parishes that thought he was too conservative, I could go and be with them and support them and things like that. We did that for many years. And he and I have worked very closely with the Native Bishops Collaborative. We did a lot during COVID because of the need of to connect people who were in isolated communities already. When he went to Albany, he invited me to come and work with them with communion across difference. And it was really very moving – and challenging, but very moving to watch folks really work on their relationship with one another and with God and struggle with their theological understanding, and being able to show them, demonstrate to them, how to talk through these things.

And now you’re finishing up your time in Massachusetts. Was that by design? Did you want to end up there and retire?

No, to assume that I have any plans, that’s like a big joke in my household. I had done an interim [rector position] for [Bishop] Mark Lattime in Alaska. There was a parish in Sitka that was really struggling. It had gone through a search and failed. So we spent 18 months or a little bit more than that in Sitka, and I knew I was going to be working in Montana and the Bishops Native Collaborative. So I had to be somewhere I could easily fly to Alaska. Alaska Air, at that point they were only flying out of Boston, Philadelphia and Newark. We had friends in Massachusetts and our youngest daughter at that point was living in Massachusetts, and so we decided to come here.

You have been pretty active in the Diocese of Massachusetts, as a regional canon and then assistant bishop. Do you see that as sort of a continuation of your past work?

Well, you know, the thing about life as a bishop, it’s very different from large dioceses to small dioceses. There’s a lot of things that are the same, but in smaller dioceses and particularly in places where there are challenges, bishops are often involved in helping parishes in transition, helping find leadership, helping people imagine how to go forward when they’ve had some distress. So some of my work as a regional canon was really an extension of a lot of things I’d done, particularly in Indigenous ministries. I came in with two other [regional canons]. Each of us had a region of 60-plus parishes, which is more than a lot of bishops [in other dioceses] have. So we really just built relationships, helped people with their transitions and struggles. And you know, we were able to be present to people in this big diocese in a way that they hadn’t had before.

The wider church also seems to be going through a period of transition, and that has been the storyline for our new Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, that he was chosen to lead the church into this next phase. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on what might be next for the church, or if you have any hopes for its future?

I’ve known Sean for a long time, and I think his approach is really good. I was really close with Michael Curry. He and I go back to the Diocese of Maryland, so I’ve known him for a really long time. Michael did the work of re-energizing the spirit of the church. And I think Sean has a gift to re-energize [church] structures to help people. In every era, there’s somebody called to do something different than the previous presiding bishop. I think the gifts he brings are going to be really useful in this time. I don’t know what to expect of the future. I think it’s both exciting and scary. I hope in my retirement years I can volunteer and do things with our Native communities. I’ve worked with a lot of our Native clergy and kind of have a familial relationship with them, so I want to encourage them as much as possible.

– David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.