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12/06/2017 07:30 AMIn 2013, the Rev. Canon Doctor Ellendale Hoffman, LMFT, stepped into a full-time role at Grace Episcopal Church serving as the interim rector. Now, with a new permanent rector, Charlie Hamill, starting at Grace Church in January 2018, Ellendale is ready to move on to life’s next chapter.
For 30 years, Ellendale served as part-time Episcopal priest at Grace Church. Until 4 ½ years ago, she fulfilled that role alongside her husband, the Rev. Charles Hoffman, the former Rector of Grace Church. When he retired as rector in 2013, church leaders asked Ellendale if she would step up to be the full-time interim rector, and serve until the parish found a permanent replacement. She agreed. Now, with the new rector hired, Ellendale is ready to retire and join her husband Charles in retirement.
Don’t expect the energetic and engaged Ellendale to sit at home, however. She plans to assist in other area Episcopal churches as a priest part-time—as her husband has since retiring—and may also devote some hours to work as a marriage and family therapist. One goal in retirement is to apply her years of experience working with volunteers, social services groups, and community organizations to help build and nurture partnerships between them and faith communities. More walks in the woods and neighborhoods of Old Saybrook with her dog Duke are also part of her plan.
“I also would like to mentor and train other clergy in how to build mission partnerships in the community,” says Ellendale of her retirement goals.
At this point of transition to a new life, Ellendale also looks backward at the successes of the parish she has served for 30 years and with many thanks for its many committed and engaged volunteers with whom she has worked.
“The last four years have been very busy and a wonderful time. We had to do a capital fund drive to raise $100,000 to restore the roof, replace the boiler, and do window repairs on the Parish Hall. I moved from having two vocations—priest [and] marriage and family therapist—to three,” says Ellendale.
Working with different teams of volunteers, as rector, she oversaw the capital campaign, the Parish Hall renovation project, routine parish activities, as well as the parish’s search for a new permanent rector to take her place.
“My role has evolved over the years and I’ve just tried to keep up with it,” says Ellendale. “The key to my success is building relationships with key people in the community and finding ways we can work together. I’ve worked to find creative ways to do new things. And my tool of success is picking the right people for the right jobs at the right time and working closely with them. A lot of what we do [at the church] depends on volunteers.
“The community partnerships in ministry is one of the things I love about being in Grace Church. We work with the historical society, the Shoreline Soup Kitchens & Pantries—we donate office space and have a meal site—we host the Common Goods community garden, we work with Social Services Director Sue Consoli to host monthly Help Days, host a free dental clinic, provide food assistance, [and] work with Old Saybrook Youth & Family Services,” says Ellendale. “A church located on Main Street has a particular opportunity to develop community initiatives. All of this for me is the fruit of faith looking beyond our world to build partnerships in the community for the greater good.
“Faith is the furnace. Because we love the Lord and want to serve God, we find ways to use our talents and gifts to make this world a better place,” Ellendale says.
When Ellendale Hoffman was first ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church 41 years ago in 1977, as a woman, she was a pioneer. Ordained as a deacon at Christ Church Cathedral in Louisiana in 1976, she was not even eligible to be a priest until the fall of 1976. That’s when the Episcopal Church finally voted to regularly ordain women as priests.
While attending Manhattanville College, Ellendale Hoffman had double-majored in psychology and religion, but it took another woman, a professor who was a Catholic sister with a Ph.D., to help her recognize her calling.
“One of the sisters came to me and brought me an article she had seen about Episcopal women (deaconesses and lay women) who felt a call to be priests—and she said to me, ‘I thought of you.’ I read the article and I knew then what I was meant to do,” says Ellendale. “That sister saw in me a vocation.”
After graduating from college, she entered Harvard Divinity School, thinking that she would get a Ph.D. and teach religion, as the sister had, but after just one semester, she saw she had made a mistake and transferred to the Episcopal Divinity School, a seminary. It still was 1974, however, and no women were yet ordained as priests, so she became a doctor in clinical psychology as she trained to be an Episcopal priest in Massachusetts.
“I was pretty practical. The church may ordain us [as women], but parishes may not hire us. That’s when my bi-vocational [career] began,” says Ellendale. “I had to go out in the community to find work plus
have a part-time ministry. So I was a clinical director of a mental health agency on Cape Cod and a part-time Episcopal priest.”
She met her husband Charles because he was an Episcopal priest at the Cape Cod parish where she worked part-time. In 1988, he was called from Cape Cod to be rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Old Saybrook, and the two of them moved to town and to Grace Church—he full-time, she part-time. Thirty years later, she is ready now to step back and prepare the parish for its new leader.
“I can feel that my job here at Grace Church is completed. I will explore new ministry roles. New things will come my way. I also look forward to serving with my husband in ministry again,” says Ellendale. “I have many hobbies, and {Charles and I] are renovating our Old Saybrook house.”
Ellendale is eager and ready to apply her boundless energy and talents to master and enrich her life’s next chapter.