Unlike Morello, whose academic background is a complete mystery, or Strawn, whose seminary was a marginal, unaccredited institution, Marsh attended The Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary, a bastion of contemporary liberal theology. Marsh's fellow alumni include openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson and "gay American" former New Jersey Governor James McGreevy, who, following his resignation as governor, attempted a career makeover as an Episcopal priest. While on one hand we can say "not that there's anything wrong with that", on the other, the ACA is a member of the conservative wing of Anglicanism that would never ordain openly gay clergy -- yet the denomination's Presiding Bishop received his formation in precisely the liberal environment the ACA was set up to abjure.
A better source for other biographical information is a profile in a local paper from 2009, when he was consecrated ACA Bishop of the Northeast and finally left his day job as a high school drama teacher:
It's the latest career change for Marsh, 60, who hasn't been afraid to alter direction over the years. After working in the theatrical world and human services, he moved his young family from western Massachusetts to New York City to enter the seminary when he was in his mid-40s. Now, as he takes on his new role as a regional bishop, he looks back and sees his previous work as a natural path that has led him to his new calling.He spent most of his life in western Massachusetts, other than his time at an undistinguished university -- except for two forays to New York. The first involved dreams of the stage:
Like many serious actors, he tried his hand in his mid-20s in New York City. "I found less work than I thought I'd get," he says. To support himself, he signed on with a temp agency, mostly doing office work.But, as with almost everyone who goes to New York or Hollywood to become a star, it was back to Belchertown. Then, 20 years later, came dreams not of stardom but of the Episcopal priesthood, and it was back to the city that, unlike Belchertown, doesn't sleep:
So in 1993, after a last summer with the Shakespeare company, the family moved to New York, where he enrolled in The General Theological Seminary to become an Episcopalian priest. His children, who were 6 and 9 at the time, attended school in Manhattan while his wife did educational consulting work.If this were a job interview and I were in human resources, I'd want to know a little more about what happened here. Seminary is just one part of a process that leads to the Episcopal priesthood. For instance,
Attend seminary for three years and earn a Master of Divinity degree. During your studies, you will become a candidate for ordination and probably will be required to attend a candidacy conference. In January of your senior year, you must take the General Ordination Exams (GOEs), which will help determine if you are ready for ordination.Somehow, this process, which involved enormous disruption, time, effort, and expense, didn't pay off the way it should have, viz, in Marsh becoming an Episcopal priest. And General Theological Seminary is liberal-Episcopal through-and-through, there's nothing sorta-kinda about it. All we know is something didn't work out. Instead, the next datum we have is that he "completed" his seminary training in 1996, returned to Belchertown yet once more, and was ordained a priest, not in The Episcopal Church but in the ACA, in 1998. By then, he'd become a high school drama teacher, and he kept that as a day job while for ten years he was a part-time pastor at a couple of tiny ACA parishes in southern New Hampshire.
The tendency in the Episcopal Church has been to put the best possible face on the number of middle-aged people going into seminaries as a second career. They bring all the insight they've gained from a couple decades of adulthood, blah blah blah, but what they don't point out is that many of those same people want to try the priesthood after one or more earlier career choices simply haven't worked out. And the Episcopal priesthood is seen as something prestigious, secure, and not very demanding.
On the other hand, there's no shortage -- indeed, as we've already seen, a huge surplus -- of people who've already gotten this exact same idea. It's far easier to get into seminary than it is to get hired as a priest once you get out. We may assume that, irrespective of any other obstacle to his ordination as an Episcopal priest, Marsh was not skimmed off the top of his graduating class as the crème de la crème, and back to Belchertown it was. It took him two years to find a couple of part-time jobs in a third-rate denomination.
And we've already been looking at what seems to be a corollary to the law of small numbers: when the talent pool is tiny, anything can happen. In the ACA, somehow, utterly mediocre figures like Strawn and Marsh vault to the top; something like that seems to have happened with Hepworth as well.
