Introducing the new CCR director

Dear Community of Communities,

It is with deep gratitude and reverence for the members of the search committee, the Sisters, the Board of Directors and the gentle, but persistent pull of the Spirit, that I have accepted the position to be the new Director of the Center for Clergy Renewal at Holy Wisdom Monastery.  I will begin on January 6, 2025.

I am a resident of Milwaukee, where I have served two congregations and, for the past 14 years, have been the Lutheran campus pastor at UW-Milwaukee. My husband, Kurt, is an architect working in campus planning at Marquette University. My daughter, Nadezhda, is an emergency room tech and a committed union organizer and activist. My son, Hans, is an improvisational pianist living in Brooklyn. In this new role, I will remain living in Milwaukee, but I am committed to be on site each week to be fully present to the ministry and people it serves.

I became acquainted with Holy Wisdom Monastery when I was a young seminary intern in Madison. A beautiful soul in my congregation who now also serves on the staff of Holy Wisdom, Pam Shellberg, invited me to retreat with her in the guest house. In those days, the prairies were mostly farm fields, but even then, the land gentled me and taught my heart to listen.

Over the years, I have come to Holy Wisdom’s sacred land to be in retreat with women’s groups, campus ministry colleagues and college students as well as for my own time of rest and renewal. Throughout the years, I have watched the land be transformed by seeds. Green corn stalks giving way to purple and yellow and every shade of blossoming. Tidy rows of plants to the wild richness of diverse life and ministry expanding along with the prairie.

In my own life, seeds have also been planted and ministry also expanded. As a parish pastor, I learned the rhythms of holding lives from the cradle to the grave, marking the passages of our human existence with sacred rituals that held a tenderness others could feel as God’s presence. In campus ministry, I learned to take those rituals into the world as calls for justice, deepening my courage as I walked alongside our rising generation to help them co-create a more whole and holy world. And in touch with my own spiritual becoming, I have also opened myself to energy work, became certified in therapeutic yoga, joined the herbal apprentices at Alice’s Garden Urban Farm, and have grown in my incarnational belief in the healing to be found within God’s presence in our own bodies and the body of the earth.

With these seeds growing inside of me, the call to walk alongside other clergy in their own deep and holy planting into God’s love feels ripe and ready. I will be grateful to listen, learn and pray among you in the year to come as my roots join yours in the deep soil of Holy Wisdom.

Peace,

Pastor Rachel Young Binter