The short Dorsey bio:

       

      The Rev. Dorsey McConnell is Rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill. He has been ordained for twenty-seven years, and all he really knows is that he cannot live without Christ, that he depends on Him completely, that all his joy resides in Christ’s determination to make Dorsey’s life his own. Known for his deep commitment to a Gospel of grace, Dorsey’s Bible studies, adult education classes, and guest lecturing in “Christian Perspectives on Justice and Mercy” a course he designed with Jack Goldsmith at Harvard Law School, give him frequent opportunity to share his sound exegesis of what the Gospel means for our lives today.

        A graduate of Yale College, Dorsey received his divinity training at the General Theological Seminary in New York, and was ordained in 1983. He successively served as Curate of Saint Thomas Church, New York City, Chaplain for the Episcopal Church at Yale, Rector of the Church of the Epiphany in New York, and Rector of Saint Alban’s Church in Edmonds, Washington.  For fun, he loves to cook, hike, fish, and snowboard, and is a certified open-water diver. Dorsey is married and he and his wife Betsy have one college-aged son.

 

The long Dorsey bio:

 

       I have been ordained for twenty-seven years, and all I really know is that I cannot live without Christ, that I depend on him completely, that all my joy resides in his determination to make my life his own. My moods are various, my powers of concentration poor, my courage weak, my hope thin, and my faith scarcely worth talking about. But he is the Lion-Heart who will not let any servant in his house lie down in such poverty: so he wakes me up, and washes me, clothes me, feeds me, and comforts me, exhorts me, trains me in his joy, and sends me on his own mission. Some days he must do this again and again before I begin to admit that my life has been changed forever.

       As rector for the last six years of the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I have become more certain than ever that the first job of the parish priest is to love his people. I am astonished by how simple the lesson is, how long it has taken me to learn it, and how easily I can forget it.

      Every Sunday I try to preach the sufficiency of Jesus Christ, the necessity of his grace, the reality of his love, the urgency of the personal choice to belong to him and him alone. This I hope I teach and pray and counsel the rest of the week. Mine is not a small parish, and it seems to me that I go to a great many meetings; even in those, I pray that, in the budgets, the discussions, the logistics, this Christ in his beauty and power may be made known, this Christ of the Line Item, Christ of the Calendar.

      Before I was old enough to read I had memorized the Venite from hearing my mother sing it in my ear as I stood in the pew next to her in church: let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation, for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth. My father, a general, was often gone, but I always lived in the aura of his power. When God claimed me as his own, in my baptism at age six, in an Episcopal church on a stormy Louisiana night, I was swept through by an even mightier power; I wept out of love and out of sheer relief that the waters had touched my head and I was still alive.

      Sin being as banal as it is deadly, I wandered in all the usual ways. By the age of seventeen I was a confirmed agnostic, keeping the possibility of God in the wings, but not close enough to interfere with my pleasures. I was mainly interested in myself. I left Yale in 1975 with a B.A. in English, went to Paris on a Fulbright, and the following year embarked on a series of six-month careers as a groom at the Santa Barbara Polo Club, a ranch-hand and barfly in Argentina, an actor in a dinner theatre on California’s Central Coast in the course of which the hand of God inconveniently pursued me, his voice asking me, in all but words, who are you, what are you doing, why are you here? In 1978, miraculously, I chose to move to New York to be with a woman named Betsy whom I had met on a ship the year before. It was the first time in memory I had done anything for anyone exclusively beside myself. As I tried to love, I found out how bad I was at it, how much I wanted to blame anyone besides myself for any failings that beset me. In the midst of that struggle, through her love for me, Christ showed himself, and threw me a lifeline. I took it and have been holding on ever since. Betsy and I married in 1980, and have one son, Evan, who is twenty.

       I was ordained in 1983, and successively Curate at Saint Thomas Church, New York City, Chaplain for the Episcopal Church at Yale, rector of the Church of the Epiphany in New York, Rector of Saint Alban’s Church in Edmonds, Washington, and now Rector of the Redeemer. I helped create, and served on the leadership team for, the New Commandment Task Force. I have been a deputy and an alternate to General Convention.

 

My work with Anglicanism:

       I expect that we are beginning to experience a new era in Anglicanism. I believe God is breaking open the visible Church to reveal the Church that has been unseen. This is more than a matter of disputes over jurisdiction and real estate, more even than a struggle over doctrine. It is a matter of re-imagining the form of the Church and its structures, even as we strive to remain in communion. I am interested in helping create a network of clergy and lay leaders committed to an evangelical Gospel to broker ideas and resources for congregationally-based mission both within and across our own denominational boundaries, and to share the riches and ethos of Anglicanism with other churches who are daughters of the Reformation.