In addition to her part-time work for the diocese, Kirkpatrick, who lives in Waldoboro and was ordained to the transitional diaconate in June, will also serve as a part-time assistant at Grace Episcopal Church in Bath, Maine. The two positions together will comprise her diocesan internship, in part funded from the diocese’s One in Christ Campaign for Clergy Internships.

Kirkpatrick, an honors graduate of Skidmore College and the National Law Center of George Washington University, worked for the Environmental Protection Agency for 10 years. In 1991, she returned home to Maine to work for the Department of Environmental Protection, where she served as commissioner from 1999 to 2003. As a parishioner at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Newcastle, Maine, she discerned first her call to study theology at Harvard Divinity School, and eventually to the ordination process. She completed her master of divinity degree earlier this year.

"Martha brings to this ministry her extensive background in environmental work and her deep faith," said Maine Bishop Chilton Knudsen. "With that experience coupled with her reflection on environmental issues from a theological perspective, the congregations in our diocese will learn a great deal about environmental concern from a Christian perspective."

Kirkpatrick, noting that she has done environmental-policy work in state and federal government for nearly 20 years, said "working in that arena gave me a healthy sense of how complex our environment is.”

“We've been working our environmental problems as a complex of public health, engineering, legal, economic and policy concerns,” she said. “It is all of that, but it is still more."

She continued: "At some point I began to understand our environmental crisis as a signal of the disordering of our relationship with God. Understanding our place on earth is, I believe, a matter of human identity. We've so put ourselves at the center of things that we've lost a sense of our interconnectedness with all life. We've broken our covenant. It also seems to me that the harm we've done to our environment is radically intertwined with a failure of social justice."

When asked how she envisions the role of missioner within the diocese and specifically with congregations across the state, she said: "In my experience, people in parishes intuitively understand that our relationship to the earth is a deeply spiritual concern, but few if any of us heard much about this in church until very recently, if at all. My hope is that our deep interconnectedness with all life finds expression in liturgy and worship, and that this expression supports and empowers people in their commitment to environmental stewardship in action."

Kirkpatrick will be one of a very small number of Episcopalians working on a diocesan-level whose sole focus is environmental stewardship. She describes herself as "literally awestruck" by the opportunity to bring these two passions together in Maine, where she was born and raised and has lived most of her life. "I believe the time is right for the Diocese of Maine, and I am deeply grateful to the bishop for having the vision and making it all work. I have been praying to find my true vocation and this feels like it is finally coming together."