Episcopal Press and News

Seminary of Southwest Graduates Urged to "Ministry of Compassion"

Episcopal News Service. June 22, 1989 [89119D]

AUSTIN, Texas (DPS, June 22) -- On May 23, the 32 graduates of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (ETSS) were urged to "attend to the basics of ministry" and were wished a "holy unrest" by guest speaker, the Rev. Dr. August E. Wenzel, director of the growing Lutheran Seminary Program of the Southwest, at the 36th ETSS commencement.

"Attend to the basics: lead God's people and love God's people," Wenzel added, as he stressed the need for a "ministry of compassion" and cited the "holy unrest" dilemma posed by the famous. preacher Phillips Brooks. "As he worked in his study," Wenzel said, "the faces of the people who should be visited haunted him, and when he was visiting the people, the image of his study haunted him."

Two ETSS graduates, the Rev. Edwin B. Nettleton and the Rt. Rev. Robert D. Rowley, Jr., were awarded honorary doctor of divinity degrees during the ceremony. A 1966 graduate, Nettleton, who is now rector of St. James, Taos, New Mexico, was cited for his pastoral work in the 1970s at St. Vincent House on Galveston Island, Texas, and his current rural ministry in New Mexico where he is a "witness to the Holy Spirit in many settings." Rowley, recently consecrated Bishop Coadjutor of Northwestern Pennsylvania, was honored for his "deep commitment to the spirituality of good order and management" and for the range of his work in the dioceses of Hawaii and Bethlehem after graduation from ETSS in 1977.

Marianne Sorge, a graduating seminarian from the Diocese of Easton and daughter of Easton's bishop, the Rt. Rev. Elliot Sorge, received the Mark Armin Jorjorian Memorial Award for her work at El Buen Samaritano Center in South Austin, Texas, and her ministry last summer in Panama.