On the Emmaus Road: A Guide to Transitions in Ordained Leadership

The Rev. Dr. Mary Brennan Thorpe served as an intentional interim rector as well as a settled rector before becoming Director of Transition Ministry and then Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Virginia. She has facilitated over a hundred transitions at this point in all sorts of congregations and has consulted on others. Her doctoral research informed her work in that ministry and in this book. She has followed her own circuitous Emmaus Road to this work, having had vibrant careers in technology design and management and in public policy and advocacy before ordination. She is a graduate of Jersey City State College (BA in Music), of the Hartt College of Music of the University of Hartford (MMusEd), Virginia Theological Seminary (MDiv with honors), and Columbia Presbyterian Seminary (DMin). She also holds a certificate in the Management of High-Technology Companies through Stanford University and the American Electronics Association. She is an iconographer – one of her icons is on the front of this book – and musician, a wife, a mother of five and grandmother of five.