About the Rector…     For a Recent Sermon

The Rev. Judith Semple Greene was born and raised only a 
few miles from Christ Church Tashua.  “God has brought me 
full circle,” she remarks. A cradle Episcopalian, she grew up 
in St. Paul’s Fairfield, and when her family moved from Fairfield 
to Southport, attended Trinity Southport. 

 Upon graduation from Radcliffe College, she taught junior and 
senior high school history and English in New Jersey and Woodbridge, 
Connecticut.  She moved with her husband to Crawfordsville, Indiana, 
where the couple raised two sons, Paul and Tom. She studied Montessori
preschool education and became a teacher and co-director of the Children’s 
School, a pre-school and kindergarten.  She has an M.A. in history from 
Purdue University. Believing that citizen participation is essential to 
keeping us a free people, she volunteered in local government and was
President of the City Plan Commission, member of the Board of Zoning 
Appeals, and became City Plan Director.  The Episcopal Church was always 
at the center of her life, and she served St. John’s Crawfordsville in the full 
range of lay capacities.

 The family lived in Vienna, Austria. 

 Her marriage ended in 1989, and she began to discern a call to ministry. 
“I prayed God for a vocation”, she says, “and the thought came that would 
not go away, ‘Be a priest!’ I began to talk to friends in the church about this 
possibility, to priests, and finally, on the recommendation of my rector, to the
Bishop of Indianapolis, who accepted me into the ordination process. I continued 
to pray, and the thought returned in a new form: ‘Be a priest..but that’s what you 
have always been!” 

 While studying at Christian Theological Seminary (Disciples of Christ) in 
Indianapolis, she worked in state government for the Commissioner of the 
Department of Revenue, and finally for the brand new Indiana Gaming 
Commission, created to license and regulate riverboat gambling. She graduated 
from The General Theological Seminary in 1996, and was ordained to Holy Orders
that spring, and priested on The Epiphany 1997, at Trinity Covington, Kentucky,
where she served as Associate Rector, before coming to Christ Church in November
1999.  In New York City, she became a Yankees fan.  In Kentucky, she began the 
study of classical ballet.  “The arts give us images of beauty through which we come to
know God,” she believes.

 “Parish ministry integrates my life. Educating children, letting faith inform our 
lives as citizens, building community—all that I have ever done is used in the work
of parish ministry,” she notes, happy to be at such a vital parish as Christ Church.

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