People
Episcopal News Service. February 7, 1992 [92036M]
Stephen Kewasis was chosen to succeed Alexander Muge as bishop of the Diocese of Eldoret of the Anglican Church of the Province of Kenya in a diocesan election on December 7. Bishop Muge died in a mysterious car accident in August 1990 after threats were made against his life by a Kenyan government official. Kewasis had been elected bishop soon after Muge's death, but a group of Nandi tribesmen and women secured a court order that temporarily prevented him from assuming his position. The Nandis wanted a person from their tribe to serve as bishop rather than Kewasis, who is a Turkana. After the court upheld Kewasis's election, a second diocesan election confirmed the earlier result.
Skinner Chavez-Melo -- the organist, conductor, and composer who for many years was chairman of the National Hispanic Music Committee of the Episcopal Church -- died on January 25 after a lingering illness. A memorial service was conducted on January 29 at the Episcopal Church Center in New York. Chavez, 47, was born in Mexico City, and received degrees from the Julliard School, the Manhattan School, and General Theological Seminary.
Herbert Thompson, Jr., 58, became the eighth diocesan bishop of Southern Ohio on January 1, succeeding Bishop William G. Black, who retired. Thompson was formally installed on January 18 in a service of recognition and investiture in Ohio Wesleyan University's Gray Chapel in Delaware, Ohio. He had previously served as bishop coadjutor since 1988. A native New Yorker, Thompson joins Orris Walker of Long Island, New York, as one of the two black diocesan bishops in the Episcopal Church.
R. William Franklin and the Rev. Thomas E. Breidenthal received faculty appointments at the General Theological Seminary in New York during the seminary's annual board of trustees meeting on January 13. Beginning July 1, Franklin will hold the tenured position of professor of modern Anglican studies, and Breidenthal will be an assistant professor of moral theology. Franklin received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1975 and is currently a professor at St. John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota. He served for six years as the secretary of the Episcopal Church's Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations and is presently Anglican secretary of the Anglican/Roman Catholic Consultation in the United States. Breidenthal is now the rector of Trinity Church, Ashland, Oregon. In 1991 he received a D.Phil. degree from Oxford University, where he was an Episcopal Church Foundation Fellow.
Virginia Heistand Archibald was ordained a priest on December 18 by her father, the Rt. Rev. Joseph T. Heistand, bishop of the Diocese of Arizona. The ceremony took place at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Corpus Christi, Texas, where Archibald served as an assistant. She becomes a third-generation priest -- her grandfather, the late John T. Heistand, was bishop of Central Pennsylvania from 1943 until 1966. Another priest in the family, her uncle, the Rev. Hobart H. Heistand of Springfield, Illinois, was also present for the ordination.
The Rev. William Moore of Columbus, Ohio, has been appointed archdeacon of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois. He becomes one of only a handful of deacons to serve as an archdeacon in the Episcopal Church. Moore was ordained in November 1990 as part of the first class of deacons to graduate from the new School for the Diaconate of the Diocese of Southern Ohio. Since his ordination, Moore has been serving as deacon-in-charge of St. John's Town Street, an inner-city mission in Columbus that serves more than 10,000 indigent people a year with meals and emergency assistance.