About the Rector

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.