Bill Kindel's Home Page
Welcome! Until a few years ago, I was your basic middle-aged
computer
geek, though it became quite a bit easier to say what I did for a
living
once personal computers became so pervasive. Having been
what is now called an "Information Technology" professional for three
decades, I come complete with my share of war stories
and
urban legends.
That has all changed. After receiving the "Celestial 2x4 across
the
forehead" in 2001, I began a lengthy journey of discernment and
formation
that has resulted in my ordination as an Episcopal priest some
6½ years later.
More
of that story appears below.
The big news, of course, is
that I will soon be making a new life with Cynthia Obermeyer, who I met
on a Cursillo weekend (she was
a Candidate; I was on the team) in
2006. Cynthia has a unique combination of intelligence,
spirituality, love, and passion for ministry that have stolen my
heart. We are planning a January wedding in Denver.
I am the Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Parish Church of St. Charles
the Martyr (small church, long name) in Fort Morgan,
Colorado. I'm still a "baby priest," having been ordained in
December, 2007. I began my three year agreement with St. Charles
on
April Fools Day, 2008, which may or may not be significant. As
that agreement nears its end, the parish and I will spend some time in
prayerful discernment to decide if I should be called to be the next
Rector. In the
meantime, we are working to know God's will for the parish as it
ministers to its surrounding area.
Fort Morgan (pop 11,000) is the county seat of Morgan County (pop
28,000), which is a 36x36 mile square in northeastern Colorado.
Fort Morgan is 80 miles NE of Denver along I-76. Greeley is about
40 miles west on US-34, while Sterling is about 40 miles northeast on
I-76/US-6. A number of my parishioners live in Brush, which is
only 10 miles east of Fort Morgan.
St. Charles is a wonderful little parish, and I am blessed to have been
called here. When I was called here, I
was told that St. Charles wanted a priest who could commit both to the
parish and to the community (Fort Morgan, Brush, and all of Morgan
County). As a result, my unofficial second title is "the Vicar of
Morgan County," which I intend to use as the title of my memoirs (if I
ever write them).
A reality of small communities is that all the institutions (churches,
government, business, civic organizations, press) are
intermeshed. We're not quite at the point where everyone
knows everyone else, but the "Six Degrees of Separation" are far fewer
here. The result is that parishes here are very involved in the
the community, and St. Charles has been a leader in that regard.
It's a good place to be.
Professionally, I was last a Senior Consultant for Sogeti USA,
assigned to a
project for the Hewlett-Packard Workstation Global Business Unit in
Fort Collins, Colorado. It was nice to have interesting and
challenging work again after the economic downturn a few years back.
Though I had become something of a generalist over the years, I long
considered my particular specialties to include operating systems,
systems security, online transaction processing, and database
management systems. Along the way, I developed a keen
interest in network privacy issues. As a software engineer, I was
frustrated by the difficulty of
American
software publishers to export programs that include adequate
cryptographic
technology, while foreign products were subject to no such
restrictions. As
an individual, I continue to be alarmed by the attacks on personal
privacy that have
been mounted in recent decades (by zealots in several US
administrations).
Software Engineering has changed a lot since I
first began to make a living as a programmer in the 1970s. In the
"old
economy," software engineering was treated as a profession, complete
with an unwritten understanding that companies and engineers would
respect each other's interests
as part of a long-term relationship. That paradigm changed in
the nineties, as companies and engineers both became much less
principled.
As I reflect on the variety of positions I've held over the years, I
realize that the ones that were the most satisfying allowed me
to combine interpersonal skills with technical challenges. I
have accumulated a great deal of technical expertise over time,
starting with the basic engineering discipline of learning how to
learn. At the same time, I enjoyed working with customers and
other
engineers to establish a vision of how things should be and to find
creative solutions to the problems raised.
While I had resolved to remain a technical professional
among
the "hired guns" that now abound, the turning of the millenium was also
a good time to reflect
upon my true vocation. As a result, in 2001 I entered the
formal
Discernment process in the Episcopal
Diocese of Colorado. Three years later, I
was named a "Postulant for Holy
Orders," by which I was approved to prepare for ordination as a priest
in
the Episcopal Church USA.
I was ordained first to the Transitional
Deaconate in June, and to the Priesthood
in December of 2007. Both ordinations took place at the
Cathedral of St. John in the Wilderness, Denver. The above links
point to a pair of web pages for photos from these
events.
I am now a graduate of the Episcopal
Theological Seminary of the
Southwest (ETSS) in Austin, Texas. (ETSS has recently rebranded
itself as the Seminary of the Southwest,
SSW). Formation
as an Episcopal priest includes
the earning of a
Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree, which entails a three year course
of study (including
summers). Returning to academia after three decades was a bit
daunting, but this leg of the journey proved to be quite
exciting.
I received my M.Div. in May of 2007. Complementing my academic
formation, I was required to take a
unit
of
Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), which included 300 hours of hospital
chaplaincy plus 100 hours of supervision and instruction. My
clinical work was done at the Boulder
Community Hospital
for ten weeks during June-August,
2006. In October of 2006, I was admitted as a "Candidate for
Holy Orders," the final canonical step prior to my ordination as a
Transitional Deacon the following June, and subsequently as a Priest in
December.
ETSS also required us to engage in cultural immersion during the
first two (junior & middler) years of the M.Div. program. I
spent two weeks in Santa Fe, NM and Ciudad Juárez in January,
2005; the 2006 January immersion took the form of relief work among
victims of
Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The scope of the
disaster was (and remains) so
vast that I created a Hurricane
Katrina web page to bring together photos of the devastation and
describe our part in the response to it.
An important piece of my formation is getting actual experience in a
parish setting. To that end, I was placed with St. Mark's Episcopal
Church
in San Marcos, thirty miles south of Austin. As a
"middler," I was expected to spend five hours per week in this
assignment (as if one could keep it to five); as a senior, it was 10
hours/week. My duties included preaching thrice per term, leading
a Christian
Formation class between the main services, planning & execution of
the Great Vigil of Easter, and becoming fully integrated into the life
of the parish.
St. Mark's was a wonderful placement. The parish is in
transition from "pastoral sized" (where the Rector is essentially the
head of an extended family) to "program sized" (where the Rector
provides
general oversight, but most authority is distributed to the lay
leadership). St. Mark's has since built and occupied new campus
west of San Marcos. This was an exceptional time in the
life of the
parish,
especially in terms of the lessons I was able to take away with me
as I entered ordained ministry. The St. Mark's family is also a
wonderfully welcoming
group, which provided a delightful diversity of opinions and
backgrounds to challenge any assumptions that I had made.
Once I returned home to Colorado, I joined the Office of the Bishop
as the Coördinator of the 120th Diocesan
Convention in October, 2007. This assignment was primarily
project management, drawing upon my engineering background, with a dash
of ecclesiastical politics and a generous dose of networking. I
was
blessed to be surrounded by good people, so things fell into
place quite nicely and the Convention went very well.
I was also made Secretary of Convention in the process; that title has
responsibilities that continue through year. Once I had become a
known entity, my job description became heavy on
"other duties as assigned" in the Office of the Bishop, even as I begin
to serve congregations within the diocese as a supply priest.
During the six months separating my ordinations as a Transitional
Deacon and as a Priest, I affiliated with two Denver parishes. I
grew up at the Church of the Ascension, and that parish has "adopted"
me as a Priest Associate; I celebrated my first Holy Eucharist there on
the day after my ordination as a priest. I have also become a
regular part
of the St. Clare's Kitchen ministry at the Parish of St. Peter &
St. Mary, which feeds between 70 and 125 homeless and/or
working poor each Tuesday evening. These two affiliations are
nicely complementary and have been a gift to me.
As I mentioned above, I began to serve the Parish Church of St. Charles
the Martyr in Fort Morgan in April of 2008. I have purchased a
town home here, and I've begun to sink roots into the community.
When I returned to my native Colorado in 1997 after a sixteen year
sojourn in eastern Massachusetts, I first concentrated on "rebooting"
my life. The change of venue allowed me to reconnect with long-time
friends and family and to find peace and refreshment as I gaze upon and
explore the Rocky Mountains.
Recent years have contained an abundance of "interesting
times"
(in the sense of the Chinese curse), but another old saying is that
"anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger." If that's
the case,
I suppose I'm getting stronger by the minute.
I've
also made a turn for the better in the health arena. As
an
overweight middle-aged male with an infamous snoring problem, it came
as
no surprise to me when I was diagnosed with Obstructive Sleep Apnea .
For me, the treatment that works is a Constant Positive Air
Pressure
(CPAP) machine to keep my airway open at night, even when I travel .
Follow the links for more information.
As they say, "all work and no play ...". It should come as no surprise
that I'm a computer geek, but that's not all.
E-mail: Kindel@Alum.MIT.edu
PGP fingerprint: D0A4 8840 08A5 12B8 BDA8 29C2 ECA5 25B1 2FC7 6BFF