THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 12, 1995 TAG: 9505100182
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY REBECCA A. MYERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 211 lines
DURING ONE OF his Lenten services, the Rev. Geoffrey M. Hahneman modeled vestments for the congregation of Trinity Episcopal Church.
``He put the vestments on and showed us how they worked,'' recalled Sue Pierce, a member of the church.
Humor was injected into the lesson.
``He showed us one that isn't worn anymore, and he told us, `The reason you don't see this anymore is because the rectors would drag it all over the altar and burn themselves on the candles.' ''
There's a part of the service where the priest holds up the bread and then he holds up the wine, Pierce said.
``He said `. . . we don't have to do that. Nowhere is it written that you have to do that. But, you know . . . it was like your back was to them way back in the beginning. Like, you hold it up and say:
`Yeah, we got wine. Yeah, we got bread.' ''
Entwined with the comedy was a subtle lesson on why certain things are done in the Book of Common Prayer, the principal guide to belief and practice in the Episcopal church.
Ann Douglas Smith, a member of the search committee who chose Hahneman as Trinity's new rector, remembers the service well.
``You saw all these older people just sitting around eating it up,'' she said. ``Nobody has ever really sat down and explained it.''
Before Hahneman began serving Trinity on Jan. 15, the church had gone through a 14-month search process, scrutinizing more than 120 applications from across the country.
The 11-member committee charged with the task of finding a new priest for Trinity knew exactly what it wanted:
Someone young and enthusiastic. A family man with children. Someone who would draw young families back to the church.
Someone active in the community and genuinely interested in Portsmouth.
Someone well-educated, articulate and able to impart his knowledge in his sermons.
Someone willing to do beautiful, lush, rich services appropriate to a historical church.
Committee members knew it was a tall order. They figured they'd be lucky to find someone with half the attributes on their ``wish list.''
They got real lucky.
``We got everything,'' said Dean Burgess, another member of the search committee.
Smith agreed.
``The interesting thing about the search committee is that we were all in agreement, from almost the minute he came - the first time we had a telephone conference call with him,'' she said.
Hahneman's sense of humor was an added bonus.
The father of four children, Hahneman comes to Trinity from the Cathedral Church of Saint Mark, an urban church in downtown Minneapolis.
There, Hahneman served as a canon, an assistant to the dean, for four years.
``The dean retired after 22 years, and when the dean retires, the assistants go and look for new jobs,'' Hahneman said.
``There were three of us on the staff six months ago and none of us is there now.''
While in Minnesota, Hahneman received the prestigious Minneapolis Award for raising $700,000 to start a day-care program that primarily served single mothers attending school.
Hahneman saw a need because the cathedral was in the vicinity of the largest concentration of technical schools and community colleges in the upper Midwest.
``We had a lot of mothers who had funding for child care, but couldn't find child care and couldn't finish their education without it.
``So we renovated a wing, raised $700,000, mostly from corporations like General Motors, 3M, and Honeywell . . . and created a child-care program that's now been going for three or four years and has about 80 kids in it,'' he said.
Hahneman had just interviewed with a church in suburban Philadelphia and was on his way to Athens, Ga., when he and his wife stopped in Portsmouth to meet with Trinity's search committee.
``The people were wonderful,'' he said. ``It was the people at Trinity that sold us on the place. They were just an absolutely wonderful bunch of warm, caring characters.''
The Hahnemans did make their way down to Georgia, but things ``just didn't click,'' he said.
``People didn't connect. It's amazing how that's such a large factor,'' Hahneman said. ``It's got nothing to do with the numbers or the pictures or the descriptions. We connected well here.''
Since his arrival in Portsmouth four months ago, Hahneman has started working toward a five-year plan of serving the community, though he's careful not to let too much out too soon.
``I don't want to be too specific because it might blow some of the things that are happening,'' he said.
Basically, the plan involves using Trinity's facilities to more fully involve the community in the life and activities of the church, including:
Working in conjunction with the Tidewater Community College Visual Arts Center and the Portsmouth Museums to plan a community arts festival at the church;
Moving a day-care program into the church that will serve the downtown community; and
Implementing more child-driven events into church services, like a costume procession on All Saints Day and a special Christmas Eve service just for kids.
For the four weeks leading up to Christmas, Hahneman will ask the children of the church to decorate an evergreen with symbols of Jesus' family tree: apples for Adam, ladders for Jacob, stars for David and crowns for Solomon. By Christmas Eve, the tree will have become the children's very own Christmas tree.
``About every six weeks, there's going to be a big parish family event where the kids will be more visible and what they've been doing will be more obvious,'' he said.
By staging such events, Hahneman hopes to lure back some of the younger families with children who have strayed from the church.
``The search committee didn't know whether the parish needed to grow bigger, but it did know the parish needed to grow younger,'' he said.
Attendance figures have already grown by about 30 percent, though Hahneman modestly attributes most of that to ``the novelty.''
``We'll see,'' he said.
Hahneman also plans to tap into the changes he's witnessed in Olde Towne since his first interview here last fall.
``The Children's Museum has opened and you see kids all over the streets now,'' he said. ``TCC has opened, and you see all these young people with their portfolios walking around.
``So there's a real sense that downtown is getting more oriented to an influx of young people, and we hope to be a part of that.''
Born and raised in Houston, Hahneman sometimes wears cowboy boots under his vestments, but it has to be a special occasion.
``Only on High Feast days, which would be Christmas, Easter, my wedding, my ordination, baptisms, etc.,'' he said.
``That's how I start with the kids. I called them up on Easter morning and said, `This is a special day. Do you know how you can tell that this is a special day? I'm wearing my cowboy boots.' ''
Hahneman also has a black Stetson in his office that he doesn't wear in church ``very often.''
``I have on occasion,'' he conceded. ``But not here yet.''
Hahneman received an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a master's in divinity from Virginia Seminary in Alexandria.
After ordination, he became a curate at The Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston, where he met his wife, Kimberly.
``My wife and I met and married and lived first together in Boston, so Portsmouth reminds us a lot of Beacon Hill without the hill,'' said Hahneman.
``With its red brick sidewalks, being able to walk to the shops or walk to the church, it's very much like the life we lived in Boston.''
With braces and a slight build, Hahneman looks much younger than his 40 years . . . except, of course, for his gray hair.
``I'm well-balanced,'' Hahneman joked. ``They wanted somebody who appeared young, so the braces help, but who had maturity and authority, so the gray hair helps there.''
The Hahnemans' first child, Clare, now 11, was born in Boston. The family then moved to Oxford, England, where Hahneman completed a doctorate of philosophy in early church history.
Oxford University Press published a condensed version of Hahneman's thesis, a copy of which is now in Trinity's church library.
``Unfortunately, the book is not thick enough to be a good doorstop, though it might work as a nighttime sedative,'' Hahneman wrote in an introductory letter to the congregation.
While in England, the Hahnemans had their second child, Nicholas, now 9. Hahneman left England for Belgium to serve as the rector of All Saints' Episcopal Church in Waterloo, a suburb of Brussels, where his third child, Catherine, 6, was born.
From Brussels, the family moved to Kimberly Hahneman's hometown of Minneapolis, where Stephen, the youngest, was born. He is now 4.
``The rectory hasn't had any children in it for many, many years,'' said Smith, of the search committee. ``That's the fun part.
``So we're adding a bath on the fourth floor where the children will be and enlarging the kitchen because they like to do a lot of entertaining with members of the congregation,'' she said.
The four Hahneman children, still in Minneapolis with their mother, will move to Portsmouth after school ends in June. Hahneman has seen his family about once a month since moving to Portsmouth.
``My youngest knows it's five weeks, probably, until they move here,'' said Hahneman. ``Five is a number he can count to.''
It's been nearly a half century since any children have lived in the four-story rectory built in the 1820s.
``The kids are just thrilled that they can walk to friends' houses or to the Children's Museum or the 7-Eleven because we live in a suburb in Minneapolis, and you have to drive everywhere in a suburb,'' said Hahneman.
``They came out for a week in March and immediately connected with other kids in Olde Towne. The kids love it.''
Because Trinity Episcopal Church, built in 1762, is such a historic church, its members prefer a church service that is lush and rich, one that ``retains the beautiful old language,'' said Burgess, of the search committee.
Hahneman gives them what they want.
``During the Easter season, he did some of the most beautiful Easter services I've ever seen,'' Burgess said.
``He gives wonderful sermons with historical detail and richness,'' he said. ``The hope is that people who are non-Episcopalians will come in just to see some of these beautiful services.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
NEW GENERATION AT TRINITY
[Color] Photo by JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI
The Hahneman family, clockwise, from upper left: Clare, 11;
Geoffrey; Kimberly; Nicholas, 9; Stephen, 4 and Catherine, 6.
The Rev. Geoffrey M. Hahneman gets things organized in his office at
Trinity Episcopal Church.
Hahneman checks one of the Sunday school classrooms, which he hopes
to put to more use.
Staff photos by MARK MITCHELL
Before Geoffrey M. Hahneman began serving Trinity Episcopal, a
committee went through a 14-month search for the person who could
match their ``wish list.''
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