The Rev. Jim Adams and his wife, Sue, are sitting in a cabin on a quiet 110-acre campus in the scenic Catskill Mountains.
After a month at the Lake Delaware Boys Camp, campers have returned home. The staff, too, have left for the summer. And for the first time in over four decades, camp directors Fr. Adams and Sue don’t need to rush back three hours west to resume parish ministry in Geneva, New York.
“We are, for the first time, I think, experiencing what being retired is like,” said Sue. “It hasn’t quite hit yet.”
Jim closed out his career of 43 years as rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Geneva, a town of 13,000 people in the Finger Lakes Region, just before camp began in July. It’s a remarkable tenure when compared to national pastoral tenure averages, which are estimated around five and seven years.
Jim’s longevity at the parish has lent the stability needed to develop and grow thriving ministries, of which St. Peter’s is home to many: a nonprofit community arts academy, four active choirs, well-attended Adult Christian Education classes and a weekly free meal program. It has kept the congregation strong and stable at a time when many churches across the Northeast have seen major decline.
Sue has served as Jim’s partner in ministry, both as St. Peter’s church administrator and a leader of its various ministries. Since 1988, the couple has also run Lake Delaware Boys Camp, an academy-style summer camp that offers — in addition to the customary summer camp activities of sports, zip lines, swimming, and overnight camping — a Drum and Bugle Corps and daily chapel services from the Book of Common Prayer.
While churches led by long-tenured clergy can run the risk of stagnancy — and, often, decline — throughout his career Jim innovated as he remained rooted in a single community.
“In Pentecost, the Old Testament readings from Joel talk about your young people having visions and old men dreaming dreams, and I think that’s true for parish ministry — to have visions and dream dreams,” Jim said.
Jim attended Nashotah House Theological Seminary in the late 1970s, when former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey taught ascetical theology.
“I remember him saying that, as a parish priest, you can never expect the commitment of the congregation ever to be any greater than your own,” Jim said. “And so that stuck with me, that the commitment to the gospel, the commitment to Christ, the commitment to the parish, was at the core of leadership.”
Upon graduation, Jim completed his curacy at Christ Church in Cooperstown, New York. He served there for three years before accepting the call in 1981 as rector of St. Peter’s, described by his bishop at the time as “a parish with a distinguished past and a questionable future.” Founded in 1853 by the first bishop of Western New York as an Episcopal mission, the church had fallen on “some hard decades” amid the wider economic decline of its region, Jim said.
“The bishop said, ‘We can give it three years and see what happens,’” he said.
Jim and Sue quickly “fell in love” with St. Peter’s and were captivated by its history. They also sensed parishioners were eager to grow, Jim said.
“It was a small congregation at the time that really wanted to grow spiritually and really wanted their church to thrive, so they were totally open to change and to new visions,” he said.
Jim started offering Bible studies, and parishioners showed up in large numbers.
“It was a real time of spiritual renewal for the congregation and for us,” he said, adding that Christian education and Bible studies have remained a core part of the church’s life over the decades.
Five years into his ministry at St. Peter’s, Jim spearheaded a large capital campaign to renovate and restore the church’s gothic architecture in accord with the original design, while also creating a space suited for worship according to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.
The result was a downtown campus better positioned to serve the community, and the church began channeling its energy and resources into local mission. Looking to strengthen the parish’s connection to the local community, Sue launched a weekly event called Neighbors Night, openings the doors to area children to enjoy a free meal, games, and fellowship.
“It began with that handful, eight to 10 kids every Wednesday night, and we’d have some fun songs and games and crafts and a Bible story — just planting some seeds — and we’d have a snack,” Sue said. “And then after several months we realized that for some of the kids that was going to be their dinner, so we asked people from our church to provide a pot of soup. As our numbers grew, then we had a retired teacher, who was a member of the parish that loved to cook, and he cooked a full dinner for the neighbors. We’d have up to 100 kids.”
The ministry continues today. The church now delivers meals — a response to COVID — often accompanied by crafts and school supplies. The change in model has given volunteers more insight into the transient living situations of some neighborhood children and allows the church to serve the entire family, Sue said.
“It’s been really important to the parish,” she said. “A number of years ago, a member said to me, ‘If Jesus belonged to St. Peter’s, he’d be volunteering at Neighbors Night.’ It became highly recognized and appreciated in the whole community throughout the years, and as St. Peter’s has continued to grow and develop and thrive, it has become more and more recognized as a real important asset to the community.”
Inspired by a sabbatical spent at Salisbury Cathedral in the early 1990s, Jim realized the next opportunity for St. Peter’s was to build a great music program. The parish then hired a recent graduate of the University of Cambridge as the church organist, choirmaster, and youth director. That seed of a music ministry would eventually grow to include three youth choirs and an adult choir.
“It was, again, the parish being willing to hear about a dream and them being willing to carry it out and support it,” Jim said.
In the early 2000s, the Adamses began pursuing their next dream: opening an Episcopal parish school. After touring 20 Episcopal schools throughout the country, the couple saw a more pressing need in the community for arts education that was accessible to students, regardless of their families’ ability to pay, and St. Peter’s had the resources to meet that need.
“We already had great musical people on staff, and we have these great big buildings that were inspiring places to make music,” Jim said. “Again, the parish got behind it and there was a lot of seed money that had to go into it.”
For the first few years, St. Peter’s Community Arts Academy ran on a deficit, but the parish continued to invest in the program until it became sustainable, Jim said. Today, it serves over 300 students. St. Peter’s held a successful $2 million capital campaign for a new building, with funds coming largely from outside the parish. Through a collaboration with the Geneva City School District, the arts academy offers lessons for free to public school students who might not otherwise be able to afford them.
Sue has led the arts academy as executive director, in addition to her work as parish administrator.
“We didn’t do rest very well,” Jim said. “We took two sabbaticals in the 43 years, and one led to us starting choirs and the other led to us starting the school.”
There were plenty of opportunities to take other jobs over the years, including some at “very attractive parishes,” but Jim said he always felt there was more work to be done at St. Peter’s.
“We kind of made the decision that, instead of looking to move to a larger church or a bigger position, it was going to be much more rewarding to try and make St. Peter’s a great church,” Jim said. “And so that became our goal: to make St. Peter’s a great church rather than to climb a ladder.”
Some studies, including a 2014 survey of the Episcopal Church, show a bell-curve relationship between clergy tenure and church growth. A congregation is likely to grow gradually through a priest’s initial years with the parish, with the likelihood of growth beginning to decline after five years. Clergy age is also associated with parish growth, the same study found. The rate of congregational growth was highest among parishes with a priest 39 years and younger, with rates decreasing accordingly with older priests.
Still, Jim remains convinced of the value of an effective long-term pastorate. Membership and attendance at St. Peter’s have been remarkably stable, even as the town’s population steadily declined. Even after a pandemic slump common to many churches, attendance at St. Peter’s in 2022 was 85 percent of what it was a decade before.
Often when churches reflect on their golden age of growth and stability, it was under the leadership of a long-term pastor, he said.
“None of [St. Peter’s initiatives] could have happened if we hadn’t been there that long,” he said. “It was long enough, several times over, to have a dream, and then make that dream become a concrete goal. It takes years to accomplish those things. I don’t think any of those things could have happened without the long-term trust.”
He shares the credit with St. Peter’s vestries, which grounded his big dreams in practicality and found the resources to execute them.
The search is now underway at St. Peter’s for its next rector. Sue and Jim plan to remain in Geneva and, after giving the parish space during the transition, they say they might make their way back to its pews.
“If whoever the next rector is is comfortable to invite us to sit in the pew, that might be on our radar,” Sue said.
“We ended with so much mutual love and admiration and appreciation between pastor and people there. That meant so much to us and leaves us feeling so fulfilled,” Jim said. “During that last year, there were a lot of tears, but also a feeling of real gratitude. It was not contradictory for them to be sad at the thought that we were going to be retiring but yet knowing it was time and looking forward with excitement to the future.”
