Alla Bozarth

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of their ordination to the priesthood. Carter Heyward, Alison Cheek, Nancy Wittig, Emily Hewitt and Alla Bozarth participate in the Eucharist at Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1999.

In 1947, Alla Bozarth was born in Portland, Oregon, into a family she described as an “ecumenical brood of independent believers.” When she was fourteen years old, she felt called to the church and wanted to become a nun. After attending both an Episcopal high school and a Roman Catholic high school, she applied to and was accepted for study at Northwestern University and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary simultaneously. She would ultimately go on to earn three degrees – Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D. – from Northwestern University, while studying independently for the canonical exams.

In 1968, after an exploration of the Carmelites, a Roman Catholic religious order, Bozarth created the Ecumenical Oblates, a “community-in-anticipation,” in which she vowed to live by “Simplicity, Availability, and Purity-as-Wholeness,” her own interpretation of the “traditional vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity.” In 1971, the community of one became a community of two when her fellow seminarian, Phil Campbell, asked to join her. They married on September 12, 1971, and shared “the dream that [they] would be ordained to the priesthood together.”

Bozarth was ordained to the diaconate on September 8, 1971, and served as a deacon for three years, including time as an associate chaplain at Northwestern while completing her doctorate. On July 29, 1974, she became one of the first women to be ordained a priest in The Episcopal Church as one of the “Philadelphia Eleven.” After her ordination, she found herself unemployed and decided that, “as long as I accepted someone else’s definition of me, I had no power in my own life.”

Bozarth founded Wisdom House, a feminist interfaith spirituality center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1974 and incorporated it in 1976. From there, she traveled widely as “a kind of priest-at-large,” conducting feminist theology workshops, giving poetry readings, and lecturing on topics such as women in the church. After her husband’s death in 1985, she returned to Oregon and established Wisdom House West. She ended her active ministry in 1994 due to health reasons, but remains affiliated with Wisdom House as priest-in-charge. During her career, Bozarth published multiple books on faith and grief. She is a successful and beloved poet.