Melissa Wilcox's father, grandfather and great-grandfather were Episcopal priests, and her grandfather went on to become a bishop. But even after job-shadowing two Episcopal priests during her senior year Jan Plan, Wilcox '94 says joining the priesthood was only in the very back of her mind.

It took a 1997 sermon in Swahili, in a dirt-floored Anglican Church in East Africa, to hear her calling. The sermon was her own.

From 1995 to 1998 Wilcox worked as youth coordinator for nearly 7,000 youngsters in the Anglican Church in northwest Tanzania, about 15 miles from Rwanda. While living in several refugee camps of up to 350,000 Rwandans who had fled ethnic violence, Wilcox worked on outreach projects, such as AIDS awareness and prevention, and visited with AIDS sufferers. In Africa "AIDS is such a shaming thing people don't talk about it," she said.

During her foreign service Wilcox was repeatedly asked to preach in Anglican churches but always declined because she wasn't theologically trained. Realizing that parishioners simply wanted to hear from her as a visitor, she agreed one week. "I looked up the readings," said Wilcox. "They were on the Holy Trinity, which is the hardest concept to explain."

Wilcox wrote her five-minute sermon in Swahili, prepared to read it word for word. That Sunday, in front of the congregation in the grass-roofed church, she placed a cooking pot with water atop three stones, the local cooking method, and explained who each stone represented. She asked what would happen if one was missing. Inevitably, when she removed one stone the water spilled onto the church's dirt floor. Riding her bike home, Wilcox felt the pull toward an ecclesiastic life.

In 1998 Wilcox returned to the United States and entered the Virginia Theological Seminary, from which she graduated last year. In September she became a deacon, and this February she was ordained as an Episcopal priest at the Church of the Holy Comforter outside Chicago. In addition to preaching, she can now celebrate the sacraments and share in "the most meaningful parts of people's lives."

Wilcox's sense of ministry was shaped well before entering the priesthood or serving in Tanzania. "It's always been important for me to be connected to something beyond myself," she said. "From a theological standpoint, God created all of us. To be right in your relationships with others, it helps to be right with God."

A women's studies minor, Wilcox worked on a local domestic violence hotline while at Colby. During her junior year, in Kenya, she conducted a month-long independent project interviewing women in refugee camps, and she spent the year after graduation working for the International Rescue Committee's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, which assists with refugee camps overseas and resettlement in the United States.

In the broadest sense, ministry is a call to service, Wilcox says, and as priesthood is an offering to God, it is also an offering to the community. Wilcox's current pastoral duties at the Church of the Holy Comforter include pastoral care of the elderly and homebound, outreach with a nearby African-American and Afro-Caribbean parish and participation with a soup kitchen on the north side of Chicago. Currently Wilcox is looking into ways to assist the "Lost Boys of Sudan," refugees from Sudan's two-decade civil war, some of whom resettled in the Chicago area. Her husband, whom she met in seminary, is also an Episcopal priest.

"As priests we point people to the holiness in their lives every day and especially on those days when they need it the most--in sickness and in death," said Wilcox. "If they can glimpse God through my work, I know I am fulfilling my vows."

--Alicia Nemiccolo MacLeay '97