At Messiah Lutheran Church in Ashtabula, Ohio, where I grew up, there was a drinking fountain. It was old. It was ordinary. It barely worked. But just after midnight on Christmas Eve, the water would run cold and clean and strong. I know now that water pressure drops when everyone sleeps and the cold December ground cools the pipes, but this always felt like something more—an inside joke, a mini miracle, a little bit extraordinary.
When other kids were asleep on Christmas Eve, I was still at church with my mom. She was not yet Bishop Eaton—she was Pastor, exhausted, still wearing her robes, doing the work that pastors do when everyone else has gone home.
There is a kind of ministry that begins when the candles are blown out. Christmas Eve didn’t end for her with the final hymn. It ended in the sacristy in the dark-ordinary and extraordinary. I drank the cold water from the fountain like it meant something, but the Christmas miracle was really her work, her call, her ministry—perfectly ordinary and extraordinary.
My mom was born on the west side of Cleveland in 1955. My family were beer wholesalers and active, faithful Lutherans. She’s a middle child, and her brothers sometimes called her “Bossy Bess.” Smart and athletic before girls were really encouraged to be either, she always wanted to be a pastor before women could be ordained.
She played her flute at Severance Hall with the All-City Cleveland Youth Orchestra. She studied music at Wooster (Ohio) College and then went to Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., where she didn’t unpack her bags for weeks, afraid they had made a mistake admitting her.
She met my dad at seminary—he’s an Episcopal priest. They both got first calls in Columbus, Ohio. That’s where our family began. My sister and I became nursery connoisseurs.
For me, her daughter, one of the most profound ways she has been a woman in ministry is that she mothered, not just me but the people of the church.
But the ministry I really witnessed happened at Messiah, where she served for 15 years. That’s where I saw the full spectrum of what church could be—ordinary and extraordinary.
Beyond the broken drinking fountain, this is where we lived in community and call. Parish ministry is sacrament and sermons. It’s also fast-food dinners between choir practice and committee meetings. It’s playing shortstop on the church softball team, the Mighty Walleyes. It’s community organizing. It’s taking the youth group on a “work week” to rebuild houses with Lutheran Disaster Response but also giving them a chance to see the ocean for the first time.
As parish pastors know, it’s baptizing, marrying and burying your people.
She did this work well, and a new call came.
In 2007 she was elected bishop of the Northeastern Ohio Synod. It was a time of change. In 2008 the United States entered a recession. We also elected our first Black president. In 2009 the ELCA voted to affirm LGBTQIA+ clergy in committed relationships. The decision was complicated, incomplete, brave and bold. Our bishops, including my mom, were called to walk with people through the joy and grief.
In the following months, she logged tens of thousands of miles on her American-made car (the one she still drives today), traveling across the state to sit in sanctuaries and church basements with people who were angry or confused or relieved, holding space for it all.
From the time she was told she couldn’t be a pastor, she has been the first woman in each of her calls. She credits those who came before her.
She is a baby boomer, white, cisgender and straight. She has never claimed to speak for everyone, but she shows up in rooms where women haven’t always been welcome. She shows up so others can too. And for me, her daughter, one of the most profound ways she has been a woman in ministry is that she mothered, not just me but the people of the church.
Her ministry is holding all of it with grace—the grief, the joy, the broken drinking fountains, the broken systems. This is what she’s done.
In 2013, I watched from an Italian villa as she was elected presiding bishop. My dad had to buy more ties—he hadn’t packed for history. But I knew. I knew when people heard her speak, she would no longer belong to only us. She would belong to the world. She would belong to you.
Her early days were strange—staff at the churchwide offices taking pictures of her answering a phone, still doing parish ministry; interviews on national news where she worried that they would ask her to comment on Miley Cyrus’ twerking. (They didn’t, but still.) She was letting go of Ohio and stepping into the leadership of a nearly 3-million-member denomination. Ordinary and extraordinary.
At that time there was no TikTok. No COVID. She had no grandchildren. The world she would serve had yet to fully unfold.
She has met the pope three times. She once flew all the way to India only to be turned away at the airport due to anti-Christian sentiment. She held my newborn babies during Zoom meetings. She led through a pandemic. Through devastating political polarization. She leads this church knowing she can’t make everyone happy. She faces the behemoth of social media, reading every comment, every message, every criticism, late into the night.
In recent months I’ve watched her ministry take new shape. Quietly sitting in pews of a Latine congregation in Chicago facing Immigration and Custom Enforcement threats. Reaching out to queer pastors after church buildings with pride flags were vandalized. She just returned after spending Palm Sunday in Jerusalem from where she sent me a text message that read: “There was a missile in Tel Aviv, but our flight is still on time.” Ordinary. Extraordinary.
Her ministry is holding all of it with grace—the grief, the joy, the broken drinking fountains, the broken systems. This is what she’s done. Not for recognition. Not to build a legacy—she hates that word. But to show up. To do what is asked, what she has been called to do.
Ordinary. Extraordinary.
In retirement, I imagine she’ll make fires in the fireplace and spend time with her 99-year-old mother. She’ll garden. She’ll read the same book over and over. She’ll hold her grandkids without being on mute. She’ll watch cozy British mysteries and Alaska survival shows. And maybe—on Christmas Eve—she’ll play Pachelbel’s Canon on her flute and help turn off the lights.
All of it ordinary, yet extraordinary.
