Susan Wines
Nominee for: Mission Council, Committee on the Election of a Bishop, Lay Person
Please describe your current involvement in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut using first person, narrative language.
My current involvement in the Episcopal Church in Connecticut is centered in the parish life of St. Andrew’s in Madison, where I have served in several leadership roles, including as Co-Warden since January 2024. My parish ministry has included formation, stewardship, lay leadership development, communications, preschool oversight, and leading our Search Committee. I have chaired our Nominating Committee and served for several years on the Stewardship Committee, including two years as chair. As Co-Warden, I initiated and led a renewed focus on Vestry formation. I designed the process, drafted a new Vestry Handbook and Covenant, revised our Vestry Norms, and conceived, organized, and led our 2026 Vestry Retreat.
Worship and pastoral ministry are also central to how I serve at St. Andrew’s. I serve as a chalice bearer at both our 8:30 and 10:00 services and love the many ways people approach the cup—some without eye contact, some with a bright smile, some with a squeeze of the hand, and occasionally with a joke. I also serve as a lay visitor, bringing fellowship and parish news to those unable to worship with us. I entered that ministry thinking I was bringing care to others but have discovered how much I am cared for in return through the wisdom and friendship of parish elders.
Since July, much of my energy has been devoted to our rector transition. I coordinate our supply clergy, a ministry I have found unexpectedly meaningful. I have the privilege of welcoming visiting priests into our space, helping them get oriented, and offering small creature comforts along the way. Week by week, their unique voices have shown us different ways one can live out the call to be pastor, priest, and teacher. I also lead the work of our Search Committee, including planning and facilitating parish listening and discernment, developing prayers and formation materials, creating written and online ways for parishioners to participate, and managing the committee’s work and longer-term schedule. To be honest, I would not have chosen to take on this work, but it has been life-giving in ways I did not expect. The rector search has allowed our parish to pause, gather, pray, and listen for what God might be asking of St. Andrew’s in this next chapter.
Some of my other work at St. Andrew’s has included leading a major restructuring of our parish Preschool; designing and launching a new parish website; and conceiving and leading our first parish-wide Bible Challenge, The 50 Day Bible Challenge: A Journey with Luke, which drew 78 participants. Beyond St. Andrew’s, I founded and led a Southeast Region Wardens’ Group, bringing wardens together for peer support, cross-parish relationships, and practical conversation about parish leadership. All of this has made me want to understand and serve the Church beyond my own parish.
Much of my wider community engagement is woven into my professional life. I have spent my career in public service as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and now serve in an executive management role in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut. As a federal prosecutor, priorities may change, but the fundamental mission of the role remains constant—to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and serve the people of Connecticut. Weighing the impact of prosecutorial decisions on victims, defendants, and the public is an essential part of the job.
Closer to home, I serve as an appointed member of the Town of Madison’s Ethics Commission, where I was the principal drafter of the Policies and Procedures that govern the Commission’s work. That project required translating the Town’s Ethics Code into clear, workable procedures for handling advisory opinions and complaints, including deadlines, confidentiality, recordkeeping, and review.
I have also volunteered as a guide for paratriathletes training for and competing in the Madison Triathlon. Guiding meant walking alongside an athlete, not simply leading someone through a course. Through training, I learned to understand each athlete’s strengths and challenges, to offer support without taking over, and to pay attention to what allowed that athlete to compete as fully as possible. I had raced and won that same triathlon twice myself, but racing with a paratriathlete was more about relationship and trust than it was about where we finished.
“[T]here is not just one way to be a Christian, but [I] am head-over-heels in love with the Anglican way of following Jesus.”
I really wish I’d written that, but alas, I did not. Those words belong to Scott Gunn and Melody Wilson Shobe in Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs & Practices, p. xvi. But they describe exactly how I feel about our Episcopal faith.
I was raised in an atheist household, full of love, but decidedly not spiritual. Even as a child, though, I felt a “pull” toward faith I couldn’t quite understand. It was not until I had children of my own that I felt called to the Episcopal Church. In 2007, I was baptized at the Great Vigil of Easter, where my atheist family, awestruck by the baptismal rite, felt a connection to church for the first time. My love for the Episcopal faith has only grown over the years, drawing me more fully into the work and worship of St. Andrew’s and toward the ministry of the wider Church.
Much of what I would bring to this role begins with a lawyer’s instinct for understanding how institutions are structured and how governing documents shape what an organization must do versus what it may do. (What it should do is another question entirely!) I genuinely enjoy poring over constitutions, canons, policies, and bylaws (marginalia and footnotes included). At St. Andrew’s, I created a new Vestry Handbook and Covenant, revised our Vestry Norms, and designed and led our 2026 Vestry Retreat centered on formation and discernment. Professionally, I have set management standards, looked with fresh eyes at how our people and their skills might be used differently, and taken responsibility for difficult personnel matters requiring careful fact-finding, documentation, judgment, and follow-through, often amid dramatic shifts in priority.
I also tend to see the gifts people bring to an institution and imagine how they might be used more fully. At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, I have reorganized our litigation-support work, bringing existing personnel together in a centralized unit with dedicated expertise and clearer roles. At St. Andrew’s, I helped restructure our Preschool leadership within significant financial and staffing constraints, strengthening oversight and compliance. Both experiences required me to see what was not working, recognize what we already had to work with, and figure out how to make something better from it.
Finally, I’ve learned that responsible leadership sometimes means resisting the pressure to “hurry up.” Leading our rector search has required me to slow the process long enough to understand what differing answers, and the tensions among them, mean for the relationship we seek with our next priest, while still keeping the work organized and moving forward. Holding those responsibilities together has become an important part of how I understand leadership.
I would welcome the opportunity to bring these experiences to the wider Church.