Congratulations to Father Brandt Montgomery for completing his Doctor of Ministry degree from the School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South this summer.   A native of Alabama, Father Montgomery has been the chaplain at Saint James for the past two years.

Father Montgomery started working on his doctoral degree in the summer of 2016, while he was working at Ascension Church and School in Lafayette, LA. Each June, he attended an intensive three-week session at the Sewanee campus in Tennessee. 

Father Montgomery’s dissertation topic was “The Development of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Saint James School of Maryland.” It provides a historical analysis throughout the school’s history and was inspired by the social justice protests happening in the United States last summer.

“In June 2020, the young alumni wrote a letter about the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and calls for social justice, and it really got me thinking,” he said. “I had just completed my first year at Saint James, and I thought maybe there’s something here that I can explore.”

His first three chapters focus on the founders of the school—William Whittingham, William Augustus Muhlenberg, and John Barrett Kerfoot.  Father Montgomery also had a draft copy of the Saint James 175th anniversary book edited by W.L. “Chip” Prehn, past parent and former Trustee (see page 36) to assist his research.

“When it came to Muhlenberg and the Church School Movement, Chip Prehn was a very big help to me. I consider him to be the Episcopal Church’s leading authority on William Augustus Muhlenberg,” he said. “A lot of people fail to realize Muhlenberg was a very prominent educator, and every Episcopal school today owes their very identity to the Church School Movement of Muhlenberg. At Saint James, we have intentionally kept to his original vision of that.”

Father Montgomery built off of the research of Emilie Amt, Hood College professor who wrote the chapter on the Civil War in the school’s 175th history book. He concluded that Dr. Kerfoot was a slaveowner, but did so with the purpose of freeing them.
He said development of diversity, equity, and inclusion mostly halted until the arrival of Father John Owens in 1955. He then also wrote a chapter on Father Baker’s headmastership, noting that he worked to get the female boarding program approved by the Board of Trustees.  He concluded with a synopsis of Father Dunnan’s work, up to the current development of DEI at Saint James, and his findings for the future.

Father Montgomery said an underlying theme throughout the dissertation was the theological principle of reserve. 

“Reserve is an old theological principle which basically says the articles of Christian faith and of the Bible need to be taught to the faithful in a gradual way so that it won’t cause people to close themselves off to the faith and believing in Christ,” he said. 

“In some ways, reserve is good. We do need to have the precepts of faith taught to us in a gradual way because we are fallible human beings and so we can’t understand God all at once,” he said. “But on the negative side of reserve, anything that was perceived as not being revealed in scripture was thought to be a radical idea that could not be entertained. That is why a lot of High Churchmen did not support the Abolitionist Movement leading up to the Civil War. The Bible does not explicitly condemn slavery, and so because of that many High Churchmen said, 'This is beyond our scope,' causing negative aspects to how the High Church tradition dealt with race. That helped pave the way for the Anglo-Catholics who morphed out of that High Church Movement and had more of a social justice understanding of the Christian faith.”

Father Montgomery feels the many hours he put into working on his doctoral degree will help him to better relate to the work ethic put forth by our students, and he looks forward to sharing more about his findings.