Seth Little (MAT ’17) first visited All Angels’ Episcopal Church in New York City during his final year at Fuller. He and his wife, Emily, attended an evening service particularly connected with the church’s ministry to the poor, and which incorporated jazz and gospel in worship, with less need for liturgical literacy to participate. “That’s the first service I came to, and I loved the church,” Seth says. “It just felt wild. There was an argument with the pastor during announcements. The music was so fun. Half a children’s service, half a grown-up’s service, kind of Anglican. The priest was barefoot.”
Seth and Emily were connected to All Angels’ by the Brehm Center’s Maria Fee, who helped facilitate the Littles’ exploratory trip to New York City. Seth, who originally arrived at Fuller as an experienced worship leader looking to become a “traditional” pastor, was nearing graduation and discerning his next steps. He’d had his horizons expanded at Fuller, and through significant influence from the Brehm Center, had begun to shape a vision of a pastoral vocation that wove worship, music, and art together. At Fuller, he’d also experienced theological and personal growth—alongside his wife Emily—in developing an orthopraxy around standing in solidarity with one’s approximate neighbors. “We became really conscious of our privilege, and our Whiteness, and our relative affluence in the world. And we wanted to integrate a responsibility toward that awareness in our future ministry and vocation.” They wanted the same for their children as well. Alongside discerning a role for Seth that leaned into all these areas, the family wanted to pursue work in a city that would continue to provide their children with proximity to diversity and multicultural experiences.
An Episcopal parish founded in the 1840s and marked by its resilient 150 years of existence, All Angels’ attracted the Littles with its core characteristics of serving the poor, deeply appreciating the arts, and bringing together parishioners seemingly divided by cultural and socioeconomic barriers to worship under the same roof. When the position of director of music and arts became available shortly after their visit, Seth applied, got the job, and then moved across the country following graduation.
Unfortunately, what greeted Seth in 2017 was a church in crisis, as the previous pastor of 16 years had been recently removed due to a moral failure. This would be the first of several leadership transitions, culminating in a season of unrest in which the church would have five different pastors in five years. On top of this, the pandemic struck in 2020 and especially ravaged New York City. Seth found himself not only in a position of helping to pastor a church, but doing so amidst great disruption.
Despite the church’s challenges, Seth is quick to acknowledge the resilient spirit of the parishioners. “One of the things that was especially significant in my first two years or so is that the church didn’t collapse when the senior leader left,” Seth says. “There really is a throughline of a lot of people who have been committed for a long time, and I saw a glimpse of how the church had survived—and maybe even thrived a bit—in the wake of that last pastor’s departure. When the pandemic hit, the church still had that sort of grit that allowed it to do pretty well even in the circumstances. There were some serious losses and serious challenges, but the main strength of this church is that it doesn’t really have a hyper emphasis on a single leader. There’s a lot of shared leadership.”
At All Angels’, Seth’s own leadership has been proven by his sustaining pastoral and creative influence. In his role, he organizes music and arts for worship services, leads worship on Sundays, hosts jam nights, and rallies the parish for a variety of art-oriented projects. Seth values the All Angels’ tradition of embracing and valuing art created for and by the church. It’s been a safe space for artists, evidenced perhaps most notably by the fact that Madeleine L’Engle chose to worship at All Angels’ in the final years of her life.
ERIC VANVALIN is a current MSMFT student. He has eight years of experience working for a major television studio and is cofounder of Our Open House, a nonprofit resource organization for families in foster care.
KATY COOK is a freelance photographer and visual designer. Her work can be found at katycook.co.
Seth Little (MAT ’17) first visited All Angels’ Episcopal Church in New York City during his final year at Fuller. He and his wife, Emily, attended an evening service particularly connected with the church’s ministry to the poor, and which incorporated jazz and gospel in worship, with less need for liturgical literacy to participate. “That’s the first service I came to, and I loved the church,” Seth says. “It just felt wild. There was an argument with the pastor during announcements. The music was so fun. Half a children’s service, half a grown-up’s service, kind of Anglican. The priest was barefoot.”
Seth and Emily were connected to All Angels’ by the Brehm Center’s Maria Fee, who helped facilitate the Littles’ exploratory trip to New York City. Seth, who originally arrived at Fuller as an experienced worship leader looking to become a “traditional” pastor, was nearing graduation and discerning his next steps. He’d had his horizons expanded at Fuller, and through significant influence from the Brehm Center, had begun to shape a vision of a pastoral vocation that wove worship, music, and art together. At Fuller, he’d also experienced theological and personal growth—alongside his wife Emily—in developing an orthopraxy around standing in solidarity with one’s approximate neighbors. “We became really conscious of our privilege, and our Whiteness, and our relative affluence in the world. And we wanted to integrate a responsibility toward that awareness in our future ministry and vocation.” They wanted the same for their children as well. Alongside discerning a role for Seth that leaned into all these areas, the family wanted to pursue work in a city that would continue to provide their children with proximity to diversity and multicultural experiences.
An Episcopal parish founded in the 1840s and marked by its resilient 150 years of existence, All Angels’ attracted the Littles with its core characteristics of serving the poor, deeply appreciating the arts, and bringing together parishioners seemingly divided by cultural and socioeconomic barriers to worship under the same roof. When the position of director of music and arts became available shortly after their visit, Seth applied, got the job, and then moved across the country following graduation.
Unfortunately, what greeted Seth in 2017 was a church in crisis, as the previous pastor of 16 years had been recently removed due to a moral failure. This would be the first of several leadership transitions, culminating in a season of unrest in which the church would have five different pastors in five years. On top of this, the pandemic struck in 2020 and especially ravaged New York City. Seth found himself not only in a position of helping to pastor a church, but doing so amidst great disruption.
Despite the church’s challenges, Seth is quick to acknowledge the resilient spirit of the parishioners. “One of the things that was especially significant in my first two years or so is that the church didn’t collapse when the senior leader left,” Seth says. “There really is a throughline of a lot of people who have been committed for a long time, and I saw a glimpse of how the church had survived—and maybe even thrived a bit—in the wake of that last pastor’s departure. When the pandemic hit, the church still had that sort of grit that allowed it to do pretty well even in the circumstances. There were some serious losses and serious challenges, but the main strength of this church is that it doesn’t really have a hyper emphasis on a single leader. There’s a lot of shared leadership.”
At All Angels’, Seth’s own leadership has been proven by his sustaining pastoral and creative influence. In his role, he organizes music and arts for worship services, leads worship on Sundays, hosts jam nights, and rallies the parish for a variety of art-oriented projects. Seth values the All Angels’ tradition of embracing and valuing art created for and by the church. It’s been a safe space for artists, evidenced perhaps most notably by the fact that Madeleine L’Engle chose to worship at All Angels’ in the final years of her life.
ERIC VANVALIN is a current MSMFT student. He has eight years of experience working for a major television studio and is cofounder of Our Open House, a nonprofit resource organization for families in foster care.
KATY COOK is a freelance photographer and visual designer. Her work can be found at katycook.co.
Here, Seth has used a core framework—which he credits to friend and FULLER editor Jerome Blanco—for a way of integrating arts into church ministry. “Jerome wrote a little document that I brought with me from California that outlined an arts ministry in church serving three functions—for the worship life of the church, for the formational life of the church, and for the evangelistic and outreach life of the church.”
Seth has led in these areas of the arts and worship, all in addition to the traditional pastoral roles he fills in the church. “I definitely get to wear the pastoral hat,” he says. Seth regularly meets with people for pastoral care and visits with those who are sick or grieving. “It is expected for me to be making relationships, taking people to coffee, praying with every possible person. Which is really fulfilling to me. I love that.”
Seth is proud of the fact that, through the pandemic, the church maintained its drop-in programs to those in insecure housing situations and found ways to broadcast weekly services to its parishioners. As New York imposed strict lockdown measures in March 2020, Seth was deemed an essential worker and was able to enter the church building and formulate a plan for virtual worship. He had an understanding of music production from his undergraduate education and was able to pull together the equipment and resources to stream video of himself on his acoustic guitar. It proved a short-term solution because, as he put it, leading solo “gets old really fast.”
Looking for alternatives, Seth realized several of the church’s musicians had the equipment to record at home. Together they began virtually piecing together songs from a full band, complete with harmonies, that could be broadcast out to members on Sunday mornings. Several songs were inspired by specific Psalms or canticles from the Book of Common Prayer that offered fresh settings to the church’s liturgies. All in all, they recorded over 60 pieces of music while in the various stages of “stay at home.” Seth says, “It was a way to say ‘Hey, there’s still space for the gifts of the church to be employed for the benefit of the church, unto the Lord.’ We built new relationships. It was almost like a wartime rally—to execute on a vision together under dire circumstances.”
Visual arts also played an important role in sustaining the life of the church during the pandemic. Looking for a way to foster relational connections through art, Seth and an intern filmed a short documentary featuring the work of an artist in the church. “Really just to celebrate a church member and say ‘We’re in this together,’” Seth explains. “Here’s a little portrait of someone who’s doing the work, who happens to be doing creative work. They’re surviving in the pandemic. They’re a member of this community we love. Let’s have a look in their world.”
In the summer of 2021, as the church began regathering in person, Seth and his intern facilitated a project that provided cameras to 12 participants of the church’s drop-in program and invited them to snap photos of their life over a two-week period. Seth sees the role of this type of art project as a way to “help us to both be honest about what is true for us and also redress some of the problems we see.” A show was curated from the photo submissions which were displayed prominently in the church.1
The ways All Angels’ persevered through this season reminds Seth how the church has navigated past crises. To this day, staff will occasionally recirculate a memo that Madeleine L’Engle wrote around 1999, a time when the church was in real conflict over the topic of Young Earth creationism. The church was divided down the middle on the issue, to the point that a church split seemed possible. L’Engle wrote a short memo to the lay leaders which said, in effect, “It seems to me that it’s to our strength, not to our weakness, that we don’t agree on these things and yet we’re together.”
Seth agrees. “I think some of that DNA has preserved this church through crisis. It says, ‘You know what? We have a way to be together through disagreement and through challenges. That doesn’t always protect us, but a lot of times it does.’”
As the church transitions out of the most challenging years of the pandemic, there are new insights and priorities that were formed out of necessity that Seth hopes will continue. “Our church has a history of being innovative and taking risks,” he says. “But at the same time, we’re human, and we’ve always got our habits that we think are unchangeable. The pandemic brought a kind of disruption that even shakes the sacred foundations.” With this openness, Seth looks hopefully to the ways the role of the creative arts might continue to bring life to the church going forward. He says, “This habit of nurturing the created life and engaging with art in an integrative fashion—that’s part of what makes us whole, makes us adaptable, and it points to the abundant life that Jesus promised his people.”
Alexia Salvatierra, academic dean for Centro Latino, introduces this issue’s theme of “renewing the church” with a hopeful glimpse at how the life-giving work of Christ is happening in the church today.
