Note: Due to limited space in St. Joseph's Chapel, the ordination ceremony on Friday for Deacon Hartwig may only be attended by students, faculty & staff, and invited guests.
Although Peter Hartwig discovered that the road to ordination in the Episcopal Church is not easy, he is pleased that he will reach the hallowed achievement of priesthood inside St. Joseph’s Chapel on Friday.
The all-school ceremony begins at 1:30 p.m., followed by a reception in the Patrick Beaver '98 Student Center.
Mr. Hartwig was named Christ School’s Chaplain in April 2024, but his path to ordination began much earlier.
Raised in a Christian household in Charlottesville Va., where his father served as a pastor, Peter fell in love with Christian theology and pursued the academic side of theological studies from an early age.
“I always loved church and felt very embraced, both by the people of the congregation and by God,” Peter said. “When I reached high school, I read ‘The Crucified God’ by German theologian Jürgen Moltmann and started to crave the clarity and beauty that was hiding in theology.”
After graduating from the University of Virginia, Peter knew he wanted to continue his study of theology; he earned a master’s in Christian Theology at Cambridge, and a master’s in Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary.
As he continued down the path of theological studies, Peter’s gut told him that he wasn’t ready for ordination. “I woke up one day and felt anxious and nauseous, and realized I wanted to be ordained to have security and a job rather than doing it for the right reasons.,” Peter said. He believed that if becoming ordained was meant to happen in his life, it would come when the time was right.
After a short-term job in endowment management in Charlotte, he got a call from Dr. Jenkins P’29 about an Assistant Chaplain position at Christ School. “For me, Christ School was a lot more like salvation from God than it was an idea that I had worked out,” said Peter. “All I knew was that I liked Asheville and knew a few people who worked at Christ School.”
It was Father John Roberts, the Chaplain at the time, who encouraged Peter to revisit the ordination process. “I came to the conclusion that I would start the process, and if it is what God wanted and intended for me, I would make it through, and if not, I would be led to leave the process like in the past,” Peter said.
“My draw to ordination has really happened at and through Christ School.”
To accommodate Peter’s previous experience and his degrees, the Episcopal Diocese adjusted the traditional ordination process. Since he had already been to seminary, the diocese used other tools to ensure that he was well-prepared and ready to lead before his ordination.
Peter believes that the deacon ordination, the first of two ordinations to becoming a priest, represents the biggest shift in the process. “You symbolically go from lay work to work done on behalf of the church,” said Peter. “It was a deeply meaningful experience to have a sense of that growth and calling.”
Peter looks back to his deacon ordination last January with an enormous amount of appreciation. When asked what made that day so special, he said, “When we walked into the chapel singing the old hymn ‘Praise to the Lord Almighty’ it felt like I had been transported to another place.”
“It was the collection of my cherished friends and loved ones who traveled to be there, the full collection of the Christ School community, and for me, the presence of God. All of that together just made for an overwhelmingly holy and celebratory experience.”
The next step? His final ordination as a priest in October.
“So, as I am looking forward to my priestly ordination, I am honestly even more excited and am prepared to be surprised by the goodness of it and what God has in store for me,” Peter said.