Retiring from a call from God

Standing behind the bow of the boat-shaped pulpit in the sanctuary of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, the Rev. Vincent (“Chip”) Seadale delivered his final sermon as the Edgartown church’s priest on Sunday. 

Twenty years after answering the call to serve a higher purpose, Seadale, 64, will be retiring from the Episcopal priesthood this week. As he prepares to move to Florida — where he first began his clerical duties — with his wife, Colleen, the Edgartown priest wants to leave a reminder for the Island: Continue to build community and care for one another. 

“I’m told my sermons are always about love, and that’s probably true,” Seadale said. “Those are the things I want to project to our community. Everybody belongs, everybody’s loved, and there is joy here. Love never ends … and that can only happen in community.”

Seadale will be leaving big shoes to fill. He has been an active clergy member on the Island, promoting efforts to support the Vineyard’s unhoused population, helping to start an Island-wide discussion on race following the 2020 George Floyd movement, leading the Island Clergy Association, and briefly being caught in the national spotlight after helping to temporarily house a group of predominantly Venezuelan migrants at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church when they were flown unannounced to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022. 

“He has been a driving force on the Island,” said Palmer Marrin, an eight-year member of the Episcopal church.

In a softly lit office in a corner of the church, with an icon of Jesus Christ gazing over him, Seadale recounted to The Times on Easter Monday his journey to the priesthood and his plans after retirement. 

Seadale vividly remembered he received a call “out of the blue” from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church around 15 years ago. Reminiscing about the sunrise he saw with his wife by Edgartown Harbor on Labor Day weekend during their initial visit to the church, Seadale said coming to the Vineyard from Florida was a “no-brainer.” 

Christine White, who has attended at St. Andrew’s for 40 years, and was a member of the search committee that hired Seadale, said the initial priest candidate they selected gave them the “runaround,” and eventually declined to come to Edgartown. Luckily, a St. Andrew’s congregant had heard of Seadale, “a fabulous guy looking to come back north.” Vincent and Colleen Seadale basically grew up in Connecticut. 

White said it was “sort of like fate.”

“We just really, really, really liked him,” White said, saying Seadale brought a youthful vitality and many of the qualities the committee was looking for in a priest. 

Among various projects Seadale helped launch, the one he said “resonated” most with Islanders was House of Grace, the overnight homeless shelter founded a decade ago that became Harbor Home’s winter shelter. 

Lisa Belcastro, Harbor Homes winter shelter director, said Seadale had been a “gift” to the Vineyard, and was “foundational” to getting the overnight shelter started. “He was such an advocate of Islanders taking care of Islanders,” she said. 

And it wasn’t just Islanders. When the migrants were flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Seadale said he knew immediately he wanted to help shelter the group until there was a better solution. They were able to provide shelter at the church for two nights before the migrants were moved to Joint Base Cape Cod, all amid a whirlwind of phone calls and news interviews, which he did to issue accurate facts about the situation. 

Seadale was at an Episcopal clergy conference in North Carolina when the two planes touched down, but he had already suspected something like this could happen to the Vineyard, since busloads of migrants were already being sent to other parts of the country. And Seadale remembered donations pouring in, with around $175,000 raised in the first 48 hours. That funding has been put in a trust to be donated to other crises, like the California wildfires and efforts of churches in cities like El Paso helping migrants. 

“It’s all very related, and it all comes under ‘shelter the homeless,’” Seadale said. “That’s the same thing as Harbor Homes as it is the migrants.”

Seadale hasn’t always been as in touch with his faith as he is now. He grew up Lutheran, but wasn’t quite “churched” until he attended Colgate College in New York. 

“I probably had my … ‘Paul on the road to Damascus’ experience in college,” he said. A visit to an upstate New York Episcopal church with a professor solidified Seadale’s path. Seadale wasn’t practicing religion at the time, and he fell in love with the Episcopal liturgy. 

Although Seadale felt the call to the priesthood while he was a Colgate student, he said he didn’t feel ready yet. Instead, he attended the University of Connecticut School of Law, and had a 16-year legal career focused on business law. But he knew law wasn’t his main passion. 

A fellow congregant at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Cheshire, Conn., would give him the push to “consider the ordained ministry.” The comment led Seadale to attend Berkeley Divinity School at Yale while working part-time as a lawyer. 

“The phone had never stopped ringing, and I said, ‘OK, God, I’m answering the phone. What’ve you got?’” Seadale said. 

Of course, he wouldn’t have even conceived of becoming an ordained minister without the support of his wife Colleen. “She’s been everything to me in my ministry,” Seadale said, saying he couldn’t be more excited to be entering retirement with her. 

While Seadale was hoping to stay in Connecticut after being ordained, instead he started at Christ Church Ponte Verde Beach in Florida as an associate priest. This Florida suburb is where Seadale and his wife will be moving after retirement, to a condominium they bought in 2019 within walking distance of the first church where Seadale served. It’s something the Ponte Verde Beach congregants seemed to have an inkling about, saying the Seadales would be “boomerangs.” 

“We kind of never left, in a sense,” Seadale said.

Later, Seadale led Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in southside Jacksonville, Fla., for two years before coming to the Vineyard. 

While the Edgartown church searches for its next priest, the Rev. Cynthia Hubbard, priest associate, will be filling in as the interim pastor. This time, White said, she won’t be a part of the search committee. “I’m getting older, and it’s time for other people to make decisions,” White said. 

She said the Seadales will be greatly missed in the congregation, and the Island community. “It’s really hard when somebody who has been with you for so long decides to leave,” she said. “He and his wife Colleen have done so much that it’s time for them to relax and enjoy life.” 

As Seadale leaves St. Andrew’s, he sees the church “refocusing on the basics,” particularly helping Islanders who are unhoused, needing food, or needing to be clothed. “That means something to us,” he said. 

He also said he is confident in the strong continuity of St. Andrew’s and the church as a whole. 

In retirement, Seadale looks forward to the time he’ll spend with his wife, but he also wants to make a practice of daily meditation. “That’s where my basis for my relationship with God began and will end,” he said. 

“We’ll see what God has in store for us,” he said.