Welcoming St. Luke’s Curate

With the month of August has come a new face to East Hampton and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The Rev. Leandra Lambert, ordained as a deacon in March, began serving as curate, or assistant, to the Rev. Denis Brunelle on Aug. 1. 

Born and raised in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood, Ms. Lambert will be ordained to the priesthood in September at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.

Her placement at St. Luke’s, by Bishop Lawrence Provenzano, follows a position as executive assistant to the director of Anglican relations at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Lambert was named the Union of Black Episcopalians’ 2017 Young Adult of the Year, and earlier this year received a citation from Brooklyn’s 43rd Assembly District for service to the community and state. She also served as a deacon at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn. She will serve at St. Luke’s for two years. 

“The hospitality has been wonderful,” Ms. Lambert said on Monday. “The welcome has been great — not just in the parish, but the welcome I’ve received from the community as well.” 

Ms. Lambert grew up in the church, she said, “so my faith has always been a part of my life.” She studied political science at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., but a “very transformative experience” while studying in Greece shortly after that country’s government debt crisis, which resulted in widespread poverty, was at least as informative. “I had been going to demonstrations, meeting with the people, and hearing their stories,” she said, “and had experiences where I was tear-gassed, and just really wanted to know where was the church in the midst of all that suffering. They weren’t present.”

The Greek Orthodox Church and the country’s political leadership are intertwined; as civil servants, priests are on the state payroll. “So they really couldn’t be there,” Ms. Lambert said. “That was one experience I always carried with me.” 

Back in the United States, she spent a summer at the Episcopal Church’s Office of Government Relations in Washington, D.C. “It was a way for me to merge these two interests of mine: faith and politics,” she said. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do after I finished college, but a friend encouraged me to go to divinity school. I wasn’t sure that that was for me, but she was very persistent, so I did some research, applied to divinity school, and started at Harvard.” 

The intention, she said, was to “study life at the intersection of faith and politics, and during my first year there found that I was asking profound questions about life, the meaning of life, and the purpose of my own life, and in conversations with my professors and fellow students and family and friends — people who really knew me — sensed that God was calling me to ordained ministry.” 

“I’m very excited to be in East Hampton,” she said, “and really looking forward to my time here.”