Priest. Researcher. Revitalist. Adaptive Leadership educator in the Church
For 20 years, Clara has used adaptive leadership to promote change in the Anglican (Episcopal) Church and a growing circle of other denominations. She builds leadership cultures and learning environments that are psychologically healthy, deeply rooted in the Gospel's ethics of power, and that inspire creative risk-taking and courageous response to the needs of the world.
Rooted in these values, Clara's PhD in Practical Theology at Fuller develops a cutting-edge method for teaching adaptive leadership to clergy. Anticipated in 2026, the result is offered as a theory of change and theory of action for other leadership educators to utilize, contest, or contribute to, with the hope of building a culture of mutual pursuit of excellence in adaptive leadership programming for the church.
Clara is skilled and experienced in hyper-local, regional, and systemic interventions. She teaches adaptive leadership to mainline churches across Canada, and she is a teacher and mentor in The Leader's Way Program at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale.
Clara has ten years of ordained ministry experience both in multiethnic urban parish ministry as well as in diocesan ministry developing lay leadership in rural congregations. Her first article was published in the Journal of Religious Leadership in Fall 2024: “Clericalism as a Configuration of Normative Expectations,” in which she offers a new approach to overcoming clericalism that empowers laity and clergy alike.
Much of what Clara knows about human emotional systems she learned from working with herds of horses on the prairies in her native Alberta, Canada. She has two characterful horses and a Border terrier, as well as two adult step-daughters with her husband Michael. They live in Calgary.
