Introducing the 9th Dean of St. James Cathedral

A Message from Senior Warden Susan Fickling

I am elated to announce that our Provost, the Very Rev. Lisa Hackney-James, has accepted our call to serve as the 9th Dean of St. James Cathedral effective February 1, 2025.  

Please mark your calendars for the opportunity to celebrate this joyous news as a community on Sunday, March 2nd at 4:00pm when Lisa will be installed as Dean by the Rt. Rev. Paula E. Clark during a festal Evensong at the Cathedral with our combined Cathedral choirs and guests from around the Diocese. Stay tuned to parish communications for more details about the upcoming service and a festive reception to follow.

For now, I want to offer my profound thanks for the gifts of leadership, gravitas, good humor, and spiritual inspiration that Lisa has afforded the Cathedral community since she arrived at St. James in 2015. There is no doubt this experience, in all its breadth and diversity, was preparing Lisa to lead us in this moment. 

You may recall that when Dean Dominic Barrington ended his tenure at St. James in 2022, the parish was already in a transitional state. The Diocese’s proposed sale of 65 E. Huron had placed the Cathedral’s future in peril; the parish was in the infancy of a capital campaign, and Sunday attendance, which had inevitably flagged during the pandemic, was beginning to recover. 

In this challenging environment, stability and confident strategic-level leadership was crucial, and Lisa embodied it. And so Chapter took the important step of calling Lisa to serve as Provost, vesting in her all the authority she would need to represent the Cathedral’s interests throughout these critical venues. 

The results have been a blessing for us all. Under Lisa's astute and poised leadership, our Cathedral’s future went from uncertain to exciting. Lisa worked in tandem with Bishop Paula Clark to strengthen the cohesion between the Cathedral and the Diocese. Under that spirit of cooperation, members of our community could work collaboratively with the Bishop & Trustees and the Bishop’s staff to move toward the settlement of the future of 65 E. Huron. 

Thanks in no small part to Lisa’s guiding hand, we have now laid the groundwork toward a successful purchase of the property. The Diocese accepted our Letter of Intent to acquire the building, and we have expanded our capital campaign to support this landmark agreement. The result is a comprehensive plan to preserve our physical legacy and ensure the Cathedral has the space and resources it needs to perpetuate our vital ministries for generations to come. 

As we approached the end of 2024 with both tremendous momentum and a considerable amount of work left to do, it became clear to me that we needed to solidify the leadership of St James. In the ordinary course of a leadership transition at a Cathedral, the Chapter would engage in a discernment process followed by a call for its next Dean – a process that I had been committed to before the prolific surge of extraordinary events that included the opportunity to purchase the office building, the launch of an exciting capital campaign, the ongoing expansion of our ministries under enthusiastic lay leaders, and to the need to reimagine our personnel model. Having had the opportunity to observe Lisa’s fluid management of all of those events along with the day-to-day management of a thriving Cathedral church, it became obvious to me that we already have the leader that we need for the future.

Late last year, Junior Warden Allen Moye and I started to have conversations with Lisa, the St James staff, our Chapter, and Bishop Clark – all of whom agreed with resounding conviction that we should invite Lisa to serve as Dean, enhancing her capacity to lead us as the moment requires. Bishop Clark enthusiastically affirmed this decision, as her approval is required by the canons. 

On behalf of Chapter, we are profoundly grateful that Lisa has accepted our call to serve as our Dean, just as she has with such unwavering faith and commitment throughout her decade of leadership in our midst. 

Please join me in welcoming the 9th Dean of St. James Cathedral, the Very Rev. Lisa Hackney-James.

A Message from Dean-elect

Dear People of St. James Cathedral,

I am deeply honored to accept the call to serve as the 9th Dean of St. James Cathedral, Chicago.

In this call to further service, I am grateful to the wardens, chapter and people of St. James for the trust you have placed in me, for the confidence that you have expressed in my leadership, and for the invitation to delve ever more deeply into leadership with you, in the midst of this historic, dynamic, and Spirit-filled community of faith.

As a clergy leader accepting a call, it would be customary for me to write to the community at this time to introduce myself to you. I would tell you that I have a wonderful spouse, the Rev. Alan James, and more children and grandchildren than you might find plausible. I would recall that in my first career I was a professional harpist, and that since the time of my early childhood I have always lived in a big city by a Great Lake: Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland – and then back to Chicago again. I would tell you that I was ordained not once, but twice on the black and white marble of this historic nave and that I believe that the great American Midwest, the global City of Chicago, and the historic community of St. James are deeply important - and are already deep in my bones. 

In fact, because I have already served as your Sub-Dean and then Provost for nearly a decade now, we are already well-known to one another! Likewise, I am privileged to call many clergy colleagues from around this diocese both colleague and friend.

While acknowledging the atypical path toward this discernment, the decision of the wardens and chapter, along with the enthusiastic endorsement of Bishop Clark, to extend the invitation for me to serve as Dean creates an exciting opportunity for our cathedral and diocese alike. We are able to build on the momentum that has brought us to this moment in the life of our Cathedral and our Diocese of Chicago, and I look forward to leading, along with our Bishop, a renewal of the mission and ministry of this Cathedral, and strengthening both the relational bonds within our diocese and our common sense of Episcopal identity.

In Christ,

Lisa +