It’s hard to trace one throughline in the life, work, and ministry of the Presbyterian minister, professor, university chaplain, and feminist advocate Patricia Budd Kepler. Her work and career is long and varied. But consistently she’s written about human interdependence. In the 1960s, she delivered a sermon on the Beatitudes, from notes, with the occasional full paragraph for emphasis:
“Blessed are those who suffer [...] God does not want us to suffer. It is not his will. God made the world good.
“And we can see through Christ that the answer to suffering is not one great act of God to conquer it, but the steady persistence of suffering love.” Comfort for the afflicted doesn’t fall down from the sky; it’s something people all build, together.
With steady persistence over a 60-plus year career, Pat has worked locally and nationally in groups devoted to human liberation, peace, and interdependence, as Pat continues to say, "with one another and with God." PHS’s David Staniunas recently helped appraise, pack, and deliver her personal records to the archives, a 17 cubic foot group spanning her earliest pastorate in 1959 to her most recent sermon in 2025, inspired by the death of Pope Francis.
Pat was born in Lancaster, Pa. and grew up in Philadelphia, graduating from Girls’ High School. She completed a business administration degree at Drexel in 1955, and graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1958. From 1959 to 1967 she was supply pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church (Manalapan, N.J.), serving an African American flock. One of the young people to grow up in Westminster was Elenora Giddings Ivory, who would later join Pat at Harvard Divinity School, and go on to her own long career in public witness.
Pat and her husband Thomas Fitch Kepler were a clergy couple in the late sixties and early seventies, and therefore were something new in the church. They and their congregations in Manalapan and Englishtown were profiled in Presbyterian Life: “The Reverends Mr. and Mrs. T. F. Kepler have three sons, two churches, one dog.”
From 1968 to 1973 Pat served in the Women’s Program of the Board of Christian Education, working out of the Witherspoon Building in center city Philadelphia. During this period she developed the songbook for United Presbyterian Women, “We Sing,” and served as staff consultant for the Task Force on Women, "bringing the Church into the women's movement." She also organized the Women’s Coalition for the Third Century, serving as its chairperson.
WC3C looked forward to the celebrations of the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1976 by casting back to the 1876 gathering of the National Woman Suffrage Association, also held in Philadelphia. A broad coalition of religious and secular women’s groups, WC3C held its first gathering in Independence Hall in 1973. They developed study groups, pilot projects on community development, and crucially, drafted the document, “A Declaration of Interdependence.”
Released to the media September 10, 1975, “A Declaration of Interdependence” was certainly an outpouring culmination of the Women’s Movement of the late sixties and seventies, and is maybe an artifact of the age – casting back to “The Mothers of 1876, from your Daughters of 1976” – but it’s deeply inclusive and studiously patriotic. In this response to America’s founding document, classism and racism, and care for creation are addressed as much as the heteropatriarchy is. No one is to be left behind in the Third Century:
“We women and men and children make this Declaration living in the midst of a world in which women are subservient and oppressed, men are repressed and brutalized, and children are violated and alienated. We live in a world in which love has yielded to war, art to science, religion to materialism, and sexuality to violence. We are committed to the discovery of a humanity which lays claim to the fullness of life.”
From 1973 to 1978 Pat was Director of Ministerial Studies at Harvard Divinity School, teaching and developing the curriculum and continuing education programs. While there she led a project on working women, interviewing women in the School about their work and family lives. The interviews would prompt Pat’s later work on an ecumenical “Project on the Family and Relationships,” and the eventual publication of her own Work After Patriarchy. When she described the project on our visit she said “If I did the interviews again I would have had to interview the men. There’s no way to talk about family and work life without the men involved.” As the Declaration had it, “We will share in the labor force and treasure leisure. We will share in raising families.”
Pat and Tom served as co-supply pastors at Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church (Somerville, Mass.) beginning in 1982, and there were deeply involved in local peace organizations, especially active in Middle East peacemaking. This was during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and the congregation counted among its number members of the Palestinian diaspora. Promoting understanding and a vison of common humanity was foremost for that congregation – they held Arabic cultural celebrations, had guest speakers, and hosted a Synod of the Northeast assembly on the Middle East. That work is ongoing.
In the 2000s Pat and Tom once again teamed up as pastors of Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church (South Easton, Mass.) and First Presbyterian Church (Waltham, Mass.), while Pat served as chaplain at Tufts University. Her time there coincided with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Following George Bush’s declaration of a “national day of prayer and remembrance” for Friday, September 14, Tufts held a special service at noon. Pat delivered an impassioned prayer for peace:
“We […] seek grace to deal peaceably with the revelations yet to come, to invoke Divine guidance for the broken and fractured world of which we are a part, [to] spare us from violence in our own hearts, and to see beyond these shattering days to the good that lies within, beyond and around us.”
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