"I think Bishop James is a living, walking, talking, breathing saint on Earth, and I desperately want other people to know about him."
Sometimes first impressions are misleading, and sometimes they’re magically prophetic. The Rev. Michael Christian Sturdy, T’25, says he “loved every second” of one of his earliest School of Theology classes—a global Anglicanism course co-taught by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Global Anglicanism the Rt. Rev. Dr. James Tengatenga. Over subsequent semesters, Sturdy took every opportunity to learn from Tengatenga. To say Sturdy’s admiration for his professor has grown over time is a bit of an understatement. “I think Bishop James is a living, walking, talking, breathing saint on Earth,” Sturdy says, “and I desperately want other people to know about him.”
To that end, Sturdy and his wife, Lauren, recently provided a generous gift to establish the Bishop Tengatenga Travel Fund, which will help cover a wide range of expenses related to seminarians’ study abroad. Michael, who currently serves as a curate at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in Houston, studied in Malawi for a month during the summer of 2024, as a recipient of the Episcopal Church’s Seminary Consultation on Mission grant. Throughout this experience, he spent significant time with Tengatenga, who served as bishop of Southern Malawi from 1998 to 2013 and continues to visit the country often. “To go [to Malawi] with Bishop James is wild,” Sturdy says. “He hasn’t lived there permanently in 10 years, and everybody still recognizes him and knows who he is.”
Travel and transition are familiar themes for Sturdy, who grew up in a military family. In the tumult of frequent relocations, he says, church was a welcome constant. “If we moved to a new place on a Saturday night, it didn’t matter—we were at church on Sunday morning.” Though he felt a call to ministry as early as sixth grade, he didn’t pursue theological formation until his mid-30s. In the meantime, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Baylor University in Waco and worked in a variety of fields, including curriculum development for a railroad museum and regulatory reporting for oil and gas companies. Eventually, he came to trust the vocational pull he experienced in his youth, and he, Lauren, and their two young children found their way to the Mountain.
Choosing Sewanee over other seminaries “was [initially] a hard decision to make,” Sturdy says, “which is hilarious—because, in hindsight, how could we have ever gone anywhere else?” He credits Lauren’s savvy financial planning skills with enabling their School of Theology philanthropy. “We have the ability to make a gift like this because Lauren has taken care of our finances, and I have followed her instructions.”
Sturdy hopes the fund will help seminarians gain a big-picture view of Anglicanism. He points out that the Episcopal Church has about two million members, while the Anglican Communion includes more than 80 million people worldwide.
Ultimately, he says, the fund exists “so seminarians and their spouses can say ‘yes,’ joyfully, to something they know matters.”
