Renaming liturgy offers a blessing to a North Dakota woman and her new name
By Melodie Woerman, ENS:
It’s not often that a 21st-century Episcopalian knows they are standing in the footsteps of Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, but that’s the feeling Andrea Olsen had during a July 9 liturgy that affirmed the name she chose when she came out as a trans woman four years ago.
The service took place at St. Stephen’s in Fargo, North Dakota, with half a dozen of her closest friends – people she calls her chosen family – joining parishioners for the service.
Olsen told Episcopal News Service she knew the Bible is filled with stories of people who had received new names from God, including Abraham (formerly Abram), Sarah (Sarai), Peter (Simon) and Paul (Saul). And hers isn’t the first new name in her family, as her paternal great-grandfather changed his name from Stanislaw Osinski to Stanley Olsen in the early 1900s a few years after he immigrated to the United States from Poland.
The Rev. Jamie Parsley, the church’s rector, told ENS he immediately thought of Olsen when he saw “A Service of Renaming” in the print edition of the 2022 Book of Occasional Services. The service is designed to be used “when an event or experience leads a baptized person to take or to be given a new name.” Parsley said he suggested it to Olsen because the process of legally changing her name was complex, and he thought this would be “a beautiful reward” after its completion. He also told her it would offer “a public recognition of your new name, and a blessing on your name.”
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