ACCOMAC — The new rector of historic St. George’s Episcopal Parish traveled far in both space and time to become spiritual advisor to its two congregations, St. George’s in Pungoteague and St. James’ in Accomac.
The Rev. Cameron Randle and the parish on Sunday will celebrate the new ministry at a special service at St. James with the Bishop of Southern Virginia, the Rt. Rev. Herman Hollerith IV.
Randle arrived in January after a 10-day road trip from Los Angeles taken with his 11-year-old Maltese dog, Will.
Randle, 54, left a successful 25-year career as a music industry executive to become a priest a few years ago, embracing a vocation that had tugged at his heart from an early age.
Fulfilling that calling involved a move from Los Angeles to New Haven, Conn., to attend Yale Divinity School. After graduating in 2008, Randle returned to Los Angeles, where he served three years as associate rector of St. Stephen’s in Hollywood, the same church where he had spent time discerning whether he should become a priest.
The two careers are not as different as they might at first appear, Randle said. Much time in his former job was spent listening to and counseling recording artists and facilitating others’ careers.
Randle was born in Missouri and raised in western Kansas. He attended a Baptist church as a youth, along with Methodist Sunday School and Sunday evening Pentecostal services at a local agricultural hall.
When he enrolled in Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla. as an undergraduate, he intended to become a minister.
But “something said, ‘You’re not ready for this,’” he said. Randle switched majors from theology to English literature and history. Ironically, it was then he found his spiritual home in the traditions of the Episcopal church.
“It was the chairman of the English department … who said to me one day, ‘Cameron, I think you’re an Episcopalian and don’t know it,’ ” Randle said. Upon attending his first service, he immediately felt at home.
His past includes a stint as a legal assistant followed by attending law school at the University of Tulsa.
“I was really trying to find out how to replace that very strong conviction that I would be a minister,” he said.
He also moonlighted as a freelance writer, turning out articles about the entertainment industry.
In 1985 he opened a newspaper to a story about the nation’s largest country music talent agency, the Tulsa-based Jim Halsey Company.
He landed a job there with persistence and later started a “young, hip” management company in Los Angeles with Halsey’s son.
Randle left that company for Nashville, where he and Stuart Dill set up Refugee Management. Among other successes, they helped revive the career of Freddy Fender, who had just come out of rehab.
Randle put Fender with Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez to form the Texas Tornados, who won a Grammy for best Mexican-American performance in 1991.
Randle became deeply involved in the Tejano music
Randle then moved to Hollywood, where he was senior vice-president at Disney-owned Hollywood Records Latin.
It was three years into Randle’s tenure with Disney that he felt “something missing.”
“I realized the time had come” to pursue his calling, he said, adding he gives “boundless credit” to his wife, recording artist Angelica Garcia, for supporting him in making such a radical change. He also has a stepdaughter, Angie.
A year ago, while serving at St. Stephen’s, the couple both felt a sense of restlessness — which in his experience is the main way the Holy Spirit has manifested in his life.
Randle put his profile on a national database of Episcopal ministers seeking parishes. The first response came from Virginia’s Eastern Shore — a place they had never seen.
From the first telephone conversation, they felt led to the parish.
Randle preached his trial sermon on All Saints’ Sunday last year and started as rector in February. His wife and stepdaughter joined him this summer after Angie completed her senior year at a Los Angeles high school.
“For me, coming to the Shore was a bit like coming full circle” — having grown up in a farming community but spent the next four decades away from rural life, Randle said.
What he loves about his new career is in many ways similar to what he loved about the old one.
“I loved about 97 percent of every minute I spent in the music industry and a good bit of that I attribute to an addiction to characters,” Randle said, adding, “So I came down here and discovered that in my parish I have watermen and farmers, I have retired government employees, I have educators and bankers, I have handymen and housewives. I love the mix.”
Article source: http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20111113/NEWS01/111130312
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