The Right Rev. Jennifer Brooke-Davidson wasn’t exactly ignoring God.

But the longtime commercial financial lawyer had a lot on her plate. A Yale University and University of Texas law school graduate, she was wife, mother, church volunteer and lay leader.

Life was full, and she was busy.

Saturday was expected to be full and busy as well, brimming with the pomp that comes with being ordained and consecrated the sixth bishop suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas. The title translates to assistant bishop.

It was to be a celebratory event for all Episcopalians. Brooke-Davidson, 57, became the diocese’s first woman ordained a bishop.

She’ll help tend a flock of about 26,000 Episcopalians in 87 congregations in South Central Texas.

Elected by clergy and representatives of every congregation, Brooke-Davidson is a self-described “business development junkie” who wants to build “leadership capacity” within the church and empower others to do God’s work.

She sees her mission as stretching “church” to every day of the week and to the communities in which those congregations sit, “to make life better not just for ourselves but the people around us.” She has an affinity for churches in small towns and to help them “do more than they think possible,” she said.

Her mentor, the Rev. Patrick Gahan of Christ Episcopal Church, where Saturday’s ceremonies were to be held, called the new bishop a talented, committed woman of profound intellect.

“She’s thoroughly in love with the Lord Jesus Christ and has come to know he can change and completely refashion individual lives and the lives of a whole community,” Gahan said.

At her prior post in Buda, Gahan credited her with reviving a church in a way others thought unlikely. “She got there and made friends with the Police Department and went to all the City Council meetings,” he said. “The community began to realize that the church really cares about them.”

“She’s that kind of woman. I have nothing but high hopes for her and her ministry in the diocese,” Gahan said.

Brooke-Davidson hails from Corpus Christi and has deep Texas roots. She says her ancestors arrived before the Civil War. Her family’s Episcopal history goes back to the English Reformation, she said.

Her own history in the Church of the Good Shepherd in Corpus Christi started early — a Vacation Bible School certificate she holds dear was issued the day before she turned 3.

She might have been more active in the church had girls been allowed to serve as acolytes. At the time, women were barred from the priesthood.

She focused on academics and went to Yale. In her first week she was reading Plato’s “Dialogues,” Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The History of the Peloponnesian War.”

That was a sign.

So was how she had fun.

She did theater, serving as a producer and director. “You’re creating the conditions for others to shine,” she said. “It’s what a parish priest and bishop does.”

She got to Yale less than a decade after it began admitting women. Progress was slow. When she graduated from UT law in 1985, she said an American Bar Association Journal story said, “I don’t think that ladies should be lawyers.”

“It was a respectable thing to say in those days,” she said.

Brooke-Davidson married environmental lawyer Carrick Brooke-Davidson — they combined their last names at marriage — and moved with him to Washington, D.C. They stayed for 12 years. She worked at a firm and recalled being unable to attend client meetings held in men-only clubs.

“There were lots of challenging assumptions,” Brooke-Davidson said. “Some changed quickly, some not so quickly.”

She felt a pull to the church in Washington, but “didn’t know what to make of it,” she said.

One moment remains vivid in her mind. It was Christmastime. A homeless man was sitting outdoors near her bookstore. She stooped to hand him a $20 bill. She pauses in telling the story, tears welling up in her eyes.

“He looked up at me, and I saw the face of God,” she said.

It startled her, yet the message was clear, she said. “It said, ‘Get to work.’”

By the late 1990s, her family resettled in Wimberley, where she found volunteer work in a country church that led to lay positions. She was drawn to teaching and preaching and went to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, a nondenominational, missionary-focused seminary. Her cohort came from 17 denominations and six countries.

She graduated in 2008 and was ordained a priest. Until June, she was vicar of St. Elizabeth Episcopal Church in Buda.

A female bishop was a long time coming to the diocese, and people are ready to celebrate it, she and others said. She has been touched especially by the support of the older women of the church.

If there has been resistance, she hasn’t felt it and calls the historic moment “meaningful,” especially for girls in the church.

Her selection probably had less to do with her gender than her abilities, Gahan said: “The Episcopal Church has done the gender thing.”

Instead, leaders “saw in Jennifer a fervor and ingenuity to bring our churches back to life,” he said.

For her, the diocese’s historic moment has made her think of the Apostle Paul and his third chapter in Galatians.

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,” she said, “for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

EAyala@express-news.net

Twitter: @ElaineAyala