The Episcopal Church began formally allowing women to become priests in 1977, but it was still so controversial at the time that it wasn’t uncommon for bishops to back out of the ordination at the last minute.

So just before the Rev. Phebe McPherson was set to become the first woman ordained in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland that December, she knitted the bishop a pair of striped socks. She mailed them to him with a card to explain: “So you don’t get cold feet.”

Over the next four decades as a priest, McPherson used her platform to spread love and promote racial equality, family and friends said. She spent 35 years as rector of Epiphany Episcopal Church in Odenton, growing and diversifying its congregation and revitalizing the church through massive renovations and a historical designation.

The church, in some ways, is a manifestation of her legacy, loved ones said. McPherson, who was also a devoted wife, mother and grandmother, died Feb. 6 of complications from pancreatic cancer. She was 74.

“She was a visionary,” said her husband, the Rev. Bruce McPherson. “She saw how to make her part of the world a better place, and then she spent a lot of time bringing everybody else along with her.”

Phebe McPherson was born in Virginia on Aug. 1, 1950. She grew up in New Jersey with three older siblings and spent summers swimming and relaxing in Sherwood Forest, a resort town on the Severn River in Anne Arundel County. Her family were Episcopalians, but religion was never a huge part of her life growing up, her husband said.

She majored in theater, a lifelong passion, at Goucher College, but also enrolled in a few classes on religion. Her husband isn’t sure exactly why she took those courses, but “she once told me that people that she met who were religious knew something she didn’t know, and she’d like to find out what it was.”

She was initially turned away from one seminary because of her gender, and it wasn’t clear then whether she would ever be able to become a priest, her husband said. But she persisted, attending Union Theological Seminary in New York City and Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago.

In the roughly two years between graduation and her ordination, McPherson spent her days as a drug counselor. After she was ordained the first Episcopal female priest in Maryland, she served at St. Bartholomew’s in Ten Hills and Memorial Episcopal Church in Bolton Hill.

“It was controversial, but I don’t think she was intimidated by it,” said Suzanne Farnham, a longtime friend whose husband was a priest at Memorial. “She just moved forward and made the best of it, and everybody loved her.”

McPherson blazed trails for those that came after her, said the Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs, the current rector at Epiphany Episcopal Church. McPherson came to Epiphany in 1987 and served as rector until her retirement in 2022 — a tenure four or five times as long as the average priest, Rodriguez-Hobbs said.

“There is this generation of women clergy in Maryland who have this immense connection to Phebe and this immense gratitude for her,” he said.

Among them is the Rev. Rosemary Beales, a longtime friend who never dreamed of becoming a priest when she moved to Odenton in 1995. McPherson saw something in her, though, and encouraged and supported Beales through her studies.

“She taught me so much about being a priest just by observing and noticing how she treated other people and how she loved Jesus and loved people,” Beales said. “She could be a lot of fun but also was reverent.”

McPherson had an incredible ability to make meaningful personal connections with congregants, friends and family said. She was known not only as a preacher but as a person, especially through her incomparable Christmas pageants at the church, loved ones said.

“People felt like she was preaching just for them,” Rodriguez-Hobbs said.

Still, McPherson never talked much about her own accomplishments or leadership skills, said her son, Sam Coe. Another person easily could have made a big deal about becoming the first female Episcopal priest — rightfully so — but his mother never thought that way.

“She was like, ‘Just because I happened to be the first female priest in Maryland, that wasn’t my goal, that wasn’t my mission in life,’” Coe said. “‘My mission in life is something else that doesn’t really have anything to do with my gender, my identity. It has more to do with broader sense of justice and doing what’s right.’”

So she directed much of her energy to her true passion — racial reconciliation and equality.

McPherson earned a doctorate in 2006 from Virginia Theological Seminary, and her thesis focused on racial reconciliation in the church. The next year, then-Gov. Martin O’Malley appointed her to the Governor’s Commission on the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland.

“Epiphany is kind of a perfect example of what we as Episcopalians are talking about when we talk about a church where all are welcome,” said Shawn Milleville, McPherson’s friend and colleague who serves as senior warden at Epiphany. “We have all kinds of different people of different ethnicities and racial backgrounds who attend our services, and that was all Phebe’s doing.”

For the past decade or so, McPherson had been working on an original musical, “Givin' It Up,” that detailed “how love can bridge the race gap,” Bruce McPherson said. She’d worked with a Baltimore jazz artist to write music.

She hoped to finish enough of the play to hand it off to someone else before she died, but that didn’t happen, Bruce McPherson said. She was diagnosed with cancer about 2 1/2 years ago, and it was aggressive. They were both in denial the entire time she was sick.

Every moment of their 27-year marriage was “bliss,” Bruce McPherson said. They met at church years earlier and had been friendly, but they were both married with children at the time. After their respective marriages ended, their relationship blossomed into something more, and their families blended seamlessly.

Phebe McPherson had her son Coe, and Bruce McPherson had two children, William and Amy.

Bruce and Phebe could count on one hand the number of times they fought in their marriage. Their most recent disagreement was whether they’d argued three times (Phebe’s assertion) or two (Bruce’s). They spent their days relaxing in nature, sailing, traveling, seeing Broadway shows and hanging out with their grandchildren.

But above all, she loved, Coe said. She was joyful and excitable and would hop from one project to another. She just wanted to feel love and spread it to others, he said.

“She was an endless source of optimism and positivity and always finding the silver lining with her friends and family,” he said.

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