The Rev. Kirianne Weaver

Kirianne grew up in the church - literally - at New York City's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, where her father, renowned organist John Weaver, was Minister of Music, and her mom, flutist Marianne Weaver, directed the junior choir. She regularly heard the preaching of such greats as David H. C. Read and Fred Anderson. A talented musician, she sang with the Metropolitan Opera's Children's Chorus and was soloist for a recording of her father's compositions; she also played violin and piano. A wonderful artist, she earned money drawing portraits in Central Park. While a student at the Bronx High School of Science, she was on the varsity soccer team and won the Pegasus award as the best female player in the City of New York public schools; this led to her spending a summer in Holland in the Teams USA program. During her four years at Bryn Mawr College, she began to feel a call to the ministry. She spent a summer as designated artist at the archeological dig at Megiddo, Israel, visiting many historic Christian and Jewish holy places. Another summer was spent in Yellowstone National Park working with the Park Christian Ministries program. After graduation in 1995 she spent a year as an intern in the Women's Advocacy program at Presbyterian Headquarters in Louisville. There she came under the spell of the art work of the Christian artist Nalini Jayasurya, who invited her to study in her home in Sri Lanka. Kirianne spent the 1996-97 year working with Nalini and teaching at the Senior Moir School in Colombo.

Kiri entered Princeton Theological Seminary in 1998. During her three years there she served as an intern at the Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and sang in the Chapel Touring Choir. Summers were spent with the Touring Choir in England and Scotland, living in a Christian village in Ghana, and working in a children's program at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in South Boston. At her graduation in 2001 she received the Jagow Prize in Homiletics and Speech and the Graduate Study Fellowship for the Parish Pulpit Ministry. (Her grandfather had won a similar fellowship from the seminary exactly 70 years before to study in Scotland.) This fellowship enabled Kirianne to spend the next year in Calcutta, where she studied Indian religious art while also traveling throughout that vast country. She returned to the USA to become a Resident in Ministry at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, and two years later she became Pastor of the United Presbyterian Church of Northville, NY. This past February, she led a mission trip with 20 parishioners from her own church and a neighboring parish to Guatemala where they traveled and worked on a construction project at a church in a Mayan village. She is the niece of Bob and Anne Weaver, members of Immanuel.

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