Our Rector, the Rev. Sara Fischer, was raised on the east coast and baptized as a young adult at Emanuel Church in Boston. She has lived in Portland since 1986 and served as a lay person at St. Stephen’s and then at Grace Memorial before going to General Seminary in 2000, where she earned her M.Div. in 2003. Over the decades her ministries in the wider community have included anti-racism work, baptismal formation, and advocating for the poor and outcast in the public square. In particular, while not an artist herself, she believes that opportunities for creativity are a basic human need and works to bring the arts to those with limited access to creativity. She is a huge fan of the Book of Common Prayer and is nurtured, energized, and renewed by what she calls “good, clean liturgy.”

Ordained in 2003 at Grace Memorial, Portland, Mother Sara brings a wealth of experience from her previous roles as rector at Saints Peter and Paul, Portland; St. Paul, Seattle; Saint David of Wales, Portland, and St. John the Evangelist, Milwaukie. Since April 2024, she has been leading Hope and Bread City Mission, a street church in East Portland dedicated to serving our unhoused neighbors.

Sara is the author of a memoir, Open: Adventures in Radical Hospitality, which reflects on Rahab’s Sisters, a ministry she helped to found in 2003, as well as her own development as a priest. She is working on a second book, about street chaplaincy.

In her spare time, Sara loves to knit, read, run, hike, and swing kettlebells. Her husband, Mark, is a semi-retired professor of computer engineering at Portland State who, luckily for Sara, loves to cook. The two love to travel around Oregon and overseas. Their adult son, Nathan, lives and works in Northwest Portland.

Vestry

Joseph Z. Pettit studied organ and church music (David Dahl), voice (Mira Frohnmayer), harpsichord (Randall McCarty), and choral conducting (Richard Sparks) at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA.  He pursued further studies in singing and historical performance practice at the Academy of Ancient Music in Amsterdam under legendary Dutch baritone Max van Egmond.

During his six years living in the Netherlands and working throughout Western Europe, he performed, recorded, and broadcast with many of the world’s leading early music ensembles, including La Chapelle Royale de Paris, Collegium Vocale Gent, and La Petite Bande.  He sang fulltime with the Netherlands Broadcasting Choir for three years, the house choir for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He debuted at the Netherlands Opera under Mstislav Rostropovich in 1992, in the world premiere of Alfred Schnittke’s Life with an Idiot. He has recorded on various international classical labels, including Sony, Virgin Classics, and Harmonia Mundi.

He moved to Norway in 1994, first to Målselv-Øverbygd parish above the Arctic Circle, and then became Kantor of UNESCO World Heritage Site Røros Kirke, with its Baroque organ from 1740. In 1997 Pettit was the featured Bach performer on the newly restored 1742 Wagner organ in Trondheim’s medieval Nidaros Cathedral, the national shrine of Norway, in celebration of the city’s millennium.

In 1997 he moved around the world to Honolulu, where he was Organ Scholar at St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral, and then spent four years as principal organist of Central Union Church, at the time the largest United Church of Christ (Congregational) in the West.  (Fun fact: during his seven years in Hawaii, Joe played five thousand Japanese weddings.)

He returned to the Pacific Northwest in 2005 to be music director at Trinity Lutheran Church, next door to his alma mater PLU, where he worked for six years. Thereafter he was organist-choirmaster at St. John's Episcopal Church, Gig Harbor. Pettit has been Organist-Choirmaster at St. Aidan’s since the beginning of 2022.

He frequently appeared as organist and harpsichordist with the Honolulu Symphony and Chorus, and several times as organist with the Seattle Symphony.  He has been adjunct music faculty at Pacific Lutheran University, the University of Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University, Chaminade University of Honolulu, and St. Andrew's Priory School.  Pettit is multilingual and has done graduate studies in linguistics.  He now lives less than a mile from St. Aidan's here in Rockwood, with his spouse Andrew and dogs Prairie and Powder.