Christ Episcopal Church will have one of its own returning home to speak.

The Rev. Michael Chaney, the son of Mike and Mary Chaney, will conduct both the 8 and 10 a.m. services on Sunday, June 3 at the church.

“I am so excited to come home and preach and serve in a place that means so much to me,” Michael Chaney said.

The Rev. Sam Godfrey, who is the priest at Christ Church, will be out of town, Chaney said, “And they needed a supply priest and I happened to be in town and they asked if I wanted to fill in, and I said sure.”

Chaney, a film and television professor at Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), where he has been for the past 20 years, also serves as a bivocational Episcopal priest and is appointed to St. Paul the Apostle (Episcopal) Church.

“I am on deck as I call it once a month at the evening services,” Chaney said. “And about every six weeks I preach during the morning service.”

Chaney also has a variety of ministries focused on the downtown Savannah Arts community, which include a coffee house ministry and a discussion series called Common Grounds that he co-ministers with a Methodist preacher.

“Common Grounds is a discussion series over coffee,” he said, and topics have included gun violence, economic justice, the #MeToo movement, racial inequality and how to be better allies with people who are disenfranchised or oppressed.

“We have talked about everything you don’t want to talk about at Thanksgiving dinner!” he said.

Chaney is married and the couple has three sons. He received a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Calif., a master’s degree in fine art from Tufts University, School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Mass., and a M.Div., from The Episcopal Divinity School, in Cambridge, Mass. 

“I really liked the graduate programs at Tufts. I think it was exactly what I was looking for in terms of the way they approached interdisciplinary arts,” Chaney said.

And it was while he was at Tufts, he said, that he attended a couple of symposiums at the Episcopal divinity school and “fell in love” with the institution.

“When I went through the ordination process I thought this is the one place I want to go to seminary,” he said.

Chaney said his home church played a significant role in his decision to go into the ministry.

“I think being a cradle Episcopalian, I look back at Christ Church with a gladness in my heart because I had a faith family at Christ Church that I am so grateful for, first in my formation period as a young person and also when I made the decision to go to seminary,” Chaney said. “Christ Church was very supportive of me from a distance and I look back at the since of community and the spirit of real love that Christ Church embodied and I feel so blessed to have ben part of that community.”