Meet the Candidates
On Wednesday, July 22, 2026, the Standing Committee of the diocese released the initial slate of nominees to stand for election to be the first bishop diocesan of the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes. Read the announcement here.
Get to know Mother Terri.
My full, formal name is The Rev. Cn. Terri Lynne Bays, but people generally call me Mother Terri. I use she/her pronouns. My current title is Canon/Missioner to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Indiana, which is based in South Bend, Indiana. Except for my 3 years in seminary, I have lived in South Bend since 1999. I share my current household with my husband of 36 years, one of our two young adult daughters, and four cats. We also enjoy visiting our elder daughter in Chicago. To counterbalance the mental stresses of my work life, I enjoy making inexpert attempts at both gardening and quilting.
I started my career as an English professor with a focus on liturgy and literature from 14-15th century England, getting my BA in English from Northwestern and a PhD from UCLA. After teaching for about two years, I became a Director in the Notre Dame London Program, where I specialized in placing students in internship opportunities that furthered their academic and professional goals. I gradually transitioned from academia to work for the OpenCourseWare Consortium (now OEGlobal), which helps put college courses online, free and open to the public so that teachers can learn from teachers and learning is not limited to the classroom. I served as Special Projects Manager, then as Interim Executive Director, and (while in seminary and as a curate) again as Special Projects Manager. Since Ordination, I have served as a Cathedral curate, priest of a tiny inner-city parish, and then in my current role on the diocesan staff.
Because my husband grew up in Niles, Michigan, and we live nearby, my family has long oriented our household’s attention northward. Collaborations with Eastern and Western Michigan colleagues in my diocesan work have increased my own sense of investment in both the innovative spirit with which you have developed new ministries and the resilience with which you have faced the hardships of the past several years. Applying as a bishop candidate gives me an opportunity to move from merely watching you to working with you.
To that work I bring decades of experience working to help communities through difficult transitions, first as a lay leader and then as a priest on diocesan staff. One of my strengths is a talent for uncovering the gifts God has given to an individual or congregation. For example, one congregation might have a history of sustaining a variety of vibrant lay-led bible studies; another might have a creative idea for turning deferred maintenance on a cemetery into an intergenerational leadership program. This allows me to identify the common desires that bring together seemingly disparate views and values, and to help people take their confidence in what they already know and love and invest it in the project of facing the uncertainties of a new project.
My vision for my potential ministry as the first bishop diocesan of the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes, therefore, focuses on identifying, maintaining, and where necessary restoring, the strengths of the individual dioceses you have brought together to make up your new whole and discovering what previously un-dreamed of possibilities emerge from the combination. This means attending to the various individual ministries from around the diocese, according to their needs. Though we cannot know where God will call us in the coming years, my vision is to support you in becoming a diocese that gets there together, confident in the knowledge of God’s love and of our love for each other.
The Reverend Zachary Nyein
Senior Associate Rector & Pastor of Imagine Worship,
St. Bart’s, New York City, New York
Get to know Zack.
I am the Reverend Zachary Charles Kyaw Nyein. Kyaw is pronounced “Joe” and Nyein is pronounced “knee-ain,” rhyming with “vein” (both names are of Burmese origin). Folks in different contexts call me Father/Reverend/Pastor Zack — or just Zack! I use he/him pronouns and serve as Senior Associate Rector and Pastor of Imagine Worship at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in the City of New York, affectionately known as St. Bart’s.
I currently reside in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan with my husband, Michael Waterson, who is a native Michigander. Michael serves on the biology faculty at Lehman College in the Bronx and is active in the St. Bart’s community. Together, we enjoy the arts, time outdoors, and visiting family in Tennessee and Michigan, where many of our loved ones are scattered across the Mitten. For recreation and wellbeing, I enjoy taking group fitness classes and singing with the Grace Church Choral Society, a local community choir.
I studied music education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where my burgeoning sense of call was nurtured by the Tyson House, a vibrant Episcopal-Lutheran Campus Ministry. After graduation, I was licensed as a lay preacher and commissioned by the Bishop of East Tennessee to plant Project Canterbury, a progressive campus ministry housed in an Anglo-Catholic parish serving the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. I later prepared for ordination through Yale Divinity School, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Since being ordained in 2016, I have served at Grace Church Chattanooga; All Saints’ Atlanta; and, since 2022, St. Bart’s NYC. At St. Bart’s, I founded Imagine Worship, a radically welcoming midweek congregation that includes many spiritual seekers and newcomers to the Episcopal Church. My continuing education has included participation in the inaugural cohort of Trinity Wall Street Leadership Fellows and the Learning from London program through Bexley Seabury Seminary, exploring fresh expressions of church.
I felt drawn to the Great Lakes because of the courage, faith, and imagination reflected in your diocesan profile and in the “Juncture Journey” that has brought you to this moment. My husband Michael’s family hails from Up North, and over the years I’ve come to love both the beauty of the Great Lakes and the earnestness of its people. I was especially inspired by your expansive understanding of church — one that embraces traditional expressions of Christian community alongside your camps, Plainsong Farm, and ministries of service, care, and justice where God’s people are fed and formed, gathered and scattered back into the world as the hands and feet of Christ.
As a seasoned innovator, much of my vocation has involved cultivating new life within inherited church structures, trusting that God’s New Creation never throws away the old. If called to serve as your first bishop diocesan, I would hope to bring energy, resourcefulness, and creativity to help this new diocese flourish, together with the compassionate heart and steady pastoral presence needed for healing, trust-building, and shared discernment to continue. Above all, I would aim to encourage lay people, priests, and deacons alike to boldly claim their baptismal callings as we build God’s church together.
I know that an authentic vision for the diocese must be discerned collaboratively through prayer, intentional listening, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. That said, I am captivated by the Great Lakes as America’s “Third Coast.” In a time of polarization, destabilization, and profound spiritual thirst, I wonder whether God is calling this diocese to embody a “Third Coast” way of being church: pastoral yet pioneering, rooted yet adventurous, forward-thinking yet spacious enough to honor a diversity of perspectives. Grounded in the Anglican via media (“middle way”) and fueled by the loving, liberating, life-giving Way of Jesus Christ, I imagine a diocese alive with communities of Word, Sacrament, and Service that form disciples, foster belonging, bridge divides, and invite the weary to be renewed by the fresh and ancient streams of God’s amazing grace.
Get to know Holly.
I am the Rev. Holly Ann Rankin Zaher (she/her) and I serve as the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Evansville, Indiana, where I live with my spouse, Jim, and my two sons, Benedict and Basil, and our family dog, Freckles – my adult daughter, Ellie, lives out west. I like hiking when I can find a trail and enjoy fiber crafting and reading.
I earned a BS in Mathematics, a Master of Arts in Missions and Evangelism with a concentration in Youth Ministry that I surrendered for my MDiv from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry. I taught youth ministry at the seminary level, oversaw the liturgy of an emergent church plant in the early ‘00s, ran the online portion of a seminary, and did youth ministry in four different churches in four different dioceses all before I was ordained. Over the last decade as a priest, I have served in various roles in the diocese of Indianapolis: as a member of the Executive Council, the President of the Standing Committee, two-time delegate to the General Convention, and to the wider church as Secretary for the 2022 General Convention Evangelism and Future Church Legislative Committee. I regularly speak and consult at diocesan events and with non-profits.
Compelled by the hopeful vision captured in the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes’s profile, a vision of a newly-formed diocese that has done a lot of honest reflection about needs for building both trust and community while offering a clear-eyed vision of the future ahead for us as church, I saw this as precisely the kind of church I want to be a part of – one that is honest, willing to risk, and knows that the near future will call for the difficult and joyful work of both rediscovering and creating different ways of being church in our world.
As a former youth minister and church planter, I bring deep experience analyzing gospel and culture and an ability to be flexible in thinking and practice. As a priest, I understand the importance of Episcopal identity while inviting established congregations into deepening their ability to love God, love one another, and love their neighbor—while experimenting with ways of connecting with our neighbor. As a child of God, I see the dreams of God becoming reality every time we live justly, with all of creation knowing the love of their Creator.
This is my vision for a potential ministry as the first bishop diocesan of the Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes: our ministry would first be centered on our deeply knowing God’s love in the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, filled with that love and the power of the Holy Spirit so that it leaks out to all we meet: in our relationships, as we serve, as we live, as we work, as we partner with God to co-create a better world, visible in the ongoing work of building relationships across this new diocese and in the deep listening we need as we discern priorities. And that discernment, coupled with unbridled hope, are the most needed spiritual practices today. With these practices, we will seek to deepen our capacity to handle uncertainty and cultivate creativity in a world that is in flux and desperately needs people who can notice where the Spirit is moving, and move there.