Bishop John Harvey Taylor with Canons (from left) Daniel Valdez, Episcopal Community Federal Credit Union president; Christine Budzowski, diocesan ECW president ; and Jeffrey Baker, vice-chancellor.
Three veteran lay leaders – diocesan Vice-chancellor Jeffrey Baker, diocesan ECW President Christine Budzowski, and Episcopal Community Federal Credit Union President Daniel Valdez – were named honorary canons of the Diocese of Los Angeles by Bishop John Harvey Taylor on Nov. 7 at Diocesan Convention’s annual meeting in Riverside.
Conferring the canons crosses and certificates following the Diocesan Convention dinner, Bishop Taylor gave remarks conveying the following biographical information.
Baker – who delivered the Margaret Parker lecture at Diocesan Convention – has served as a vice-chancellor of the diocese since 2019. He has been active in two congregations – Epiphany, Oak Park, and St. Aidan’s, Malibu – while serving as a Clinical Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Clinical Education and Global Programs at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law where he also directed the Community Justice Clinic.
Earlier this year, after 15 years in Southern California, Baker returned to his home state of Alabama where he now serves as a Clinical Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Experiential Learning at the University of Alabama School of Law. Jeff launched his career as a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Law in 2000. His clinic law practice seeks to advance social justice, human rights, and access to justice for communities with fewer resources. His scholarship addresses issues at the intersection of law, policy, theology, human rights, and human dignity.
Baker and his family – wife, Jennifer Duck Baker and their two daughters – are now parishioners at Canterbury Episcopal Chapel at the University of Alabama. While in Southern California, he found time to write his 2019 novel titled Haven focusing on the experiences of two sisters separated by war.
Budzowski was born in Sydney, Australia, baptized in the Church of England, and confirmed in the Episcopal Church after moving to Los Angeles in 1962. In her early 20s she served as ECW President at St. Mary’s Church in Provo, Utah, where she lived for eight years and where her two two daughters, Marina and Katherine, were born. She returned in the late 1970s and has made her home in the Diocese of Los Angeles ever since. Now grandmother to Wills and Sofia, she is active in numerous Episcopal Church activities at the parish, diocesan, and churchwide levels.
Budzowski has held various leadership roles with the Episcopal Church Women denomination-wide, including serving on the board as vice president for information and communication. She is currently president of the diocesan ECW and has also been a leader of the Daughters of the King.
In the Diocese of Los Angeles, she has been active in parishes including Holy Nativity, Westchester, where she assisted with the Community Garden Project. After a move to the South Bay, she later St. Francis, Palos Verdes Estates, and now St. Luke’s, Long Beach, where she is focusing on developing resources bilingually in Spanish and English.
A digital communication expert, Budzowski is a longtime member of the diocesan Program Group on Communications and provides technological support for the diocesan website. She consults with numerous congregations through the small business she established, Trinity Web Consulting, which serves non-profit organizations and small businesses with website development, database implementation, training, and marketing.
In 2012, Budzowski wrote: “I love the Episcopal Church and believe that our greatest strength lies in the ECW organizations within parishes and dioceses, working together in mission and ministry and inspiring the next generations of Episcopal Women, who will follow the examples set by our mothers before us. Communicating our history, as well as our current story through all the forms of media available to us, keeps us connected and working together in that common mission.”
Valdez has served as president of the board of the Episcopal Community Federal Credit Union, based in Los Angeles at St. Paul’s Commons, for the past 18 years. A longtime lay leader at All Saints / Todos los Santos Parish in Highland Park, he has served as an elected deputy to seven sequential General Conventions of The Episcopal Church. A skilled consultant in financial services, Valdez provides accounting and bookkeeping support to various congregations and institutions of the diocese. He has been a member of Diocesan Council.
In his remarks about Valdez, Bishop Taylor noted that the credit union “took form in the mid-1990s to bring refreshment to the credit desert at the heart of our diocese, where working people, and especially people of color, struggled for equality to financial resources,” particularly in the wake of the 1992 civil uprisings.
“As a former board member,” Taylor said, “I have a deep understanding of the quality and constancy of his devotion to our credit union….
“As a financial professional, he helps parishes and missions all over the diocese with their bookkeeping and audits. A member since 1991 of Todos los Santos and its on-again, off-again, on-again senior warden, he has stood at the side of one rector after another, including the incumbent, the Rev. Otto Vazquez.” As a deputy to General Convention, “you will always find him paying particular attention to any resolution or ministry that has to do with justice for God’s people.”