The Rev. Max Wolf, entering his eighth year as rector of St. Paul’s Church in Nantucket, Massachusetts, was named person of the year for 2025 by Nantucket Magazine. The recognition was in honor of his service to the community, the magazine said.
The publication featured the rector on the cover of its winter 2025 issue, placing him among past cover subjects such as Martha Stewart, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, veteran journalist Lesley Stahl, and former Rep. Joe Kennedy III.
“For nearly a decade, Wolf has not only led St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Fair Street—he’s also become a leader in the community, supporting a number of charitable causes at a time when Nantucket’s housing and food insecurity crises have reached an all-time high,” wrote the magazine’s publisher, Bruce Percelay.
The magazine mentioned several of his contributions to the community: delivering more than 1,000 bags of groceries to the food pantry, donating over 200 bicycles to summer employees, holding weekly dinners at St. Paul’s, and providing laundry services for struggling residents of the island.
During the pandemic, Wolf and his wife, Olly, accompanied by their terrier Meatball, held a live broadcast on Facebook and Zoom from their attic. At one point, around 500 people would tune in. It mirrored the format of Compline and was called Prayers in the Attic.
Wolf told The Living Church that he didn’t figure out the horizontal feature of his phone until later on, so he and Olly would sit very close together to fit in the vertical frame. Prayer books, hymnals, and Bibles, functioned as a makeshift stand for the phone.
Jeff Cox, a longtime friend of the rector, said that Wolf is “not a sitting around kind of guy.” He’s full of energy and “someone who really believes in his vocation.” “The secret to Max is he does not come from a place of privilege,” Cox said.
Wolf told a Cape Cod publication in 2018 that in 1980, with $100 in his pocket and a four-pound tent slung over his back, he went on a three-month journey, hitchhiking his way from Los Angeles to Alaska, where he worked at a salmon factory and on a commercial fishing vessel. In San Francisco and New York City, he was a server and remembers waiting on entertainment icons like Miles Davis, Jimmy Stewart, and Elizabeth Taylor.
“It’s easier to be a servant if you’ve been a servant than if you came from a place of privilege,” Cox said of his friend.
Wolf serves as a chaplain or volunteer leader for around half a dozen community organizations, including the Nantucket Cottage Hospital, a hospice on the island, and the Nantucket Interfaith Council, of which he’s vice president. He’s also on the advisory committee of The Warming Place, a shelter for individuals on the island experiencing homelessness.
Although Nantucket is known as an enclave for the wealthy, its year-round residents continue to face economic and food insecurity, brought in part by the economic disparity among its affluent inhabitants who are usually on the island part time, mostly during the summer.
Addie Morfoot reported in The New York Times that 65 percent of Nantucket’s nearly 12,000 housing units are occupied by seasonal residents, with a median home price hovering at $2.5 million. “That leaves little housing for workers on an island where a decades-long divide of the haves and have-nots has reached a tipping point, town leaders say,” Morfoot wrote.
“Nantucket is this amazing island full of really rich people, which is partly true, but it’s an island full of diverse people,” Cox said. “Max is involved in all angles of the island.”
Wolf said in his interview with Nantucket Magazine that not all children who attend a Nantucket academic institution called Community School could afford snacks. “We feel bad that they’re left out and that it’s obvious that they’re in financial need,” he told the publication. And so St. Paul’s made a significant commitment to provide snacks for all of the school’s children, which it has been doing for several years now.
Wolf had always felt called to the priesthood as a boy, but growing up Roman Catholic, he dismissed the idea because the Catholic Church didn’t permit priests to marry. One of the people he looked up to was Henry Shelton, a former Catholic priest who married. Shelton was part of an organization called Gray Panthers, a group of elderly individuals fighting ageism and advocating for social justice.
“I could see their impact in the community and their compassion,” Wolf said. He also witnessed his parents’ deep involvement in the community before their divorce.
As a teenager in Rhode Island, where he grew up, Wolf worked in factories. In college, he drove a truck at night to pay for tuition. Around that time, and after his parents’ separation, he attended a few Episcopal services with his mother.
The Nantucket priest said his humble background has been a blessing to his ministry. “I think that’s kept me connected in a way,” he said of his commitment to serve the broader community.
In 1985, as a young adult, he walked into an Episcopal parish in Boston, where he “felt so much at home.” It took him a while to be a regular worshiper, but he was eventually received at Trinity Church on Copley Square, where he served as an usher.
At Trinity, Wolf began working with women experiencing homelessness through a ministry called the Women’s Lunch Place. “I would wait on them, then sit and eat with them … and then I would clean up after they’re gone,” Wolf told TLC. He served on their board for a decade.
While he worked as a wine salesman, the call to the priesthood resurfaced. “It was something I had to do, to pursue the priesthood. I was compelled,” Wolf told the magazine. He entered seminary at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and received his Master of Divinity degree in 1996. There he met Olly, whom he considers his partner in ministry. “She sacrificed her own career to serve the church with me,” Wolf said, speaking to Cape Gazette in Cape Cod.
In Cambridge, Wolf became friends with a fellow seminarian, Kelly A. O’Connell. She became the regional canon for the Southern Region of the Diocese of Massachusetts and worked closely with Wolf.
“In his entire ministry, he has been deeply engaged in the communities where he served and has always seen that connection between the church and the communities,” O’Connell told TLC of his former schoolmate. “You might say he’s a priest with a deacon’s heart—that he’s always trying to connect the community and the world with the church, and vice versa.”
Asked about his ministry philosophy, Wolf recalls his second call out of seminary, as curate of St. Paul’s Church of Wickford in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. The longtime rector, Canon Peter Spencer, told him that as curate, he was responsible for the “care and cure of the whole village, not only of parish members.”
“That sense of responsibility continues,” Wolf said.
When he left the parish for his next call, Spencer wrote in his prayer book, “Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, and all will be well.” Now, at 70 years old, Wolf is cognizant that retirement nears, but makes it clear that he’ll keep working.
“I’ve always said that I’d like to pour out my life as a libation, as a liquid offering to God. … I’m filled so much by that that my cup runneth over.”
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
