SEATTLE — After a career that’s included parish administrator and archdiocesan vocations director, Rich Shively has taken the helm at the Seattle Seafarers Center.

The ministry — an ecumenical outreach of the local Catholic, Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran churches — meets the spiritual and practical needs of mariners working on cargo ships arriving in Seattle and Everett.

“We’re trying to rebuild connections and renew connections post-COVID,” said Shively, who started his new role in April. “It’s really fun to get on the ships,” he added. “You engage people in conversations about family and home.”

Shively was most recently pastoral assistant for administration at Mary, Queen of Peace Parish in Sammamish for 12 years; before that, he served nearly 17 years as the Archdiocese of Seattle’s vocations director.

He had the right skill set, experience and background to lead the Seafarers Center, said Joe Cotton, a member of the center’s board and executive director of the archdiocese’s Office of Vicar General, which includes the seafarers ministry.

“We needed to hire someone who knew they were stepping into a huge budget deficit,” Cotton said.

That deficit was partially caused because cruise ships didn’t operate during the pandemic, and donations that were normally collected during Masses on Holland America cruise ships weren’t coming in, Cotton explained. The Seattle Seafarers Center received a $156,000 grant from the archdiocese’s St. Joseph Foundation that will fund the executive director position for two years.

Shively has “a two-year runway where he can do some major fundraising” to help support the center, Cotton said.

The Seafarers Center, located at the south end of Harbor Island, has volunteers who go aboard ships to visit crew members who are away from family for months at a time.

“Our ship visitors essentially act as chaplains,” Cotton said.

Deacon Joey DeLeon, assigned as Catholic chaplain for the ministry, organizes Communion services on ships. (Archbishop Paul D. Etienne visited a ship and presided over a Communion service last December.)

Shively said he would like to see the ministry expand to ships arriving at the Port of Tacoma. He also is focused on continuing to meet the practical needs of ship workers.

Through the center’s “ditty bag” program, parishioners and others fill individual bags with a knitted cap, toiletries, candy and a greeting card, all given to seafarers when they arrive in Seattle. The program wasn’t fully active during the pandemic, so Shively is reconnecting with churches to get them involved.

“We’d like to grow it back to where it was,” he said.

The center also offers transportation to take seafarers shopping and provides SIM cards for mobile phones so crew members can connect with United States cellular networks to communicate with family back home.

The Archdiocese of Seattle has ministered to seafarers since the 1930s, although the ministry has changed over the years. The Catholic and Episcopal ministries for seafarers merged in 2015, but the Seattle Seafarers Center maintains a connection to Catholic Stella Maris ministry and the Episcopal Mission to Seafarers.

“At the end of the day, it’s a single ministry of Jesus,” Cotton said.