CONCORD — The Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire on Saturday, May 19, will elect its 10th bishop, who will succeed retiring Bishop V. Gene Robinson.

Clergy and lay delegates will meet in convention at St. Paul's Church in Concord to elect one of three candidates nominated by a search committee.

The candidates are the Rev. Penelope Maud Bridges, rector of St. Francis Church, Great Falls, Va.; the Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, rector of Grace Church, Amherst, Mass.; and the Rev. William Warwick Rich, senior associate rector for Christian Formation, Trinity Church, Boston.

The new bishop will succeed Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, who announced in 2010 that he will retire early in part because of the “constant strain” that he and his husband and family endured from the worldwide backlash against his election in 2003. He will be 65 when he retires in January of 2013.

Robinson's consecration in 2003 rocked the global Anglican fellowship even though it was viewed beyond the church as a breakthrough for gay acceptance.

This election will provide New Hampshire Episcopalians an opportunity to vote for another openly gay priest; Rich is married to Dr. Don Schiermer, a physician at Exeter Hospital.

Bridges is a native of Ireland. She belonged to Grace Episcopal Church in Manchester for nine years and graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1997. She then moved to Virginia, where she served in two parishes.

“My primary spiritual gift is that of pastor or shepherd,” she wrote in her bishop nominee profile. She is the divorced mother of adult children.

Hirschfeld grew up in Connecticut. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1983 and Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 1991.

“I am energized by visiting people where they work: from a paper plant, to a school, to a soup kitchen, and noticing how the baptized realize Christ's healing and light in the world,” Hirschfeld wrote. He and his wife, Polly, have three children.

Rich was born in West Virginia. He graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1980 and received his doctorate in psychiatry and religion from Union Theological Seminary in New York in 2002.

“I have given a good deal of my energy to founding and working in hands-on ways with social justice ministries, and I want to be a bishop who is the bellwether of the flock, more than the shepherd, out and among those fellow sheep — especially the lost and least — among whom he is called to minister as one who serves, rather than is served,” Rich wrote.

Clergy and lay delegates from the diocese's 47 congregations will elect their new bishop during the Holy Communion service. A decision will be reached when one person receives a majority vote from the clergy delegates and lay delegates, who will vote separately.

The new bishop will be installed on Jan. 5 of next year at St. Paul's Church.