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June 5, 2026
It is with great joy that the Bishop, Senior Warden, and Lesser Chapter have received and unanimously approved the recommendation from the Dean Search Committee. We therefore announce the appointment of The Reverend Carol Piland Morehead as the new Dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke. This is a moment we have prayed toward, worked toward, and waited for with patience and hope — and we believe with full confidence and deep gratitude that God has led us here.
The search that brought us to this moment was neither quick nor casual. In August of 2025, Dean Stevens charged an eleven-member Search Committee drawn from across the life of the cathedral, representing different ages, perspectives, and histories with this community with the sacred task of finding our next Dean. They took that charge seriously in every sense.
Over nine months, meeting first every two weeks and then more frequently as the work deepened, the committee reviewed twenty-two candidates and conducted first-round interviews with eleven of them. Their process was governed from the beginning by shared commitments: to confidentiality, to hearing every voice at the table, to speaking only for themselves and not lobbying one another between meetings, and above all to prayer. They opened every meeting seeking God’s guidance. They prayed for the candidates, for this cathedral, and for one another. Discernment, for this committee, was not a step in the process — it was the process. When they brought their recommendation to the Lesser Chapter, they brought it in complete consensus. Eleven people, nine months, twenty-two names and one clear answer.
That answer is the Reverend Carol Morehead.
The Rev. Morehead has served since November 2018 as Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts, an urban parish on the edge of Boston. In her seven years there, she has demonstrated exactly the kind of integrated, grounded, and courageous leadership that this cathedral needs. She has overseen liturgy, formation, and financial health — including a childcare and after-school program with a budget of $1 million. She led her congregation through the grief and dislocation of the COVID pandemic and into a renewed season of mission and community life. She guided a long and careful process of racial justice discernment that culminated in a formal congregational commitment to reparations — a process she describes not as a top-down initiative, but as a collaborative journey in which the people of Grace “lived into the call of their baptismal covenant.” She renewed and expanded the music program, grounding it in the richness of the Anglican tradition. She built formation offerings that serve both children and adults. In each of these efforts, her leadership has been marked by collaboration, by the empowerment of others, and by a steady, non-anxious presence that holds space for honest conversation even in difficult moments.
Before her call to Grace Church, she served for five years as Associate Rector for Liturgy, Adult Formation, and Pastoral Care at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio, Texas — a large well-resourced parish where she honed her skills in staff leadership, stewardship, and lay ministry development. She holds a Master of Divinity from the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, along with advanced training in neuroscience, mental health, and trauma. She has presented at mental health and faith conferences across the country, and her understanding of the interior lives of communities — of anxiety and grief and the slow work of healing — is one of the gifts she will bring to our common life.
Prior to seminary, Carol was an Office Administrator in her husband’s psychiatry practice, served as Lay Ministry Coordinator at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church in Texas and was a High School English and Philosophy teacher for ten years.
Her service extends well beyond her parish. In the Diocese of Massachusetts, she serves dean of the Mystic Valley Deanery, co-convener of the Council of Deans, and a member of Budget, Strategy, and Governance committees. She also served as Diocesan co-chair of the Racial Justice Commission. Carol is a person who understands the church as an institution, and who has earned the trust of those she serves alongside.
What the Discernment Committee found in Carol Morehead is a priest whose gifts are not merely impressive on paper, but alive in her. Her preaching is substantive, warm, and rooted. Her faith is joyful and unmistakably genuine. Her pastoral care is attentive and boundaried in the best sense — she walks alongside people, holds them in prayer, and trusts the grace of God to do what she cannot. Her liturgical style is flexible, inclusive, and deeply Anglican. And her leadership, at every level, reflects a conviction she has stated plainly: that good ministry means empowering others to live out their vocation, not doing everything yourself.
It is worth noting, too, something about her own discernment. The Rev. Morehead was not restlessly seeking a new call--a trusted colleague encouraged her to consider this one. She describes being genuinely happy in her work at Grace and yet, she writes, she has felt the Spirit calling something new forth. “When the Spirit taps us on the shoulder,” she writes, “we must notice and respond.” We are grateful that she noticed. We are grateful that she responded. And we believe that God is at work in bringing her to Saint Luke’s at this particular moment in our common life.
The Rev. Carol Piland Morehead will begin her ministry as Dean in September, when she and her husband Dan will move to the Portland area. We invite the whole cathedral community to hold her, and the people of Grace Episcopal Church, in prayer as she prepares for this transition, and to hold one another in prayer as we prepare to receive her.
Thanks be to God for this gift.
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