Dear saints,

Recently, I have been enjoying going back through All Saints’ vestry minutes, starting when All Saints’ was founded in 1903. It has been fascinating to see how many of the questions that occupy the vestry today were also on the minds of their predecessors 123 years ago. As the body that holds fiduciary responsibility for the parish, the vestry then and now has a keen eye on how to be good stewards of the mission of the church through the common life, ministries and the financial and material resources in their care. 

Back in the early 20th century, there was plenty of conversation about the financial resources All Saints’ would need to sustain itself into the century ahead. Following the opening of the church building in 1906 and the purchase of a rectory five years later, in 1915 a committee was formed to oversee the 

building of a parish hall. Following the death of one of the pivotal figures in All Saints’ history, Mr. Thomas Egleston, in 1916, the church received a $25,000 bequest from his estate. This transformational gift that enabled the parish hall to be built (which would bear his name as the ‘Egleston Memorial Hall’) was one that kept on giving. Through Egleston Hall, All Saints’ opened itself up to the wider community in all sorts of ways and while doing so created a much needed new revenue stream for the church. 

Vestry minutes show quite how multi-purpose Egleston Hall was, with the Atlanta Music Study Club, the Boy Scouts, and various theatrical performances, concerts, banquets, dances and lectures making Egleston a hive of activity. Of course, while all of this was going on, the parish utilized its new hall for meetings, Sunday school classes, and all manner of other church activities. 

As I took all of this in, it struck me quite how similar our own desires for the Egleston building are to what the vestry of 1915 envisioned. We too are looking to sustain All Saints’ finances through the century ahead, with our master plan naming the necessity of relocating our core ministries from the south-west corner on Spring and North Avenue up to West Peachtree and Ponce, so that the south west corner can be developed to provide a significant new source of revenue for the parish into the long-term. Like the wonderfully multi-purpose Egleston Hall of the 1920’s and on, we envision an ‘Egleston Ministry Center’ providing a place of fellowship, new homes for our core ministries, a new music suite and staff offices, a rooftop garden, and through all this a ‘second front door’ into the life of community here for us and for the city. It is striking how much history repeats itself. Or put another way, how good it is that All Saints’ remains true to its historical roots in our desire to open ourselves up to this city.

To fulfill our vision for All Saints’ through the work laid out in our master plan, we must first address the significant question of how to be good stewards of the future of this church while doing what we can to honor the historic nature of the Egleston building. Within the past couple of weeks, we have begun meeting with the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, a wonderful organization that is thinking alongside us and the architectural firm who will guide us through this process. The Georgia Trust has a program called ‘Places in Peril’, and Egleston is being named on that list, which we welcome as it will allow us to draw from Georgia Trust’s extensive experience in this field as we work through how to marry our vision for the future with the significant challenges the current building has resulting from extensive damage Egleston Hall suffered during recent construction work in the area. To make Egleston a structurally sound, accessible, and high quality interior space that will support the ministries, staff and community members who will need to use it, is a multimillion dollar endeavor. While that is so, we are confident that with the expertise the vestry is gathering around us we will be able to bring before you as a parish plans for Egleston that will provide us with a transformational step forward for All Saints’, much as Egleston Hall did when it was constructed over a century ago. 

One lesson we learn as adherents of an ancient faith is how our appreciation of the past teaches us to be courageous in our mission as we step into the future. We need to know the faith of our forebears if we are to retain our sense of who we are, and equally we need to orient our own faith into the future so that the church can continue to thrive long after we are gone. It’s a tremendous privilege and an exciting challenge. What a gift that we are the generation of this church that gets to forge this path together. 

Peace,