Dear saints,



Dear saints,

Before I visited Israel for the first time, I was not sure what to expect seeing the places Jesus had walked and lived 2000 years before. I imagined that the stories that I had first heard as a young child, and over and over again throughout my life, would in some way become more real to me. And then I went there. What became immediately apparent was a truth I had not anticipated to the degree that perhaps I should - there’s been a lot of life lived since then! The holy land is a place of a myriad of stories, and to be there is to walk into them, a kind of thick description of human toil and flourishing. 

If you visit one of the holy sites of the Christian story, you are likely to find a church the Franciscans built, or another church on top of the remnants of that church. Many of those churches place the gatherings of the current congregation set above archeological remains, and thus upon them each day’s visitors become the living stories on top of the story laid above the story of Jesus. Once I got over the density of all that narrative, it was for me a rather beautiful thing to behold and momentarily be part of, making it abundantly clear that these deeply historical places are constantly evolving. It struck me as a rather apt feature to have found at the epicenter of the Christian tradition that itself is at its essence stories of human beings layered upon one another in wondrous complexity, all set within the greater story of God.

Of course, our own city block is much the same. Today, we sit in pews or kneel at the altar rail bearing with us the joys and concerns of our present era, yet those very same pews have felt the weight of history of other times. I have the privilege of preaching from the pulpit where Frank Ross once stood to offer a word of comfort after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or where Geoffrey Hoare stood to do the same after 9/11. The church is always re-telling its story in light of history’s current gaze. Walk around our city block, and the stories are similarly multi-layered. Today we can knock on the door on the corner of Spring Street and North Avenue and somebody from the Midtown Assistance Center will answer. If you had done that a few years prior, somebody may have handed you a pepperoni pizza. Go back far enough into our history and you could walk into the room where MAC had its very beginnings. The same goes for Covenant Community’s genesis story as a night shelter, or youth ministry’s attic, which once was, well, just an attic. 

Change has been the constant of the church’s story - our story at All Saints’, and the story of the church catholic. The reason has not been because followers of Jesus are simply hostages to fortune. It is because we are people who believe that the future of our life together and our ministry as Christians belongs to the living God. We change - as individuals and as communities - because God calls us forward. We change because our faith invites us to. We change because the kingdom of God is only ever unfolding. We never arrive at the end - and therein lies the opportunity. 

As we come to the culmination of our discernment about the future of the church on this city block, we do so trusting that the years ahead of us belong to God and as such we are presented with a tremendous opportunity to step forward with confidence and trust. We are set in the midst of a dynamic urban center, surrounded by people and institutions seeking to co-create a Midtown and an Atlanta that boldly imagines its life as a global and cosmopolitan city. We have an opening as the parish of All Saints’ to imagine our own place on that landscape for the lifetime of this century and beyond. As we prepare to share the fruits of that imagination on Sunday May 4th, I pray that we will all feel emboldened to be good stewards of the promises of a loving and faithful God.