In the mid-1960s, Ralph McGill, famed editor of The Atlanta Constitution, and Elbert Tuttle, Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, joined the governing body of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Midtown, Atlanta, where I serve as rector.
All Saints’ was already evolving as a church that increasingly saw its mission to serve a diverse city.
In the 1950s, our clergy had joined other religious leaders to organize the Ministers’ Manifesto, a statement of our belonging to one another that sought to transcend racial divides at the time. Atlanta continued to work out what it meant to be a city too busy to hate, and the transformative leadership of Atlantans like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, Andrew Young and John Lewis expanded the nation’s view of itself.
Within these currents of change, McGill and Tuttle offered new urgency and a keener sense of the needs of the city, helping us to see beyond ourselves in new and unanticipated ways.
Our small part of that story voiced a repeated refrain that has stuck with us through the decades: All Saints’ is called to be an “all sorts” kind of community.
We are still working on that hope.
Like any group of individuals who seek to hold something in common, we are a work in progress. The global spread of COVID-19 has brought upon us a new dispensation for our life together, and the key to our hope in this time of uncertainty is the confidence we have in where we are heading together as a church.
We are confident that heading toward a future where we increasingly reflect Atlanta in all of its diversity — in all of its sorts — is the place we want to go.
What our particular story as a church teaches us for this present hour is that though we are many, we are indeed one body. And, with all that might divide us otherwise, we trust that love has so much more power to draw us together.
If there has been a lesson of love that this season of distancing has taught us, it is that we belong to far more people than we had otherwise realized. As with many places of worship in the city and beyond, we have moved our life as a church online these past several weeks.
We have become more familiar than we might have liked to with video meetings and online Bible studies, and the clergy have gotten used to seeing themselves preach and pray on screen — even sharing a virtual coffee hour with one another on social media broadcasts.
Parishioners have joined us online, staying in community with one another, learning of needs they can meet. We are being the church, just differently for a while.
Yet, we have been more than just ourselves.
In our online offerings through the week and on Sundays we have noticed our tent enlarge as people join us from across the state, the nation and overseas. Though necessarily separated, we are more than we had been before.
By staying in place, we are digging deeper into the kind of belonging that we can know as a human family, apart yet closer to neighbors we did not know we had loved.
In the days to come, along with many faith communities, we will lean into the love we hold for this city. Some of us will focus on meeting the needs of healthcare workers; others will rally to the causes of longtime local partners of ours such as the Midtown Assistance Center that helps the urban poor, or the Atlanta Community Food Bank that provides life-sustaining services.
Like the Amish communities in Ohio that have united around the production of protective gear for medical staff at the Cleveland Clinic, we know that to play our part is to love as Jesus loves: expansively and faithfully.
Of all the gifts we might all carry with us beyond this season of distance and separation, I hope that love might be the one we consider preeminent.
Could it be that the gift of the present moment is that we are closer to one another now than we have been in a generation?
We know with clear focus today how profoundly we need one another for the common good and for our individual sense of what it truly means to be human.
Atlanta has risen from ashes before, and she will do so again.
Yet, it is how we rise that counts in the end.
Though we are many, there are innumerable ways by which we can be one body, one people whose common cause is this city we love to call home.
Many blessings to you, Atlanta.
Let us keep the faith, stay strong, and be one, now and in all the time to come.
The Rev. Dr. Simon Mainwaring is rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta. He is originally from England and was educated at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Birmingham where he earned a Ph.D in biblical theology. He enjoys time with his family, cycling, painting and cheering on his beloved English soccer team, Tottenham Hotspur.
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