Dear All Saints' Family,

On behalf of the vestry, Alexa McElroy and I, your wardens, are very pleased to announce we have called the Rev. Ed Bacon to be our Interim Rector. We have been in conversation with him since late July and have found him to be a person with great spiritual and practical gifts. In this time of transition I believe Ed will be the pastor who can bring us together, and help us prepare to embody Christ’s transforming love with our next rector.

He will be with us on Game Day, September 7, working with staff in the meantime. September 28 will be his first regular Sunday at All Saints. 

With love and prayers,
Martha Bains
Senior Warden

From Ed:

Dear Members and friends of All Saints Church,

I’m delighted to have been named your Interim Rector. These past few weeks of discernment with your wardens, vestry, and staff have inspired my wife and me. That inspiration suggests a relationship with you of growth and energy as we pray, work, heal, and serve together, preparing to receive your next rector.

Our discernment process began when Bishop Curry called in July with her conviction that my journey so far would match your current needs and gifts. My wife, Hope, and I were immediately attracted in that we know and admire All Saints, where I enjoyed worshipping and speaking in my early retirement several years ago when my friend, Glenda, was your rector.

Our primary residence has been in Hoover since I retired in 2016 from a 21-year rectorate at All Saints Church, Pasadena, Ca. We moved to Alabama because our daughter, her husband, and their children have lived in Helena since graduation from Birmingham Southern. (Our son lives in New Orleans where his son has just entered kindergarten at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School.)

I’m grateful for a joyful and graced priesthood, leading three different Episcopal Churches (in Dalton, Ga., Jackson, Ms., and Pasadena, Ca.) after my ordination in 1983. Prior to being confirmed, I was ordained in the Southern Baptist Church in 1971, serving as Campus Minister and then Dean of Students at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

I’m energized by contemplative spirituality articulated by Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Barbara Holmes, Howard Thurman, Cynthia Bourgeault, Ilia Delio, Richard Rohr, and Teilhard de Chardin. Merton’s thinking about the false and true self in each of us (the mind of Christ in each of us, 1 Corinthians 2:16) has informed my preaching, teaching, and priesting since the beginning of my ministry. In 2012, my book, 8 Habits of Love, unpacked my passion about the power of love over fear. Flowing from I John 4, where God is named, “Love,” I have experienced Holy Love winning over fear in every situation. I’m also inspired by the interface of Jesus’s call to be One (John 17) and science’s findings that there is no separateness in our uni-verse. The Oneness of everyone and everything in God is our roadmap for healing divisions. Oneness reveals the lie in the myth of the separate self. Albert Einstein and others have taught us that we live together with all of creation where all matter is interconnected energy. I love examining the gifts of science for healthy religion. I love to refer often to the 47,000-tree trunk, 106-acre rootball of quaking aspens that actually is one organism, one DNA, one plant called “Pando” in southern Utah.

Finally, my self-introduction would be incomplete without noting these last 6 years of my life I playfully refer to as “flunking retirement.” Just before COVID, I became Interim Rector of the parish where I was trained and ordained, St. Luke’s, Atlanta. Then 18 months ago, the bishop in East Tennessee called me to teach Contemplative and Centering Prayer at St. Paul’s Church, Chattanooga. I love and enjoy interim work and look forward to sharing my joys and love with you.

Blessings always,
Ed Bacon