February 2, 2026
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,
The Rev. Dr. Simon Mainwaring, Rector
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How Does God Call Us Forward?
Thanks to the generosity of the people of this parish, we now own the entirety of our block. This achievement, one long hoped for by parishioners who came before us, now offers us the exciting opportunity to envision together how we can leave a legacy for future generations.
In the fall of 2018, a steering committee was commissioned by the vestry to guide the parish over the coming years through the work of discerning the future of our block. During the first year, noting all that was happening in our immediate neighborhood of Midtown, the committee determined that we would be well-served by committing to a time of learning together.
The committee began their work by meeting with different partners in our community to learn about the changing face of Midtown, including Midtown Alliance, Georgia Tech, and Emory Healthcare.
One of the repeated messages we heard was how much Midtown is changing. For the past four decades, Midtown Alliance, a nonprofit coalition of business and community leaders, has been at the heart of that change. It focuses on planning and development in Midtown, and their assessment is that Midtown is becoming one of America’s most vibrant residential and commercial urban neighborhoods.
During our year of learning, we heard three key strengths that Midtown offers to those who work, make home, and play here, which are most pertinent to our own place in this part of the city of Atlanta.
Midtown is a Walkable Urban Neighborhood
Midtown is fast becoming one of the most desirable places both to live and work in Atlanta. Year by year, more and more people drive and walk by our block, and come to see our place on the landscape as part of a larger walkable and accessible whole. Our neighborhood is increasingly a place where people want to be, and linger, and enjoy one another’s company, the very things we rely on ourselves for the formation of our own community.
Midtown is Becoming a Hub for Talent and Innovation
If we were to trace a line from our corner on North Avenue, down West Peachtree past Tech Square, we would pass through one of the most concentrated hubs of innovation and technology in the country. The most prominent example for us is the new headquarters of Norfolk Southern across the street, focusing its operations and innovation work within this West Peachtree tech corridor.
The exciting invitation that this hub of innovation presents to us as a church is how our own mission and ministries might continue to adapt and grow to meet the needs and excite the imaginations of those innovating, literally down our street.
Midtown is Accessible via Public Transportation
Our neighborhood has the benefit of having three MARTA Stations: North Avenue, Midtown, and Arts Center. Access to public transportation is one ofthe key drivers of the growth and development of Midtown. We are placed right at the heart of that transit zone, and have an opportunity to invite in the thousands who pass by our beautiful block every day.
In conversation with two of Midtown’s largest institutions, Georgia Tech and Emory Healthcare Midtown, we heard two themes that characterize much of what we see developing around us: innovation and collaboration.
Innovation
Both Georgia Tech and Emory Healthcare in Midtown have a strong focus on innovation. Nearly 25 years ago, Georgia Tech had a vision to effectively connect the university to the Midtown community through a development now called Technology Square.
The district, just north of us in Midtown, has evolved to combine research, business, and education such that innovative enterprises, from small business start-ups to large international corporations, have planted and blossomed in our immediate neighborhood increasingly year by year.
Emory Healthcare has made significant investments in Midtown over the past few years. The recently opened Proton Therapy Center provides advanced radiation technologies for cancer patients and the construction and opening of the new Winship Cancer Institute has enabled Emory Healthcare to have one of the leading cancer care facilities of its type in the country right down the street from our church.
Collaboration 
Technology Square has created a place for the community, the university, and businesses to share space and work together creatively and effectively. The most prominent example is CODA, a mixed-use building for university researchers, students, and companies to work side by side in a space that is intentionally built for collaboration and relationship-building. Both the inside and outside of the building were designed for small and large groups to gather to share space and ideas.
Serving Those In Need
As we ponder how God might invite us forward as a church, another vital part of our landscape are the many service agencies in the area. Steering committee members engaged in a broad array of conversations with service agencies, both faith-based and secular, based in Midtown and further afield around Atlanta.
The committee spoke to 40 service agencies that provide education, advocacy, healthcare, housing, food, shelter, job training, and more. We connected with many of these organizations based on their existing relationships with our four core ministries, Covenant Community, Threads, Refugee Ministries, and the Midtown Assistance Center.
From these conversations, we learned about all of the incredible work that happens around us, at all hours of the day and night, to serve vulnerable populations, including children, refugees, and people experiencing a wide variety of crises from homelessness and food insecurity to illness, violence, and more.
We asked the leaders of these organizations two key questions to find out more about the scope of their work today and their vision for the future: 
- What are your biggest challenges?
- What do you perceive to be the unmet needs of the communities you serve?
From their answers, we learned more about their greatest needs and most prevalent concerns for the future and saw some common themes emerge with certain core needs identified:
- More stable, affordable housing.
- Greater access to tutoring and after school/ summer school programs for children.
- More job opportunities for people in transition.
- Greater resources to support mental health and long-term recovery from addiction and illness.
- Wider access to transportation to bridge the gaps that MARTA doesn’t reach.
- More collaboration among non-profits and the space to do so.
Learning from our Sister Churches
The final stage of our learning work was to understand what other churches are doing with their buildings and grounds, both here in Atlanta and across the country. As part of that learning, we engaged in a series of annual ‘Gift of Place’ conferences sponsored by Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street, New York City. All Saints’ presented at the inaugural conference at the Kanuga Camp and Conference Center, and did so again at following conferences online. We also co-led workshop sessions at the Episcopal Parish Network conference in Atlanta.
As we learned about what our sister churches are doing, we saw a few key patterns emerge.
A number of churches are looking to expand existing or to build new residential components to their mission as a church.
In Denver, St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral's St. Francis Center (sjcathedral.org/saintfrancis) is working in collaboration with the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority to provide permanent supportive housing for 50 formerly homeless people.
Closer to home in Midtown, First Presbyterian Church (firstpresatl.org/about) is improving space for ministry partners and overhauling their Women’s Transformation Center, turning dorm-style accommodations into nine micro-
apartments that house women in transition, rent free, for up to twelve months.
One of the most ambitious projects locally is at First United Methodist Church of Atlanta where the church is seeking “to bring a “God-size vision” for affordable housing and mix-use community space to life in downtown Atlanta”.
The project intends to build 320 new homes, 192 of which would be affordable units, and 80 Atlanta subsidized units. There are also plans to incorporate a new school, retail space and parking.
Such larger scale projects are complimented by churches like Church of the Advocate in Chapel Hill, NC, who in collaboration with Pee Wee Homes is building a tiny home village on its church grounds.
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Getty Square, NY (episcopalarts.org/about) is embarking on a similarly transformational journey in the construction of a performing arts high school next to its historic 19th century church building.
Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan (heavenlyrest.org) also houses a school and with it Bluestone Lane Café drawing visitors into the church’s property through the week, hosting arts performances and exhibitions and utilizing its commercial kitchen for a back-to-work program for formerly incarcerated individuals.
The common thread to each of the projects we have been in dialogue with is ‘transformational community’. We are seeing the difference churches can make in their respective locations because they already are engaged in sharing life together with the local communities around them in various ways and are committed to serving Christ in the lives of others.
Our Guiding Principles
A little over thirty years ago, All Saints’ produced a video called ‘Here to Stay’. Our first guiding principle is that we are indeed here to stay! We have no desire or intention to sell our property. Midtown is where our future lies and we are excited about and committed to serving God in this place for decades to come.
The end of that video named some essential elements of our church: acceptance, innovation, education, worship, family, openness, change,
service, witness, outreach, and at the heart of it all, people. The values of that era remain our values today. More valuable than any corner of our block, our highest and best at All Saints’ is and always will be people.