STANDING ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE SAINTS
D ear Friends,
Once upon a time, four Virginia Gentlemen were members of an Episcopal Church called Monumental near Church Hill in Richmond. Their church was active in many ways but they wanted to do more. In 1883 the church bought a piece of property at Madison and Grace Streets for the purposes of opening a chapel to start a regular Sunday School and to minister to the people in that part of the city. The planning for the new chapel began. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in the life of venerable churches, in 1888 the established church fell on hard economic times and felt it could no longer afford its own ministries and provide financial support to another fledgling congregation elsewhere. In fact, it was $3000 in the hole, a tidy sum back then. Four vestry members, believing in the rightness and importance of continuing this new ministry offered to rescue the new church and establish it as an independent congregation. The church minutes of January 18, 1888 show that Messrs. Peter H. Mayo, J.N. Boyd, T.L. Alfriend, and Thomas Atkinson, agreed to contribute the money needed to continue the work begun at the corner of Grace and Madison as an independent congregation.
At that very moment, All Saints Episcopal Church, our church, was born. It is hard to imagine that the history of this parish from 1888 up to this very day depended so dramatically on the good intentions of these four men. I believe that their lives had been sincerely touched by the Spirit of Jesus Christ and they wanted to share that Spirit with others. Two things strike me about the beginning of this church. First, though we sit in a fine, impressive, gothic church building with beautiful stained glass windows, a terrific pipe organ, and a more than adequate plant, we were born out of financial want. We were born in relative poverty. Secondly, had it not been for the vision of four men, who backed up their vision of a new church with financial support, none of us would be worshipping at All Saints in our day. All Saints Church simply would not have come to be. I don’t think it is too strong to call these men saints of God as we are standing on the spiritual foundation they have laid for us. When we think about it, the Christian Church has always stood on the shoulders of those faithful in Christ who have gone before in earlier generations.