Body of Christ aims to introduce readers to a different parish in the church family of the Diocese of Washington each month. Writer Diane Ney speaks with the Rev. John Beddingfield, rector of All Souls, D.C., Nancye Suggs, senior warden, and Susan Morrison, vestry member, to learn more about the life, history, plans and character of that congregation.

WW: All Souls is celebrating its centennial this year. What celebrations do you have planned?

BEDDINGFIELD: We’re really using the whole year to celebrate. After some events this summer, on Oct. 8 we’re having an open house/picnic in our parking lot. On Oct. 9, we’ll begin the official celebration with a special service and, on Oct. 16, Bishop Chane will be with us for the 11 a.m. service, followed by a solemn evensong. Also in our plans is a big dinner where we’ll dress in the style of the early 1900s. And there’s our stained glass. Our windows are really exquisite, so we’re going to make a keepsake portfolio with prints of our beautiful windows. The planning process for all this has been great fun and very instructive, because in looking at ways to reach out to others to join in our celebration, we have been asking questions such as how do we talk about ourselves and what would we like to say to our neighbors and to the diocese and to the larger church. Our founding rector, James McBride Sterrett, had a wonderful way of expressing our mission: “Neither a high church nor a low church, neither a broad church nor a narrow church, but a church for all souls.” And most of us feel that we are moving into his vision, especially today when we have such diversity in our membership.

WW: All Souls has been through difficult times, hasn’t it? There was a time when the diocese thought you might have to close.

MORRISON: When I came here, there were more people in the choir than in the pews. Sometimes there would be seven people attending a service.

WW: How did you change that?

SUGGS: We had a core group of people who believed that we had something here that was important and that we were going to do whatever needed to be done to get other people to come see what that something was. And I’ve always felt that the fact that we’ve prevailed was a really tangible work of the Holy Spirit, that we were never meant to close. Closing would have interfered with our mission, and once we regrouped and figured that all out, then we were able to turn everything around.

BEDDINGFIELD: On Sunday mornings, both our breakfast and our coffee hour are very welcoming. People find us, even though we’re kind of hidden in plain sight, just off Connecticut Ave. This is that sort of place, where people walk in and think, “I may not know what I believe, but this place feels like a place where I can pray and get centered.” We are an unusually eclectic place.

WW: It sounds as if you have a strong sense of community.

SUGGS: And that sense of community is a genuine thing. I’ve been here 35 years and I’m proud of the fact that we really do live into our declared mission. The people Sterrett was talking about welcoming into a church for all souls in 1911 aren’t the kind of people we welcome today, but our mission remains the same.

BEDDINGFIELD: All Souls had a gay rector at the time of the consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003. The Washington Post did an article on how our parish had dealt with that issue on a local level and a significant number of our current parishioners are people who read that article and thought, “That sounds like a church where I want to go.”

WW: How does your mission translate today into outreach and programming?

BEDDINGFIELD: People do ministry very quietly here. While a number of parishioners are involved in hands-on ministries such as Christ House, Habitat for Humanity, and other direct service programs, many do ‘mission’ 9 to 5 every day of the week. They work for non-profits, they work in the labor movement, in think-tanks, and in the government, trying to change the world. Their ministry is full-time. It’s no mistake that the word ‘sanctuary’ is in our mission statement, because so many people who come to All Souls do so looking for sanctuary, for a place to be quiet and pray, to rejuvenate and then go back into the world and continue their good works. That being said, we’ve encouraged involvement in both ongoing and new ministries. In addition to a mission trip to South Africa, last night the vestry approved mission grants from our endowment of $92,000, divided between local and international missions.

WW: What about ministry to the surrounding neighborhood?

BEDDINGFIELD: We welcome groups to meet here, we provide free space to the Farmer’s Market, and other things. One of our goals this year is to become handicapped accessible. We do want to become better in tune with the neighborhood. We’re beginning to do more with the elderly in our neighborhood and with students and congressional interns, so many of whom live in residence halls along Connecticut Ave.

WW: It sounds as if you’re a parish that’s not searching so much as expanding what you already know about yourselves.

BEDDINGFIELD: I want us to grow but I want us to grow in depth and in love and in faithfulness. In the next few years, we’ll probably add a worship service on Saturday or Sunday evenings. We might have something a little more contemplative and chant-based. We’re very much a eucharistically centered place. Especially since All Souls was reborn in the 1980s it was very much reborn around the table, the table of the church and the table downstairs. There’s no separation. People at All Souls live an Anglo-catholic faith without being focused on the language so much as being focused on the depth of the Eucharist, the life of prayer, spiritual practices. People want an embodied ministry and that’s what we’re all trying to live into at All Souls.