All Saints' Calls The Rev. Ian Montgomery as its 10th Rector
Home		Leadership/Staff | Parish News | Calendar | Directions

From Senior Warden Mary Ann Hayward: 

It is my very great pleasure to announce that the Vestry has called The Reverend Ian Bruce Montgomery to be the tenth Rector of All Saints’ Church. Fr. Montgomery has accepted the call and both Diocese of El Camino Bishop Sylvestre Romero and the Standing Committee of the Diocese have approved the Vestry’s decision.

Fr. Montgomery comes most recently from the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in New York City and Trinity Church in Red Bank, N.J. In both churches he served as Assisting Priest. For the past two years he has also been a consultant to the Episcopal Church Foundation’s Philanthropic Services Department in New York. In this position he has utilized and shared his training and experience in endowment management and stewardship.

 Ian Montgomery was born in Bremerhaven, Germany where his father was serving in the U.S. Navy and was raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. Upon graduation he taught European History at the Baylor School in Chattanooga, Tenn. and it was there, through membership at St. Paul’s Church, that he felt a call for ordination to the priesthood. He attended General Theological Seminary in New York, graduating in 1998.

People who have worked with Fr. Montgomery, both ordained and lay, praise him for his preaching, teaching and grounding in solid theology. They find him dynamic, straight-forward, a good organizer and easy to talk with. The Vestry agrees with these assessments.

Fr. Montgomery has had wide experience in youth ministry both during college and since being ordained. He is committed to the “importance and opportunities of parish churches in the midst of our nation’s cities as well as their responsibility not only to those who walk through their doors but to those who sleep on the streets outside them.” He developed and worked with an innovative program for street people during his years in New York.

He and his wife Diane, who is a consultant in the field of corporate social and environmental responsibility, have four children between them: Hermione and Robin Sharp and Charlie and Anna Montgomery.

During the Rector Search process, Fr. Montgomery says he was particularly impressed with the fact that lay people at All Saints’ have stepped up to take “real leadership roles” during the interim period. He praises the “able leadership of The Rev. Kathy McAdams who has been absolutely wonderful in helping [him] find his bearings even before arrival.”

Our new rector will be with us to celebrate and preach at both services on All Saints’ Sunday, Nov. 6. I hope you will join us on that special day to welcome him and his wife to our church family.

(Note: Fr. Montgomery will spend ten days at All Saints' in early November, then is away for two weeks, and returns to the campus full time at the end of November.)

Dear members and friends of All Saints’ Church:

I cannot begin to tell you how very pleased my wife, Diane, and I are to be joining you in what we have already experienced as a true community of faith and fellowship. My time with the Rector Search Committee and our experience with the Vestry and others over the past months has revealed to me a parish community which is not only alive and ready to grow, but is already in the midst of growth in its lay leadership right now. I only hope that those who have stepped forward and found their voice or, as former Senior Warden Gloria van Bree put it in her address at the Eucharist a few weeks ago, “found your authority”, will not go running for the hills now that a new Rector is coming! Stay. Speak. Act! The future of the Parish depends on you. You have discovered and offered a unique gift which only YOU can continue to offer. To be your new Rector will be a privilege, an honor, and a deep responsibility and I will take it on with all that I am and will become.

As a member of All Saints’ put it just yesterday, “change is hard!” Of course it is. And I realize that there is an inherent uneasiness created just by the arrival of someone unknown and that just by walking in the door and up to the altar next Sunday, even if I do not consciously alter a thing from the way the liturgy was celebrated today, change will take place just by my presence. And for that I am sorry! I’m sorry for any uneasiness which my arrival might cause to anyone who loves All Saints’ and her people as I know I will come to love the parish and you. I will promise you this. No substantive change will occur intentionally without having been thought out at length and not just by me but by many of us together.  

I hope to spend a great deal of my time listening to you. I want to know your stories as you are comfortable sharing them. I want to share with you mine, as you care to hear about it! I want to share with you the Good News of Jesus Christ as I have lived it and as the Church throughout the ages has experienced it and continues to experience its revelation even in the present day.

Whatever our future together, I can assure you that behind everything we do that is new or different will be the goal of being and doing better. Worshipping God with a renewed depth and integrity. Being better stewards of that with which we have been blessed. Welcoming all who come through our doors and becoming the sort of place through whose doors ALL people will want to come. And so much more. We will chart the course together.

I thank The Reverend Kathy McAdams, who has served you as Associate, Interim Associate, Acting Rector, and soon again (for which I am VERY grateful) as Associate – if only for a short while. I honor her as a pastor, priest, and teacher amongst you and hope to learn from her in the time we serve you together.

I thank the Rector Search Committee and the Vestry for their confidence in me and for showing me the very best side of All Saints’ Church and particularly Demian Harvill, Margaret Weil, and Mary Ann Hayward with whom I have worked most closely these past months. I thank Jane-Marguerite Russell in the parish office for her invitation to you to share of your stories with me in a “Rector’s Binder” letter and for the added work that my arrival will mean in her life.

Above all, I thank you for inviting me to join you in your journey in/with/to God.

As we approach the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls, may we join our prayers with those who have gone before us – whose prayers never cease --  for a world and Church in turmoil and that God’s wisdom and providence will embolden our wills to bring to the Church and to the world, the peace which passeth all understanding.

Wishing you a blessed week and looking forward to seeing you very soon, I am,

Yours in Christ,

The Reverend Ian B. Montgomery
Rector-Elect

Leadership/Staff | Parish News | Calendar | Directions