Letter from the Senior Warden
Fr Robert Antony Rhodes will be joining Epiphany Episcopal Church as Interim Priest in mid-February.
Father Robert Antony Rhodes, CMMR (Father Rob) has been a priest for more than twenty-one years. He currently serves as Priest-in-Charge at Trinity Episcopal Church in Michigan City, IN. He has also served at St. Paul’s Seattle, where his work was focused on the Daily Office, Adult Formation, and ministry with young families. Before that he served three years as Canon Missioner at Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati, where he worked with mission and outreach efforts in the Greater Cincinnati area as well as joining the other cathedral staff in preaching, teaching, and pastoral care. Father Rob’s background includes leading several urban and suburban parishes in the Dioceses of Missouri, Louisiana, and Newark. He graduated in 2003 from General Theological Seminary in New York City where he did his fieldwork and served his diaconate at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in Times Square (Smokey Mary’s).
Father Rob’s passions include the deep structures of liturgy and how they relate to mission, monastic and other intentional Christian communities, and understanding and rethinking our relationship to food and its production. His working-class roots in St. Louis, Missouri, and his undergraduate work in fine arts have taught him how to look closely and carefully for beauty and truth in every part of the world around him. He finds God’s presence and action in all the usual places: the Church’s liturgy, contemplative prayer, the desert, and ministry of all kinds, but also in many unexpected places — ordinary neighborhoods, coffee shops, street corners, and movie houses, in secular works of art and atheist philosophies. Father Rob’s wife, Mother Debra Susannah Mary Rhodes, CMMR (Mother Debbi) is also a priest and was ordained to the priesthood on July 1, 2023.
Father Rob and Mother Debbi will be moving from Michigan City on the week of February 9 and joining Epiphany on February 15. We are so very excited to have Father Rob and Mother Debbi among us! Many blessings to them both as they journey to Las Vegas to begin this exciting chapter!
A word from Father Rob:
I am very excited to begin to share ministry with all of you at Epiphany in February. In my conversations with Mary Ellen, Mannie, and Bishop Gardner, it’s become clear to me that the Holy Spirit is at work there in many and varied ways, and also that there is among you a deep love of Christ, a desire to grow in his life and love, and a hunger to serve him in worship and in the poor, the suffering, and those in any kind of need. All of this resonates with the parts of ministry and life in Christ that matter most to me. I look forward to us learning and teaching each other
- what Christ looks like in one another,
- who we are: Epiphany Church as a congregation, each of you as the Baptized, and myself as your priest, and
- who God has shaped each of us to be before God gave us to each other to be the Church together at Epiphany Church and the surrounding neighborhoods in Las Vegas.
Debbi and I look forward to meeting you very soon!
– Father Rob Rhodes
