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There's a place for you here.

New to Richmond? Unfamiliar with the Episcopal Church, or with Christianity? Welcome. 

Whoever you are, wherever you are in your spiritual journey, the people of St. Stephen's Church hope that your experience with this church will encourage and strengthen you. 

As you browse our Web site, you might consider: 

  • visiting St. Stephen's for a worship service and/or watching our livestreamed services

  • coming to an informal supper

  • stopping by the Farmers Market on Saturday morning

  • attending one of our receptions for visitors and newcomers

  • signing up for an Inquirers Class

  • subscribing to St. Stephen's weekly email, the eSpirit; there is no cost, no obligation, and we will not share your email address with any outside group

  • attending a retreat, workshop or group, or participating in any of the other offerings you'll see on these pages.

Do as much or as little as you like. There are no "requirements" for being a part of this community of faith. If you wish to be baptized or confirmed, or to transfer your membership from another Episcopal parish, we'd love for you to do so. But it's not required. Everything we do, everything we offer, is open to all, regardless of whether you are a "member" of this church. If you're here, you belong. 

Here's an online visitor card: it's not required--it just helps us to be more responsive to you!

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church
6000 Grove Avenue
Richmond, VA 23226
804.288.2867

Our services

St. Stephen's is a vibrant parish offering several kinds of worship services. Sunday, of course, is our big day. You are most welcome at any of the services held here.

Sunday schedule (from the Sunday after Labor Day through the Sunday before Memorial Day)

8:00 a.m., Holy Eucharist: Rite One
9:00 a.m., Holy Eucharist: Rite Two*, in the main church and in Palmer Hall Chapel
10:10 a.m., Education for all ages*
11:15 a.m., Holy Eucharist, Rite Two*
5:30 p.m., Celtic Evensong and Communion
6:30 p.m., Sunday Community Supper
8:00 p.m., Compline

Sunday schedule (from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend)

8:00 a.m., Holy Eucharist: Rite One
10:00 a.m., Holy Eucharist: Rite Two*
5:30 p.m., Celtic Evensong and Communion*
6:30 p.m., Sunday Community Supper
8:00 p.m., Compline

*indicates child care available through age 4

Weekday worship

Year-round
8:10 a.m., Morning Prayer with Communion

(When the parish office is closed for a holiday or due to inclement weather, weekday Morning Prayer does not take place.) 

Where we're located

St. Stephen's is located at the corner of Three Chopt Road and Grove Avenue (the address is 600 Grove Avenue), near the University of Richmond and across the street from St. Catherine's School.

If you are coming to the church office, the most direct route is through the double glass doors to the parish house off the parking lot on Somerset.  If you're coming for a worship service, you can enter from Grove Avenue or Three Chopt Road.

Accessibility

There are several entrances to the church and parish house that are designed to be accessible to those with mobility issues or other physical limitations:

All entrances to the church, and the main entrance to the parish house, are equipped with power-assist doors. In addition, the main entrance to the parish house, from the large parking lot, has an elevator on the ground floor that allows you to bypass the steps. The Grove Avenue entrance to the main church is gently sloped, without steps, and the Three Chopt Road entrance has a ramp.

Inside the church, several pews are shortened to allow space for a wheelchair or walker: the first pews on either side of the center aisle, nearest the altar, and the pews near the large baptismal font.

The church is equipped with assistive hearing devices for the hearing-impaired. Please ask an usher for one of these devices as you enter the church.

From birth through high school

St. Stephen's Church has an active ministry for children and youth, staffed by an energetic and talented family ministries staff and dedicated, well-trained volunteers. Our family ministry staff sends an email newsletter to parents for which you may sign up.

Our main offering for young children is Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. For youth in grades 6-12, we use Journey to Adulthood. Both are highly regarded spiritual formation approaches.

We also strive to provide opportunities for parents to learn, grow, and receive support from other parents and from our clergy.

HOLY BAPTISM

Holy Baptism is available for babies, children, and adults. Read more about Baptism and preparation here.

CONFIRMATION 

At St. Stephen's, young people who desire to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church may enter the preparation process in the ninth grade or later. Confirmation takes place when one of our bishops visits St. Stephen's, usually in May.

Young adults

Young adults--single or partnered, with children or not, in college or working--are invited to take part in everything St. Stephen's has to offer, from worship to small groups, choirs to Sunday Community suppers, from outreach and volunteer activities to our environmental stewardship group.

We have tagged 20s and 30s as "young adulthood" but many who participate in young adult activities are in their 40s. The bottom line is, no one will ask you your age--if you think of yourself as a young adult, so do we!

While young adults at St. Stephen's sometimes gather with others in their age cohort, everyone is welcome to join a group or a class with adults of all ages. 

Children and teenagers love having adults who are closer to their age as teachers and mentors. You do not have to be a parent to serve in our ministries among children and youth.

Many young adults particularly enjoy the Compline service at St. Stephen's Church, held Sunday nights at 8 in the church. This ancient service is used as the last service of the day in monastic communities, cathedrals, churches, and schools, and many people say it in their homes. (It's found on page 127 of the Book of Common Prayer.) At St. Stephen's, the service is sung by a mixed a cappella choir. The choir chants prayers and psalms, interspersed with motets. It's an exquisite service, with candles (no other lighting) and incense. Those who attend sit in or lie on a pew in silence, praying, meditating or simply listening to the music. The service lasts just 30 minutes. 

We livestream our main Sunday morning service, our Celtic service, and Compline each Sunday. You'll find these on our Web site, on our Facebook page, and on our YouTube channel.

A fellowship

One of the distinctive things about being an Episcopalian is the sense of connection and fellowship one has with other Episcopalian Christians. St. Stephen's Episcopal Church is part of the Diocese of Virginia, one of the oldest and largest dioceses in the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Our diocese includes 80,000 people who worship God and reach out to others in nearly 180 parishes in 38 counties in central, northern and northwestern Virginia. It is one of three Episcopal dioceses in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the others being the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia (based in Roanoke) and the Diocese of Southern Virginia (based in Norfolk). You can read more about the Diocese of Virginia at thediocese.net.

The best way to learn about what it means to be a Christian in the Episcopal tradition is to attend an inquirers class. This class usually meets once a week for seven weeks and is taught by our clergy two or three times each year.

 

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Sunday Schedule

Holy Eucharist: 8:00, 9:00, 11:15

Christian Education for all ages: 10:10 (returning September)

OUR LOCATION

6000 Grove Avenue Richmond, VA 23226
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Forum Series on Poetry

We Become What We Behold

A Series on Poetry, Beauty, and the Sacred

Presented on three Sunday mornings during the Sunday Forum by Allison Seay, associate for religion and the arts (information about other Sunday Forum speakers is here).

Companion text: Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty (available in the Bookshop @ St. Stephen's)

Allison Seay joined St. Stephen's staff in 2016 as a member of our family ministries team and associate for religion and the arts. In the fall of 2016, she presented a three-part series in the Sunday Forum as a primer and companion to our newly-inaugurated poetry series, and especially a March visit by the poet Jane Hirshfield.

Part 1 // October 9, 2016

An Introduction to Poetry:  What is it we are beholding and why does it matter?  How can we find poetry in our daily lives?
On one hand, as much as we are searching for how to live better, eat healthier, and participate in the world with mindful clarity, it is also true that we tend to seek not what is good for us but what is familiar to us. And we are often good at destroying what is unfamiliar. 

For many, art has become the stranger, even the enemy, and some of us would prefer to keep it at bay, outside the door, something we see as not applicable, at best, and certainly not a necessity. Art becomes the thing we’d deal with if we had more time, more space, more ability, more capacity. 

But what if it’s much simpler? What if art can be defined essentially as Beauty? What if the distinction is not so great between making art and beholding art and that one is no more noble than the other? What if poetry, more specifically, is not something to get through, but something to delight in? And what if beauty is available to us if only we will behold it? 

This talk will explore what it means to “behold” as readers of poetry and witnesses to the world’s beauty while also orienting those who might be unfamiliar with poetry to some of its elemental joys. Gustave Flaubert claims, “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” So how can we train our eyes and ears to notice it in our seemingly ordinary lives? In poetry, the work is not that we uncover all the things we think the poem is hiding from us; rather, the work is as simple (and as difficult) as beholding what already is. Art carries a particular truth and, as Jane Hirshfield says, it “adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it.”

We will look at two of Hirshfield’s poems from The Beauty as a way of entering into an invitation that we might, by appreciating poetry, behold the world more carefully, more attentively, and with an enriched understanding about our own emotional landscapes.

Part 2 // November 6, 2016

The Extraordinary Ordinary: beholding through listening
To ask how poems work is to ask how WE work. And much of our “work” is as inner — emotional, spiritual, silent — as it is outer. Our external worlds are busy, noisy, and sometimes competitive — often running counter to our essential selves. That is, what we appear to be is often not what we actually are and our external obsessions are often separate from our inherent value as children of God. One of the healthiest ways I know to explore the space between what we have and what we want is to turn inward and turn to poetry. It is in art that I am more able to gauge my emotional hunger: What is being fed and what is being starved? When we stop worrying about whether we are beholding “correctly,” we are much more likely to behold truly. 

This talk will return to Jane Hirshfield’s poems as a way of putting into practice what we know by heart: how to appreciate that which delights. “In poetry’s words,” says Hirshfield, “life calls to life with the same inevitability and gladness that bird calls to bird, whale to whale, frog to frog. Listening across the night or ocean or pond, they recognize one another and are warmed by that knowledge.”

 
Part 3 // November 13, 2016

Becoming Beauty: How do we become what we behold? What is to become of us?
This talk will explore questions concerning identity. Who is it / what is it we are becoming? What is my identity and how is my life changing?

When Jane Hirshfield says that “attentiveness only deepens what it regards,” I think she means that the more careful we are — with what we see, what we say, what we behold — the more we are rewarded in beauty, in joy, in astonishment, in knowing our existence and the existence of others is abundant and wonder-filled. “Why ask art into a life at all,” Hirshfield says, “if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for MORE is in us — more range, more depth, more feeling, more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstinted delight…”

Poetry is not necessarily the answering of questions, but the re-phrasing of questions in new and interesting ways that lead us deeper into essential truths about our selves, about what it means to be human, to love, to grieve, to doubt, to suffer. In this way, poetry is a way of making sense of the world so that we might have some reliable understanding of our predicament and our blessing on earth. We will close with another reading from The Beauty and observe the ways we have been moved from one emotional state to another simply by beholding what has been here all along.

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