In a letter to members of the church's Executive Council, Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold announced today that the Rev. Margaret Rose, rector of St. Dunstan's Church in Atlanta, Georgia, has been appointed director of Women's Ministries at the Episcopal Church Center in New York. She will begin her work April 1.
Calling the appointment "very good news," Griswold said that Rose "will bring a great deal of experience, creativity and commitment to women's concerns."
Responding to the appointment, Rose said, "I look forward to building on the
strong foundation of advocacy and justice the Office for Women's Ministries has long represented. As a parish priest and lifelong Episcopalian, I seek to build bridges among the many networks within the church and to strengthen our work with ecumenical and interfaith partners. It is crucial in these times that women's voices be heard not only within the structures of the church but in the world outside its walls."
Underscoring her lifelong involvement in women's and justice concerns, Rose has for the last two years worked with the Ford Foundation on a project to identify innovative women leaders in Christianity, Islam and Judaism. "A convening of 20 of these women in May of 2002 made it clear that, while women are exercising pioneering leadership within their institutions, whether or not there will be long-term institutional change is still an unanswered question," she said.
Rose has been rector of St. Dunstan's, a parish of 225 in northwest Atlanta, for the last 10 years where she has helped focus the parishes strong commitment to outreach, racial and gender justice and the environment.
An honors graduate of Wellesley College, Rose graduated in 1979 from Harvard
Divinity School where she was a fellow of the Fund for Theological Education. She has also studied theology and political science in France and Switzerland. After graduation from Harvard, she served an internship at Trinity Lutheran Church in Oldenburg, Germany, before returning to Boston where she was a Cox Fellow and deacon at St. Paul's Cathedral. She then served as curate and founding director of the Jubilee Senior Action Center at St. John the Evangelist in Boston, associate rector and urban missioner at Christ Church in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and interim rector at St. Barnabas in Falmouth before the move to Atlanta.
In the Diocese of Atlanta, Rose served on the Commission on Ministry, as dean of the North Atlanta Convocation of Churches, on the board of the conference center, and was elected deputy to the 2000 and 2003 General Conventions. She is vice president of the Episcopal Urban Caucus and active in the Episcopal Peace Fellowship and the Episcopal Women's Caucus.
On the civic level she was on the board of the local Industrial Areas Foundation project, an ecumenical and multi-racial coalition of churches, the Mayor's Commission on Community Relations, as well as the North Atlanta Parents for Public Schools.
She is married to the Rev. Mark Baker, vicar of the Church of the Holy Comforter in Atlanta, and they have two daughters, Hannah, 16, and Miriam, 14.
By James Solheim
