The Very Rev. Mike Kinman, who has led Christ Church Cathedral in downtown St. Louis for seven years, announced Sunday, June 12 that he has accepted a call to be the new rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California.
Kinman shared the news with the Cathedral congregation during Sunday services. He will preach his last sermon as dean of the Cathedral on Sunday, June 26 when his ministry and the life of the Cathedral will be celebrated. His final day in the office will be June 30. After that, he will resume his Cathedral-granted sabbatical, which ends September 6.
“I have come back this Sunday to begin to say goodbye. And that means that things will change here at Christ Church Cathedral. But what will remain the same is Christ’s call on us – on you and on me. And that is a call, wherever we are, to bring those of us who are most on the margins into the center and to let those voices be the church’s teachers and leaders,” Kinman said on June 12.
“To reject this pervasive culture of coercive shame and embrace a life of extravagant love, liberation and hospitality for all. To choose justice over respectability. The way of Jesus over the way of the Pharisee. This mission did not begin with my arrival and does not end with my departure.”
Kinman was called to the Cathedral in 2009. During his tenure, the Cathedral raised more than $750,000 for black churches burned in the South in 2015; opened its doors to Black Lives Matter activists after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson in 2014; and last year, helped open a residential center, Magdalene St. Louis, for women who had endured abuse, prostitution and addiction. He preached frequently about justice and reconciliation.
“As a church leader, I go where I see Christ,” Kinman told The American in an August 9 interview, in between leading two worship services on the one-year anniversary of Brown’s being killed. “And right now, I see Him in the young people. I see Him in the young people non-violently leading this movement.”
Not everyone in the congregation followed him on this journey. Some of Kinman’s parishioners have heard enough of this impassioned advocacy of protestors against the police and left his church.
“Some people have said, ‘You’re making me feel bad, guilty, ashamed,’” Kinman told The American. “I get that. Christ Church Cathedral is not always an easy place to go to church. But we go where God is calling us. There is no way history could have come to St. Louis with this movement and us not throw open our doors and then go out into the street ourselves.”
Kinman first arrived in the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri in 1986 when he attended the University of Missouri–Columbia. After graduation, he took over as a full-time campus minister at Calvary Episcopal Church in Columbia in 1991. Beginning in 1993, he spent three years at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. After graduating seminary, he was ordained deacon in 1996 in a service at Christ Church Cathedral.
He began work as curate and then associate priest at the Church of St. Michael and St. George in Clayton. He was ordained a priest in 1997 and then helped start a campus ministry with students at Washington University. That ministry eventually evolved into a full-time campus ministry.
He later became involved in a national Episcopal movement to reorient the church toward seeking and serving Christ through ending extreme poverty. That movement became Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, where he served as its executive director. He was called to Christ Church Cathedral, first as provost in 2009 and then, two years later, as dean.
A search will begin shortly for an interim dean.
For more information, please contact the Cathedral at 314-231-3454.
