YDS alum Sam Candler: Better to bless than to curse

The Very Rev. Sam Candler ’82 M.Div. would rather bless than curse. He’d prefer to shape a church into a kingdom of love and mercy than an opinionated extension of the New York Times or Fox News. Spiritual depth modeled by healthy congregations: that’s what the world needs now, he says.

“People learning how to pray together, serve together, get angry together, and love together—that’s what’s going to save the world,” he said in a recent interview

“I realize that’s a heavy comment! But the way people come together around a story of faith and live it out day by day, I believe, is actually going to be the salvation of the world. That’s what healthy parish ministry is.”

It can happen in any congregation of any size, said Candler, who has had experience in churches big and small. For the past 27 years, he has led a large church—some 8,000 members—as Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral Parish of St. Philip in Atlanta.

“Sam is an utterly delightful person who has built one of the largest Episcopal churches in the United States,” said YDS Dean Greg Sterling. “He is the scion of a famous family, yet he has made his own mark through his creative and effective ministry. Sam is a prime example of a YDS alum who is leading a flourishing church in a major urban area at a time when many don’t think that is possible.”

Enough already

The work of transmitting healthy religion in the 21^st century is not easy, Candler admits. But he relishes the challenge. Rule number one: enough already with the sanctified negativity.

“I think one of the dangers preachers get into is they talk about things they don’t like,” he said. “And a lot of folks have gone to church to sort of share their complaints—they like preachers who complain about the same things they do. But what that does is shrink the system. People eventually get tired of hearing about what’s wrong. What I encourage especially among younger clergy, and those who are starting churches, is to talk about what actually attracts you to God. Talk about the positive elements of faith and hope. Pay attention to blessings instead of cursing. That’s a mark of healthy Christianity.”

A blessed event

Candler in fact is famous in Atlanta as the “blessing priest” who annually flings holy water on thousands of participants who run or walk in the July 4 Peachtree Road Race, which goes past St. Philip’s Cathedral. This blessing became a tradition soon after Candler’s arrival at St. Philip’s in 1998. Instead of cursing the hassle and disruption of 50,000 people ambling past their church, the new dean and his congregation decided to embrace it in the name of faith and fun.

“By now, it looks to me like thousands of runners expect that blessing,” Candler wrote some years later. “They swerve over to the right to soak up the water and the good words. They are all shapes and sizes, and they are all sorts and conditions of humanity. It is absolutely amazing what our Cathedral community sees go by on that morning.”

The Candler name is also well-known in Georgia for the family’s history in business, Methodist leadership, and philanthropy. Sam Candler’s great-great-grandfather, Asa Griggs Candler, founded the Coca-Cola Company in 1892 (selling it by the early 1920s), became Atlanta mayor, and staked money to start a Methodist college in Atlanta, which became Emory University. Emory’s Candler School of Theology honors the family name.

Child of creation

Sam Candler grew up on a farm south of Atlanta. Stargazing was an early habit; astronomy remains a passion for him. The great outdoors gave him a silent everyday sense of awe, a belief that surely there is a Creator behind it all. 

“I’ve been a believer in the higher power, so to speak, ever since I was born. There’s something about the outdoors, something about the woods, that shows me God. I see the skies and they lift my spirit.”

These experiences kindled an eclectic but steady interest in matters of Christian faith. Growing up, he attended Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Pentecostal congregations. All pointed to the same thing, a deep regard for the spiritual life as a pilgrimage.

Striking a chord

At the same time, his interest in music grew. It too was eclectic. Folksinger John Sebastian and songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen were touchstones. Sebastian personified a lightness of spirit, Cohen a brooding complexity—Candler welcomed both. Eventually he turned to jazz as well, and minored in music at Occidental College in Los Angeles, with a major in religious studies and philosophy. He’s an amateur pianist to this day—also a poet. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including his poem “A Cemetery Soloist Sings Amazing Grace” in Salvation South and “From a Desert Retreat in New Mexico” in Richard Rohr’s The Mendicant. 

Throughout his earlier years, he remained hooked on church, he said, and set his sights on YDS, where he connected with Berkeley Divinity School and found theological heroes among the faculty, including David Kelsey, Luke Johnson, and Rowan Greer.

Sage advice

Soon he was ordained and eager to work for a thriving, prestigious church somewhere. But a cherished mentor set him straight.

“I told him I want to get called to a great church, so how do I do that? And he said, ‘Oh, there’s only two ways. One, you try to get called to a great church, and that never happens. The second way is, you get called to a church and you make it great.’ So I said, well, in that case, I’ll go anywhere.”

He did parish ministry in congregations in rural Georgia and South Carolina. Some were small and in need of rehabilitation. He set about starting projects that parishioners got excited about and had the dexterity to undertake, including a Habitat for Humanity effort, United Way involvement, elder care, and a nursery.

“In other words, parishes can be the centers of healthy activity if you have an openness to the gifts that are already there,” he said.

In 1993, he was called to be Dean of the Cathedral in Columbia, S.C., and in 1998 he returned to Atlanta as dean of St. Philip’s, known for its abundance of educational, mission, and worship opportunities. Alongside the soaring Gothic cathedral, a 300-capacity prayer chapel is now being constructed—a post-pandemic project featuring an octagonal space with moveable furniture, for purposes of more contemplative and intimate worship. 

The ‘via comprehensiva’

In perilous times, Candler calls himself “unabashedly a classical Christian” who looks to the church as a healing place that can offer a comprehensive embrace of worshipers and their prickly differences, and a breakthrough to an unexpected kind of unity. It’s not a question of choosing a bland, ineffectual middle way but something broader and bolder. Not a via media but a “via comprehensiva,” as Candler describes it. (His sermons and other writings on a wide range of themes can be found here.)

“How to offer a responsible public Christian witness is a question that every conscientious clergyperson in the country is working through right now,” he said. “Everybody has a way of doing it, and I have an answer too, whether or not I achieve it. It’s true you have to talk about issues that are real, that are uncomfortable or pointed. But on the other hand, I try to make the what happens at St. Philip’s Cathedral an experience of a different world. So when you come to church and you hear the sermons and participate in the liturgy, you’re entering a different world. It’s not just a different opinion in your own world.”

With its prayers and creeds and arts and hallowed teachings, a church is supposed to be truly a different realm, he said, a kingdom of love, joy, justice, steadiness, and mercy. 

“We’ve got to say those things in a way that stirs people to go back out into the world and act— with strength and energy and wisdom from our tradition, and not just repeat whatever they’ve been hearing every week in the news.”

Right praise

The challenge of the “via comprehensiva” is to hold together a broad range of jostling viewpoints on the strength of a vision of community action and behavior, not by political expectation or detailed theological doctrine. That’s at the core of his embrace of the meaning of orthodoxy as “right praise,” not primarily “right belief.”

“We have some politically charged conversations sometimes. And yet people do feel like they belong to the church. For me, that’s critical. That’s what I try to build up. If we contain both edges in one community, we carry something important.”

An example of a comprehensive congregational embrace is his approach to the Nicene Creed, which has derailed many a church body that descended into a gnarly line-by-line exegesis of its meanings.

“The way I introduce the Creed each week is to say, ‘With Christians across time and around the world, we say together the Nicene Creed.’ I use it as a form of our identity, not as a statement of belief. If you can contain the whole road, comprehensively, I think you’ve got something going there.”

Week after week, it all comes down to blessing what’s good and miraculous, not cursing what’s going to hell in a handbasket. “There’s plenty of cursing out there, but finding people and actions to bless—now that’s a hopeful thing.”