Staff Members

Anna Brawley was born in South Carolina and spent her childhood in Mexico, the Carolinas, New Jersey and Pennsylvania before graduating from White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee.  She went back to South Carolina for college and graduated with a double major in Vocal Performance and Church Music from Erskine College.  She took a couple of years off from school to work and save money before moving on to earn her MDiv and STM from Yale Divinity School in the early 1990s.  From there, she went on to do a PhD in Religion (Old Testament / Hebrew), minoring in Linguistics, from Vanderbilt University.

Anna’s academic career began in 1999 as a Lecturer in Bible at the Pacific Theological College, an ecumenical seminary serving the Pacific Island nations and located in Suva, Fiji Islands.  She taught mainly Old Testament and Hebrew, but also taught some New Testament and Greek classes.  From there, she became an Adjunct Professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.  She worked briefly as a secretary and document aide at Sargent and Lundy, an engineering firm in Chicago focused on the design of power plants.  After this, she went back to seminary to do her Anglican Studies at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, then located in Evanston, Illinois.

Though raised in the Presbyterian tradition, she was confirmed and received into the Anglican Communion in the Diocese of Polynesia during her time in Fiji and first felt a call to the priesthood while there.  She was ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church by the Rt. Rev. Jeffrey D. Lee, Bishop of Chicago, in June of 2010.  She first served as Pastoral Associate at Montgomery Place Retirement Center.  Then she became Rector of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Florence, Alabama, where she served for 6 years from 2010-2016.  While in Alabama, she also started up and was the first Dean of the Alabama Iona Ministry School (AIMS), a local ministry training center.  In 2016-2017, she served as Rector of the Episcopal Church of St. James the Less in Ashland, Virginia.  From 2017-2019, she served as Interim Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Kingsport, Tennessee.  Since May of 2020, she has been Rector of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina.  She is excited to move to Oxford, where she will serve as Rector (Time Certain) of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.  The move also brings her much closer to her parents, who live in Durham.