Anne Bryson Jolly ’92 prepares to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio

People who knew Anne Bryson Jolly ’92 as a faculty kid or as a classmate could not have predicted where she would end up.

“Nothing in my life has ever been linear,” said Jolly, the daughter of longtime Furman theater professor Rhett Bryson.

With some twists and turns along the way – a few career changes, marriage and three grown daughters, several interstate moves – Jolly’s next destination is the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, where she will become the first female bishop this year.

Rev. Anne Jolly ’92 (left) and Rev. Esther Lee with comfort dogs at the Deerfield Farmers Market in July 2022, days after the Highland Park shooting.

The diocese elected Jolly bishop coadjutor – “a fancy church word meaning that the current bishop hasn’t retired yet” – at its convention in November 2022. Since then, Jolly and her husband, David Jolly, have been tying up their affairs in their current home outside Chicago. She will assume the title Bishop of Ohio when the current bishop retires later this year.

This was far from what she had in mind growing up around campus or as a Spanish major at Furman.

“I kind of tumbled into my major, which most of my life has been like,” she said. “I just went down little rabbit trails. I took a course, and if I liked it, I took the next one, and if I didn’t like it, I’d start something else. Furman allowed me to be able to consider different career paths and to look at things in a nonlinear way.”

She was not raised to be particularly religious, but as a child Jolly had admired the great comfort her grandmother had taken in her church. She found another spiritual mentor at Furman in University Chaplain Jim Pitts.

“He was a great source of counsel,” Jolly said. “Not ever pushing an agenda and not forcing me to believe a thing, but just being a person to sit with and talk to. He just held space for the challenges I had.”

After earning her B.A. and marrying David Jolly in 1992, she moved to Atlanta, where she tried out a few career paths – jewelry sales, computer sales and high-tech recruiting. Not long after the family moved back to Greenville in 2000, the rector of their church, Christ Church Episcopal in downtown Greenville, approached David Jolly about taking on a leadership role.

“He said, ‘You’ve got the right family, but the wrong person,”” Jolly said. “‘You want Anne.’”

Despite some initial misgivings, she became the church’s stewardship and development director in 2004.

“It was one of the first times I felt the spirit was moving and I was called to that work,” she said. “I said, ‘I think I’m supposed to do this, but I don’t know why.’”

After years of lay leadership at Christ Church, she felt the spirit move her again – this time toward seminary, despite her reluctance to uproot her family’s “perfect life” in Greenville.

“I just knew, and I cried because I didn’t want to do it,” she said. “David and I spent a long time wrestling with it, but we felt very strongly that I was called to this – and therefore we were called to this. It’s our vocation together.”

She earned her master of divinity from the Episcopal seminary at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 2013. After a few years at a church in Austin, Texas, Jolly became rector at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Deerfield, Illinois, on Chicago’s North Shore, in 2016. In 2019, she became president of the diocese’s Standing Committee.

The Standing Committee assumes ecclesiastical authority in the absence of a bishop, so when the bishop retired in 2020 without a successor in place, Jolly found herself leading the Diocese of Chicago for about two years – and discovered she had a knack for working on that level. When she learned about the opening in the Diocese of Ohio, “I felt that place where God speaks to me in my soul,” she said.

Her new role may benefit from her nonlinear philosophy, said Jolly.

“The church is not the same as it was in the past,” she said. “We’ve needed to reckon with that for a long time. … We need to be creative, and we can’t just keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it.”