{"id":22997,"date":"2023-02-10T15:14:06","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T20:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=22997"},"modified":"2023-02-20T16:49:50","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T21:49:50","slug":"anne-bryson-jolly-92-prepares-to-lead-the-episcopal-diocese-of-ohio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/anne-bryson-jolly-92-prepares-to-lead-the-episcopal-diocese-of-ohio\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Bryson Jolly \u201992 prepares to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio"},"content":{"rendered":"

People who knew Anne Bryson Jolly \u201992 as a faculty kid or as a classmate could not have predicted where she would end up.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing in my life has ever been linear,\u201d said Jolly, the daughter of longtime Furman theater professor Rhett Bryson.<\/p>\n

With some twists and turns along the way \u2013 a few career changes, marriage and three grown daughters, several interstate moves \u2013 Jolly\u2019s next destination is the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio<\/a>, where she will become the first female bishop this year.<\/p>\n

\"Two

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

The diocese elected Jolly bishop coadjutor \u2013 \u201ca fancy church word meaning that the current bishop hasn\u2019t retired yet\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

This was far from what she had in mind growing up around campus or as a Spanish major at Furman.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019t like it, I\u2019d start something else. Furman allowed me to be able to consider different career paths and to look at things in a nonlinear way.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a great source of counsel,\u201d Jolly said. \u201cNot 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

After earning her B.A. and marrying David Jolly in 1992, she moved to Atlanta, where she tried out a few career paths \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said, \u2018You\u2019ve got the right family, but the wrong person,\u201d\u201d Jolly said. \u201c\u2018You want Anne.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite some initial misgivings, she became the church\u2019s stewardship and development director in 2004.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was one of the first times I felt the spirit was moving and I was called to that work,\u201d she said. \u201cI said, \u2018I think I\u2019m supposed to do this, but I don\u2019t know why.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

After years of lay leadership at Christ Church, she felt the spirit move her again \u2013 this time toward seminary, despite her reluctance to uproot her family\u2019s \u201cperfect life\u201d in Greenville.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just knew, and I cried because I didn\u2019t want to do it,\u201d she said. \u201cDavid and I spent a long time wrestling with it, but we felt very strongly that I was called to this \u2013 and therefore we were called to this. It\u2019s our vocation together.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Episcopal Church in Deerfield, Illinois, on Chicago\u2019s North Shore, in 2016. In 2019, she became president of the diocese\u2019s Standing Committee.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 and discovered she had a knack for working on that level. When she learned about the opening in the Diocese of Ohio, \u201cI felt that place where God speaks to me in my soul,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her new role may benefit from her nonlinear philosophy, said Jolly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe church is not the same as it was in the past,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019ve needed to reckon with that for a long time. … We need to be creative, and we can\u2019t just keep doing it the way we\u2019ve been doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The alumna and former faculty kid took a nonlinear path to become the diocese\u2019s first female bishop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":23025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-alumni-profiles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}