About Us

Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, you are welcomed and honored here.

All Souls Parish is a Christ-centered, Episcopal community committed to welcoming strangers and spiritual seekers from every background. Located in North Berkeley, California, just a few blocks away from UC Berkeley, our congregation reflects the larger community around us–we pursue questions of faith and meaning with a balance of intellectual rigor, robust curiosity, and a willingness to humbly acknowledge that we are forever pilgrims on the way to God’s love.

We come from all walks of life.

Members of All Souls are old, young, and every age between. We come from a multiplicity of gender identities, sexual orientations, cultural and religious backgrounds. Some of us were raised within the Anglican Communion; many others found their way to All Souls from Catholicism, Protestant denominations, Buddhism, Judaism, and the pull of spiritual searching.

We believe that each person who walks through our doors has something to teach us about who God is, and that our parish life together is strengthened by the unique gifts, backgrounds, life experiences, and questions of our members. Listening to each other’s stories is one of the primary practices of our communal faith life. Whether sharing a moment of gratitude at a worship service or offering a reflection in our weekly newsletter, we tell our stories as a way of celebrating the diverse ways God works in our lives.

We blend the traditional with the contemporary.

In our liturgy and worship, we blend elements from Christianity’s 2000-year history with contemporary forms. Familiar hymns and other traditional sacred music are interspersed with gospel songs, Taize chants, and Appalachian spirituals – we love to sing! We hold art in its diverse forms as an expression of God’s sacred beauty, and often feature visual arts as well as poetry in our liturgies.

We make church together.

We know that churches have for centuries concentrated far too much power in the hands of a select few. At All Souls, we believe that no one person sees the whole picture of where the Spirit is guiding us, and that we benefit from the full participation of all our members in the life of our parish. Our parishioners are active in every aspect of our congregation, from governance to baking the bread for our services.