The Rev. Richard Burden, the new minister-in-charge at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour, is enjoying “the opportunity to serve in a congregation and a community that seeks to grow in the love of Christ.”

A recent graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, Calif., Burden arrived in Richmond in July with wife, Monica, and son, Miles, age 6.  Less than a month later, the family welcomed baby daughter, Tamsin, born at Pattie A. Clay Medical Center.

Burden describes himself as a life-long student, so he is pleased to be living and working in a community with both a university and a college. Already he is working to strengthen the church’s outreach to students at Eastern Kentucky University and is meeting with the Canterbury Fellowship at Berea College.

The new minister at the Church of Our Saviour says that the Episcopal church has a lot to offer “because we are a church that really tries to practice being a community of faith through worship, fellowship and working to serve the disenfranchised in the community and in the wider world.”

Burden said that all are welcome to come explore their faith and to be supported in their faith journeys and their ministries at the Church of Our Saviour. He describes the Episcopal Church as one that offers an opportunity to be a voice of progressive Christianity in the world today.

He has served as a seminarian at St. Clare’s Episcopal Church, Pleasanton, Calif., and gained pastoral care experience at San Francisco General Hospital and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo, Alto, Calif. He was awarded an excellence in ministry scholarship and served as a convener of The Beatitudes Society.

Prior to entering seminary, Burden earned a PhD in Chinese history from the University of Chicago.  He has a functional fluency in Mandarin Chinese and spent a year in Shandong, China, as a Fulbright recipient where he studied native Chinese Christianity.

Monica Burden, also a Fulbright recipient, earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. During her year in Beijing, China, she collected conversational data for her dissertation.

Burden, a native of Colorado, grew up in Loveland.  He later worked as a buyer at the well-known bookstore in Denver called the Tattered Cover.

- News release Episcopal Congregation Welcomes New Minister, November 2009