Fr. John Thorpe is a graduate student at St. Louis University and a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas.
He grew up in Oklahoma as a self-proclaimed “Protestant mutt,” becoming an Episcopalian in his teenage years through St. Augustine’s, Tempe, Arizona, and Church of the Good Shepherd in Sapulpa, Oklahoma. He attended Oral Roberts University, earning one degree in music composition and another in theological/historical studies in 2002.
He and his wife, Beth, were married in 2001 and have three children. He attended Yale Divinity School through the Institute of Sacred Music, specializing in liturgical studies and earning a diploma in Anglican Studies from Berkeley Divinity School in 2005. He served as seminarian intern at St. Peter’s, Milford, and was ordained to the priesthood through the Diocese of Albany by the Rt. Rev. David Bena in 2005. He served as curate and associate rector at St. Peter’s Church in downtown Albany under the Rev. Paul Hartt and became the rector of St. Stephen’s Church in Newton, Iowa, in 2008.
In 2014, he moved south to become the Chaplain at St. John’s Episcopal School in Dallas, where he taught religion and Latin to middle schoolers and preached daily to 450 students from kindergarten to eighth grade. In 2019, he began studying Christianity in Antiquity at Saint Louis University.
He has served on the board of the Diocese of Iowa and its Strategic Planning Task Force, as Ecumenical Officer of the Diocese of Dallas and convener of several local ecumenical clergy associations, and has been active in charity work through the North Texas Food Bank; Kids Against Hunger in north Dallas and in Jasper County, Iowa; the Pregnancy Center of Central Iowa; and the Rotary Club.
