The Reverend Dr. Ellen Richardson

 The Reverend Dr. Ellen Richardson is serving as Interim Vicar at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Rincon, Georgia.  She was born in Jacksonville, Florida and raised in the Atlanta area.  She received her undergraduate degree from Georgia State University in Atlanta, and her medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, completing her Residency in Family Medicine through East Tennessee State University in Kingsport, Tennessee, and her Palliative Care training through the program of Palliative Care Education and Practice at Harvard Medical School.  She is Board Certified in both Family Medicine and Hospice and Palliative Medicine.  Her medical experience includes the practice of Family Medicine in both rural Tennessee and Georgia, and working as a Medical Director for three years for Hospice Savannah.  She is currently employed part-time by St. Joseph’s/Candler Medical Group in their Family Practice offices on Whitemarsh Island, and in Pembroke, and as Medical Director for Palliative Care for the St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System.

Ellen was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in 1996, and has served as a vestry member and  Sr. Warden at St. Paul’s in Jesup; a Lay Eucharistic Minister at St. Paul’s, at St. Mark’s in Brunswick, and at St. Francis of the Islands, where she completed four years of Education for Ministry, two as a mentor.   After completing the Canonical requirements of preparation for the Diocese of Georgia, she was ordained to the Transitional Deaconate at the Georgia Diocesan Convention on February 9, 2008, and to the priesthood on September 27, 2008 at St. Francis of the Islands Episcopal Church.   She is enrolled at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in their first class of the Distributive Learning Option for the degree of Masters in Divinity.

 Her long term goals for ordained ministry include the blending of her role as a priest in the Episcopal Church with a practice of medicine, particularly within the new specialty of Palliative Care, becoming both a pastoral and educational resource to the Church in matters of managing the last phase of life, and to the medical community in creating the sacred space around the seriously ill and dying which leads to careful choices and appropriate use of medical resources to manage comfort, dignity and quality of life at its most fragile stage.  

Ellen has been married for 27 years to Mark Richardson, a professor of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University.  They have two sons, Will, newly wed to Hope and living in Athens, and Owen, a freshman at the University of Georgia.