Reverend Tom Simmons of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church: A Ministry Built on Honesty, Resilience, and Real Leadership

The straightforward version of Reverend Tom Simmons’ career reads like a clean success story. Seminary training, service in the U.S. Army, time working on Capitol Hill, ordination in 1998, and then the rector’s chair at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Purcellville, Virginia, where his leadership helped the congregation double in size twice within six years.

That story is true. It is also incomplete.

Who Is Reverend Tom Simmons?

Tom Simmons is the Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Purcellville, Virginia, a position he has held for over two decades. He was ordained in 1998 following a challenging and extended discernment process through the Diocese of Virginia, which also allowed him to earn a Master of Arts in Christian Education. Before entering ministry, he served in the U.S. Army and worked in a professional capacity on Capitol Hill, two experiences that shaped his instincts for leadership, structure, and institutional accountability.

What distinguishes Simmons from many clergy of his generation is not an unblemished record of church growth. It is what he did when the growth stopped.

The Year Things Fell Apart

In 2008, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church ran into serious trouble. Simmons refers to it directly as the Year From Hell. A combination of external pressures, internal conflict among church leadership, and mistakes he owns without hedging produced roughly 18 months of institutional disruption. For a rector who had built his professional identity on momentum and results, the experience was a significant reckoning.

Recovery came, but slowly. The congregation never fully returned to its pre-2008 peak. Then, before that wound had fully closed, COVID accelerated what had already become a quiet pattern: declining membership, aging demographics, and the structural difficulty of competing for families against larger churches with more robust children’s programming.

Simmons is direct about where things stand. He is 58 years old. He is considering early retirement in 2028 after 30 years in ministry. He describes the financial trajectory of St. Peter’s, with rising pastoral compensation and a shrinking congregation base, as curves that are crossing and will not be sustainable indefinitely.

This is not the language clergy typically use in public. It is also why people trust him.

A Public Crisis and What Came After

In 2021, Simmons made his marital separation public, followed by a divorce finalized in 2023. In 2022, the Diocese of Virginia launched an investigation following an accusation of adultery. He was cleared of the charge. The person who made the accusation then attempted to damage his reputation through an online smear campaign.

All of this unfolded in Purcellville, a tight-knit community where St. Peter’s is a known presence. Clergy have lost their positions over far less. Simmons did not. The congregation that stayed through those years is what he calls a well-refined core, now growing again with new members who are arriving and, notably, remaining. He describes 2025 as a stabilizing year, drawing a direct parallel to 2010, the last time St. Peter’s rebuilt its footing after a period of real damage.

How He Leads

Reverend Tom Simmons does not run St. Peter’s on charisma, though he has it. His leadership framework is built around transparency, distributed responsibility, and a principle he calls permission-giving, the deliberate practice of allowing people to say no and never using guilt as a motivational tool.

He is candid about his limitations as a pastoral caregiver. One-on-one sustained care for suffering individuals is not where his gifts are strongest, and he says so plainly. His response has been to build teams of people whose gifts run precisely in that direction, surrounding himself with empathetic, relationally skilled people who compensate for what he lacks. He also developed a daily personal discipline of praying for congregation members by name, using handwritten prayer cards to track individual needs and stay in meaningful contact with dozens of people over time.

Community Work and St. Peter’s Footprint

For a congregation of its size, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church carries an outsized presence in Purcellville and beyond.

Simmons was central to founding Tree of Life, a local food pantry that has expanded considerably over the years, with St. Peter’s supplying both paid staff and volunteers to sustain its operations. The church maintains active missionary partnerships in Guatemala and Liberia, including annual mission trips to Guatemala. Domestically, Simmons developed what he calls Famous Events, a series of large community gatherings built around the congregation’s genuine strength in hospitality. These include a Mardi Gras celebration, a Feast of St. Francis gathering, a community Thanksgiving dinner, and a Christmas Eve event, all designed to bring neighbors through the doors without pressure or pretense.

For years, Simmons wrote Church Chat, a bi-monthly column in a local newspaper that ran until 2019. He served as Chaplain of the Purcellville Rescue Squad through 2020 and held a seat on the board of the local hospital. These were not ceremonial roles. They were deliberate efforts to embed St. Peter’s in the civic life of the community it serves.

The church’s physical facilities tell a similar story. Over the past decade, Simmons led a comprehensive renovation of St. Peter’s buildings and grounds, using in-house talent to keep costs manageable. The upgraded campus now generates revenue through leases to a school and a second congregation, a financial buffer that matters as operating costs continue to climb.

What Comes Next

Simmons is focused on two near-term commitments. In 2026, he has a twelve-week sabbatical planned, time he intends to use for rest and genuine reflection on what the next chapter of his ministry looks like. He is also developing a podcast. Bible teaching was his original calling and remains his clearest gift. The podcast is his way of returning to that work and reaching a broader audience than in-person courses allow, potentially at a scale comparable to the community reach he once had through Church Chat.

Whether either effort reshapes the trajectory of St. Peter’s in a measurable way is an open question. What is not an open question is what Reverend Tom Simmons has demonstrated over 25 years of ministry in Purcellville: that credibility built through difficulty, honesty about failure, and the willingness to keep showing up without pretending the hard parts did not happen is a more durable foundation than a run of easy growth.

Most people in leadership figure that out eventually. Very few say it out loud while they are still in the middle of it.

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