Fr. Tim Hepburn is a priest for the Archdiocese of Atlanta. He recently returned from Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, Michigan where he spent the last two years studying the opportunity that Pope John Paul II called the “New Evangelization.” Fr. Tim describes the New Evangelization this way: “Pope John Paul II saw that if the Church is to have anything to offer to the world it will only come by a renewal of faith within the Church. The new evangelization starts with us reclaiming and unwrapping the gift that we have been given in baptism but it doesn’t stop there. In the broad vision of Pope John Paul II this renewal of faith overflows to the world and has the power to transform the cultures in which we live.”

Fr. Tim has been a priest for the Archdiocese of Atlanta for 15 years and has been involved in many ministries as pastor, assistant vocation director, high school chaplain, university chaplain at Emory and currently university chaplain at Georgia Tech. After graduating from high school, Fr. Tim received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Auburn University in Alabama. Half way though his degree program he began to grow dissatisfied with the way he was living. He also began to wonder why God seemed to be so present to the Christians in the bible but wasn’t present in his life in a way that he could know or experience. As his thirst for God increased in college so did his prayer and his willingness to give his life over to the Lord. This conversion wasn’t his call to priesthood. Rather, it was the call that all Christians have to know the Father through his son Jesus, in the Holy Spirit.

As he finished his Architecture degree, he became active in the Catholic campus ministry at his university. Through prayer, good experiences of ministry in the Church, and the openness of a priest who let him see what priesthood was about, he began to consider that he might be called to the priesthood. Upon graduation, he attended Saint Meinrad Seminary in Indiana and five years later, in 1993, was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Atlanta.