By Jay Kt
The question landed like a stone dropped into still water.
“Will God answer my prayer?”
The Reverend Tom Simmons posed it plainly at the top of a recent episode of his podcast, “Priest in the Hot Seat,” and let it sit there the way a good teacher does, long enough for the listener to feel its full weight.
After nearly 30 years in ordained ministry and a life that has moved through military service, Capitol Hill, and the pulpit, Simmons loves to ask hard questions out loud. He does not flinch from them. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes him worth listening to.
Simmons serves as rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Purcellville, Virginia, where he has spent more than two decades walking alongside families through the full range of human experience. He is also, increasingly, a voice reaching well beyond the walls of any single congregation. His podcast is built on the same instinct that has defined his ministry from the beginning: that people grow when someone tells them the truth with warmth and without pretense.
On podcast episode 22, Rev. Tom Simmons went straight to the tension at the heart of the question. He opened with John 14:13-14, where Jesus tells his disciples, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” Then he did not dress it up.
“On the one hand, Jesus is making big promises,” Simmons told his listeners. “So clear, so explicit, so unqualified. He says, ask me and I’m going to do it for you. But on the other hand, we have observed reality. God very often doesn’t grant our request. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, we all do.”
That willingness to name the gap between promise and experience is not a concession to doubt. For Simmons, it is the beginning of genuine faith. He has spent years helping people sit inside that tension rather than collapse under it, and the podcast has become a place where that work continues in a new form.
Tom Simmons is passionate about edifying believers in the Kingdom of God, whether from the pulpit, in counseling rooms, or now through a microphone. He is not interested in tidy resolutions. He is interested in helping people go deeper.
“God gives you what you would have asked,” he said, drawing on theologian Tim Keller’s framing, “if you knew as much as he does.”
Leading From the Inside Out
Tom Simmons did not arrive at transparency as a leadership philosophy by accident. He arrived at it through years of watching what actually works when people are hurting and what does not.
At St. Peter’s, he has built a culture where honesty is not just tolerated but expected, starting with the man at the front of the room. He talks openly about his own limitations, his own questions, his own ongoing formation as a follower of Jesus. That approach, he believes, gives others permission to do the same.
“I try not to maintain a facade to meet people’s expectations,” he explained. “I try to be open and honest about my opinions and priorities, my weaknesses and my struggles.”
That kind of leadership disarms people. It signals that the church is a place where the full truth of a person’s life is welcome, not just the presentable parts. For families navigating real pressure, that signal matters more than most congregations realize.
Simmons also leads with what he calls permission-giving, creating genuine space for leaders within the congregation to bring their ideas forward, take ownership, and speak honestly. He is deliberate about surrounding himself with people whose strengths fill his gaps.
“It takes a team,” he said. “My strengths are fairly narrowly focused and my inadequacies need to be shored up by strong, talented people who share their thoughts freely.”
Liturgy and preaching remain the heartbeat of St. Peter’s, but the connective tissue is the culture Simmons has built over more than two decades: one where growth is a shared project and no one is expected to have it all together.
Rev. Tom Simmons Leads A Church That ‘Punches Above Its Weight’
For a congregation of its size, St. Peter’s carries a striking footprint in the Purcellville, Virginia, community and well beyond it.
Simmons has spent more than two decades building outward from the parish, guided by what he describes as his congregation’s defining strength: hospitality. Each year, St. Peter’s hosts what he calls its “Famous Events,” a series of gatherings tied to Mardi Gras, Independence Day, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Thanksgiving Together, and Christmas Eve. The design is accessible. The intention runs deep.
“We deploy our congregation’s greatest strength to serve the community,” Simmons said, “inviting our neighbors for great food, music, fun, and prayer. Turning strangers into friends into followers of Jesus.”
The reach extends further. St. Peter’s helped found Tree of Life, a local food pantry that has grown considerably over the years, with the church providing both paid and volunteer staffing at its core. Simmons also served as chaplain of the Purcellville Rescue Squad, sat on the board of the local hospital, and for years wrote a bimonthly newspaper column called “Church Chat,” each an investment in planting St. Peter’s presence throughout the broader community.
Internationally, the church sustains active missionary partnerships in Guatemala and Liberia, sending annual mission groups and generating meaningful financial support for partners on the ground.
“We definitely punch above our weight in our community,” Simmons said.
The record backs him up.
The Ministry of Walking Alongside Others
Pastoral care is quiet work. It shows up in a hospital room at an inconvenient hour, in a phone call made because someone came to mind, in the steady accumulation of small acts that tell a person they have not been forgotten.
At the center of that work, for Simmons, is a conviction he returns to again and again: the health of a family is inseparable from the health of a faith community, and neither can thrive when people are left to carry their burdens alone.
The families who come through the doors of St. Peter’s arrive with the full weight of modern life in tow. Anger that has nowhere to go. Marriages under pressure. Parents who are exhausted and uncertain. Mental health struggles the church has historically been slow to name. Through counseling, mentorship, and sustained relational presence, Simmons works to equip people to live out their faith where it matters most: inside their marriages, their parenting, and their closest relationships.
His philosophy draws on an image he finds instructive. “People’s problems are often like a lizard’s shadow cast onto the wall of a cave,” he said. “That wee reptile can appear like a fearsome dragon. But when we bring it out of the cave into the light of day, we see it is much more manageable.”
To keep that light shining consistently, Simmons built a team strong in empathy and intuitive care, and added a personal discipline of daily prayer cards to stay connected with dozens of individuals over time.
A Wider Audience for a Lifelong Calling
Bible teaching has always been at the core of who Tom Simmons is as a minister. He has been doing it for nearly three decades, from Sunday mornings to adult education courses to one-on-one conversations, counseling and teaching the next generation of ministry leaders. The podcast is just another extension that reveals his heart for God’s people.
“I am hoping that the podcast, with its compact, accessible format, will allow me to spread my teaching wings again and reach an ever-wider audience,” he said.
Each episode reflects the same instincts that have defined his ministry at St. Peter’s: go toward the hard question, stay in the tension, trust the listener to handle the truth.
For Christians looking for a voice that does not oversimplify, a teacher who has clearly lived inside the questions he raises, the podcast offers something increasingly rare. It is theology that breathes.
And so the question he opened with, will God answer my prayer, does not get a tidy answer. It gets something far more durable.
“We are fed by Jesus’s promise to advance boldly before his throne of grace,” Simmons said on the episode. “And on the other hand, we go humbly, acknowledging: you know our necessities before we ask, and you know our ignorance in asking. So have compassion on our weakness and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not ask, and for our blindness we cannot ask.”
God is not silent. He is sovereign. And for Simmons, after nearly 30 years at the intersection of human need and divine mystery, that distinction is everything.
