A church in the heart of the city, with a heart for the city

In West Tennessee, ‘educator at heart’ encourages curiosity in medicine, church

November 13, 2026

[Episcopal News Service] Deborah Harmon Hines’s theology is simple: “Jesus died to take away your sins, not your mind.” “I think God put all of this beautiful stuff here for us not only to enjoy but to explore and to understand,” she told Episcopal News Service. Hines, a retired anatomy professor and longtime Episcopal lay leader, went viral on Instagram for sharing her life’s stories with the Church of the Holy Communion in the Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee. When the Memphis parish introduced Lift Every Voice and Sing II, an African American hymnal, to their pews, they invited Hines to speak from her experience on the hymnal’s editorial committee; an opportunity she described as one of the highlights of her life. She shared more about her impact in medicine and the church in an additional interview that garnered hundreds of thousands of views online. Hines was the first woman president of the Union of Black Episcopalians, a Diocese of Western Massachusetts deputy to General Convention and was secretary to the most recent Joint Nominating Committee for the Election of the Presiding Bishop. And then there’s medicine: She estimates she has educated at least 10,000 health professionals over her career. “I’m an educator at heart,” Hines said. “I just want people to know things. I want them to learn things.” Hines recently retired from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School as vice provost for school services and professor. Some of her own first educators, she said, were priests. “The priests I grew up under did not make distinctions between boys and girls,” Hines said. “They pushed us all [to] do whatever we could do, go wherever we wanted to go.” Hines was one of the first Black campers at the now-closed Episcopal Camp Gailor-Maxon in Sewanee, Tennessee. She grew up in a staunch Baptist family but fell in love with the services at camp, leading her to join The Episcopal Church. Hines said the camp-to-church pipeline that introduced young people like her to the Episcopal tradition was a model she took with her into medicine. “I have used that model in my secular work in trying to get more young people, especially from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds, into STEM careers,” Hines said. Thanks to Hines, UMass Chan Medical School now has several pipeline programs designed to expose students from middle school to college to careers in health professions and biomedical research. In retirement, Hines is a trustee of the Memphis HBCU Lemoyne-Owen College, her alma mater, and is the secretary for both the Brooklyn Health Equity Foundation and St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in the Diocese of West Tennessee, where her husband serves as vicar. “Everything I learned about administration, I learned in The Episcopal Church,” Hines said. “As a part of the Episcopal Young Churchmen, I learned how to run a meeting, I learned how to take minutes, I learned how to make motions, I learned how to politick and get people to support proposals and resolutions.” Hines said she never separated her religious life from her academic life. When she taught at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, she would “duck out” to attend church on Wednesdays. Students would ask her about it, and she would invite them. She said she has always savored close-knit teaching environments where she could impart more than just science. “When I moved to the University of Massachusetts Medical School, I was often one of the first Black faculty members any of those white students had ever seen,” Hines said. “[In] that same kind of close proximity, they could ask me anything. And they did. And I answered. In a lot of ways, that opened the way for me to pass on some of the things I had learned in the larger world.” She often used examples from her own life under segregation, she said, to teach students to consider cultural context when developing treatment plans for their patients. Stories from childhood are also how Hines describes to others the genesis of her own love for science. In grade school, Hines told ENS she grew tired of the Cold War-era bomb drills. She said she was determined to learn why it was so important that she crouch in the hallway with her hands over her head when she could be in class. At her request, the local “colored” library ordered books on the atomic bomb through inter-library loans from white libraries. “Reading those books in the third grade, I came to understand how the smallest possible thing you could have is an atom,” said Hines. “The hydrogen atom. And how you could fool around with that atom and make a bomb that could blow up Memphis.” Hines said she began to see how everything can be broken down to its smallest parts and rearranged. It’s a simple principle that she said guides her entwined understanding of God’s creation and science. “At every point in my life, I have to say that people nurtured my questioning things,” Hines said. “I’m just so blessed that nobody ever told me to go sit down and be quiet.” –Logan Crews is a freelance reporter and hospital chaplain resident in the Diocese of Missouri.