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He has a lot of great things to say at the end of the episode about the sacramental imagination and the role of beauty in worship!

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We were devout Baptists. My parents had been leading Sunday school since before my older sister was born. They were often in choir and always brought a casserole to Wednesday night fellowship. More importantly, they were real believers and thoughtful in their belief. I do not remember family devotionals, but I distinctly remember interrupting my mother’s prayer time, praying before meals, and learning about the faith.

Predictably, the Bible was at the center of our faith. That is, after all, the Baptist tradition: that God is principally revealed to the church in Scripture, which is interpreted by individual Christians under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I have not attended a Baptist service in nearly twenty years, and yet I still find that Scripture principally comes to my mind in the language of the New King James version. We were not aware of having any tradition of interpretation of Scripture which was, itself, unscriptural.

At the age of six, I asked to be baptized. What I remember most clearly is the seriousness with which my parents took my request, calling me into their bedroom in the evening to speak about it. I remember my mother asking me, “Do you know what baptism is?” And I answered, with a profound sacramentality that I did not understand, “It’s being saved.”

My parents went on to explain the Baptist view of baptism, that it is a symbol and public declaration of the salvation which has already occurred through the believer’s acceptance of Christ as Lord and Savior. They led me, completely abashed, in the Sinner’s Prayer, and I was baptized soon afterwards. This is just one of many providential encounters which God put in my path with sacramental theology and the Catholic tradition during my childhood.

I demonstrated a love for the Bible at eight years old, when I told my parents that I wanted to be a Bible translator. I read the Bible voraciously, especially the narrative books. My first memory of reading St. Paul and being confounded comes from that same time period. I experienced the same thing with the Psalms. Genesis and Matthew were straightforward narratives, and if there were a few events in them that I did not quite grasp, I understood the progression and most of the events. But these other texts were impossible. St. Paul had causal clauses whose connection with what preceded seemed tenuous at best, and I could not understand his use of the Old Testament. The Psalms likewise twisted inexplicably. These texts were beyond me. The Bible required explanation.

An Encounter with Moses

In 2002, when I was eleven, my family became frustrated with the way our church divided adults and children up for Sunday school, and sometimes even for worship, and we began having family church services at home instead. It did not take long before we were drawn into the Hebrew Roots Movement by some old acquaintances. It is difficult to summarize the movement briefly because it is diverse — something which will become significant as this history proceeds. The one characteristic which the entire movement has in common is an attempt to frame New Testament Christianity in the Jewish setting of Jesus and the Apostles, and its members have concluded that that involves, in some way, observing the Law of Moses — the Torah. Beyond that, there are few universal doctrines. For many of us in western Texas who joined the movement, our radical libertarianism, our rejection of authority and tradition, was a central motivating factor. To some extent, it was an appeal to the Law of Moses, because nobody but God Himself could tell a free citizen what to do.

My first real awareness of what was going on came when our friend loaned us a DVD about the biblical feasts. It was a video of a man in a full beard and long grey hair, wearing a tunic and something like a poncho over it, with a round cap on his head, explaining the feasts and fasts of Leviticus 23. The man was Michael Rood, and the essential premise of the video was that Jesus, whom he called by his Aramaic name, Yeshua, had fulfilled the Spring feasts — Passover, Firstfruits, and Pentecost — in his first coming, and therefore He would fulfill the Fall cycle — the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles — on his return. The implication was that Christians should observe all these feasts, the former as a remembrance of Christ’s coming and the latter as an anticipation of his return.

Rood’s argument was interesting, but what it implied for us took some time to work out. It was not immediately obvious that the argument was relevant to anything other than the holy days. At the same time, Rood also made a negative case against traditional Christian celebrations and practices, claiming that they were of pagan origin, and therefore illicit. It was the very front edge of a distinction, which would loom large over the years that followed, between “Hebrew thinking” and “Greek thinking.” Once we had accepted this basic premise, things began to move quickly.

We took our china plates out to the dumpster and shattered them because, according to Leviticus 11:33, earthenware that has come into contact with unclean food needs to be shattered. At Passover we ate lamb, and though we did not do the slaughtering, we saved some of the blood from the leg of lamb and used a paintbrush to put it on the door frame. We aligned ourselves with a medieval Jewish sect called the Karaites, who claimed descent from the Sadducees, and rejected the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in favor of a Scripture alone principle very similar to the later Protestant view.

Eventually, we began attending a local Hebrew Roots or “Messianic” congregation. Unlike the Messianic movement in some places, this was not an essentially Evangelical congregation of Jewish converts who want to preserve their heritage. It was a community made up almost entirely of Gentiles who wanted to restore an original Jewish or Torah-observant Christianity. The congregation itself was divided into two camps and would split formally some years later. One camp, like my family, wanted to observe the Law of Moses by Scripture alone, while the other was immersed in the Jewish interpretive and legal tradition, the Oral Torah.

An Encounter with Tradition

Until this time, around 2006, I had been committed to the idea that interpretive traditions were simply the “traditions of men” and unnecessary additions to God’s revelation in Scripture. I had even begun work on my own, entirely biblical, liturgy, derived primarily from the Psalms. This was the beginning of a lasting love of the Psalms and an abiding interest in their role in liturgical prayer.

But the traditional camp at the synagogue had a strong argument. Not only did they point to Scripture itself, where at least some Jewish traditions seem to be vindicated in texts like Matthew 23:2, 23 and John 10:22, they also noted that the Torah seems to develop in the Hebrew Bible itself! They gave several examples, like Numbers 27, in which the daughters of a man named Zelophehad approach Moses because their father had no sons, providing no one to receive his inheritance. Moses had to discern that those daughters, contrary to the normal rule, could inherit the man’s property.

But there was a much more practical argument, as well. On subjects ranging from the calendar to ritual purity, it became clear that the books of Moses did not give sufficient details, and with no authority or means for reaching consensus, the congregation was effectively divided into two or three different communities. Because it had a bearing on what food we ate, when we celebrated holy days, and even who could have physical contact, these competing standards made fellowship difficult.

The only sensible solution seemed to be in the Traditional camp, because the other camp fragmented within itself. As a result, I was introduced to a wealth of Jewish traditions, and I began to appreciate the fourfold method of traditional Judaism, which interpreted Scripture as Peshat (the plain, literal meaning), Remez (the hidden or allegorical meaning), Drash (the comparative meaning or reference to other texts of Scripture), and Sod (the mystical, esoteric meaning about the nature of God and encountering Him).

This continued to be my spiritual life through high school and into college: A Jewish-Christian religion harkening back to the Nazarene and Ebionite sects from the first centuries AD, mentioned by the church historian Eusebius in the fourth century. We tried to be faithful to the interpretive Tradition of Judaism, while also making it uniquely Messianic, adding the Lord’s Prayer to the Jewish liturgy and celebrating the Incarnation at the Feast of Tabernacles. I learned Hebrew and Aramaic and made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land, in 2006 and 2008, exclusively visiting Jewish sites.

Unlike my earlier forays into both making my own liturgy and into Karaite liturgies, the traditional Jewish liturgy of the Siddur, the prayerbook, made sparse use of the Psalms. They were in the Jewish tradition of prayer, but only sparingly. I had an intense longing for praying the Psalms, but I felt constrained by the Tradition.

As I approached college, problems began to arise. Jewish tradition was supposed to be normative for our belief and practice, and it claimed absolute interpretive authority over Scripture. But the New Testament did not always agree with the consensus positions in Judaism. Yeshua took a distinctly minority position on marriage and divorce, and he seemed to have a strange combination of respect for Jewish tradition and a desire to transform it. His teachings on the Sabbath and the Temple were so revolutionary that they were difficult to reconcile with the tradition. More importantly, Jewish tradition maintained clearly and adamantly that the Torah was only a requirement for the descendants of Jacob, whereas the Messiah’s entire ministry seemed to say that the prophecy of Isaiah 66 about the inclusion of the Gentiles had been fulfilled. We had various competing explanations for these facts, but none of them was particularly satisfactory.

I continued to wrestle with these when I left for Baylor University in the fall of 2009, where I majored in linguistics with a minor in religion. In the course of my studies, I began to learn things no one had ever told me before. The “pagan” origins of Christmas and Easter were mostly fictional, and Christians had a better grasp of the Jewish roots of their religion than I had been led to believe. The books I read by NT Wright and Joseph Ratzinger displayed even more familiarity with Jewish tradition than I had. In fact, Christian claims to antiquity were much better founded than I had ever imagined and accounted for the Jewish origins of Christianity. Doctrines and practices which I had questioned, like the Trinity and the practice of Communion, were described by Christians like Justin Martyr in the second century! And they claimed an unbroken succession of authority which came from the Messiah himself, while we claimed ours from rabbinical sources who did not even recognize our legitimacy.

While I remained dissatisfied with explanations about the legitimacy of our connection to Judaism and how we, as Gentiles, related to Israel, I made a new friend, who would be an enormous influence on me. Lance was a student at Truett Seminary, and while he had been a Baptist, he was in the process of transferring to the Anglican Church in North America. He visited the synagogue with me one week, and in return I came to hear him be the guest preacher at the tiny Anglican congregation.

An Encounter with The Book of Common Prayer

Lance introduced me to Fr. Michael, who excused himself and returned a moment later in a long white robe unlike anything I had seen a Christian wearing before. I was taken aback, because I recognized it in spirit. He was dressed as a priest. As much as I knew that Christianity had a long history, it was to me essentially something modern and unconnected to the world of ancient Israel. I was accustomed to pastors dressed in modern clothes, singing songs written from the eighteenth century onward, in services without a hint of antiquity. But here was a priest, dressed as a priest. The liturgy was a stripped-down affair, with traditional hymns which were accompanied on guitar. It was simple but beautiful, clear as light and suffused with the text of Scripture. I was deeply uncomfortable, but also deeply impressed.

This experience was the first sign of what I would later call my “torrid love affair” with the Book of Common Prayer. It was a scripturally rich, apparently traditional form of Christian prayer, a kind of Christian Siddur, and it made more use of the Psalms.

I began, on occasion, to attend services at the Anglican mission. Once my guard had come down and I saw that this was neither the irreverent Evangelical worship I knew, nor what I still assumed would be idolatrous Catholic worship, my reticence about attending a church, at least occasionally, evaporated. Then I went home for the summer and dove into EP Sanders’ magisterial Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders extensively records the traditions and theologies of the Jewish groups who lived at the time of Yeshua and Paul in order to put Paul in his first century context. I was tormented by these problems of our relationship to the Jewish people and Jewish tradition, and I did not see a systematic way forward, so I hoped to gain clarity from Sanders’ research.

At the end of the summer of 2012, some time in August, two of the Messianic Movement’s best scholars came to our synagogue to present their thesis on this very subject. I went with my hopes high but strained. Their view was that the Torah of Moses and Jewish tradition were binding on Jewish believers, but not on Gentile converts, who were only given an “invitation” to participate. I could not square this with St. Paul’s stance in Ephesians 2, that there was no longer a division between Jewish and Gentile believers, because the commandments that stood between them were removed by Christ.

My last hope for the Messianic movement was dashed in that moment. I went home with this conviction: a Tradition was necessary for understanding the Bible, and we did not have one. The only other one that I could see was in the Apostolic Churches. The next morning, I rose early, drove to the local Catholic bookstore, which I had never entered before, and bought a Catholic prayerbook.

I returned to Baylor for my final semester, thinking that I would probably become Eastern Orthodox, because that church had the most eastern and ancient air about it. But I found the Orthodox community in Waco alienating, and as I was already connected to the Anglican community, I quickly changed my mind. I regularly attended an early morning spoken Anglican liturgy. When I arrived, the day was still young and the streets were quiet. I would slip in quietly in the gray pre-dawn and kneel in the quiet and listen to the silent voice of God. The priest, a retired army officer, would enter and in a solemn voice intone, “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Communion was received kneeling at the altar rail in holy meditation. The people were blessed and dismissed. Some remained to pray, while the rest filed out in holy silence. I did not know how lucky I was, or how rare the reverential care of that service is. It remains to me the sacred womb from which I was birthed back into Christendom.

Of course, my main concern was for Apostolic Tradition. I had already become convinced that the Bible was not self-interpreting and that Christ Himself endorsed Jewish tradition in many ways. So, I took a very Anglo-Catholic approach, and it was the work of John Henry Newman in the Tracts for the Times, which he wrote as an Anglican, that convinced me that I could join this tradition. I did not understand at the time that Tract 90, which was so important to me, because it reconciled the Church of England’s foundational 39 Articles of Religion with the Catholic tradition, was censured by the bishops at the time and began Newman’s own journey into the Catholic Church.

The year after I officially joined the Anglican Church, I moved to North Carolina in order to pursue an MA in religious studies at Duke. At the local Anglican parish there, I had a rude awakening. The parish was very Evangelical, in sharp contrast to the overwhelmingly Anglo-Catholic diocese of Fort Worth, where I had been. The cracks in the Anglican Communion were also becoming more apparent, as I learned about its ongoing fight over homosexuality. The Communion was at war with itself, and that raised all kinds of questions for me, reminding me of my early days in the Messianic synagogue. What was the use of this Apostolic Tradition if nobody could even agree on how much authority it had, or what it required of us? Many of my fellow parishioners put almost no stock in the Tradition at all! If part of the reason for being in an Apostolic Church was for the sake of unity, why was our church falling apart?

An Encounter with St. John Henry Newman

More than one good thing came of my time at that parish, though. The first was that I met my wife, Carrie. We were married in January of 2015, in St. Mary’s Chapel, according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer. At the same time, I had begun reading John Henry Newman’s seminal work, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which presents his reasons for leaving Anglicanism and becoming Catholic. He speaks to the heart of my difficulty in this passage:

It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures. (I.II.I.14)

And his solution is one which I was not ready to hear:

There can be no combination on the basis of truth without an organ of truth. As cultivation brings out the colours of flowers, and domestication changes the character of animals, so does education of necessity develop differences of opinion; and while it is impossible to lay down first principles in which all will unite, it is utterly unreasonable to expect that this man should yield to that, or all to one.… The only general persuasive in matters of conduct is authority; that is, (when truth is in question,) a judgment which we feel to be superior to our own. If Christianity is both social and dogmatic, and intended for all ages, it must humanly speaking have an infallible expounder. Else you will secure unity of form at the loss of unity of doctrine, or unity of doctrine at the loss of unity of form; you will have to choose between a comprehension of opinions and a resolution into parties. (I.II.II.13)

Without some recognized authority, unity is impossible, because on what grounds do you recognize one view, developed by a reasonable person out of reasonable (though inherently incomplete) information, over another that was formulated in the same way? And how can you ask the holder of one opinion to submit to the other? If Christ meant what he prayed at the Last Supper, “that they all may be one,” why would He then leave a Church hopelessly incapable of achieving that unity, without the essential implements of it?

At the same time, I became frustrated with all of the 17th century and the distinctively Anglican parts of the Book of Common Prayer. I could not escape the sense that, after praying the Psalms and canticles, Cranmer’s Reformed theological collects were unbearably dead and dry. But I began to discover the ancient tradition of daily prayer, through the historical Cathedral Office. It was an office of prayer made (almost) entirely of Scripture, especially the Psalms. My heart reveled in it, but I felt guilty of some kind of betrayal of my Church when I would skip Morning Prayer and instead pray the ancient Lauds.

But I was not quite ready to convert yet. I was holding out hope that some Anglican solution would present itself. I did not take the Apostolic Succession of our bishops lightly. The last time I ever attended our Anglican parish, the priest who had married us used a different liturgy than usual, one not authorized by ACNA. It was mostly unobjectionable, except when it came to the Eucharistic Prayer itself. Like the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, but unlike those with which I was familiar (the 1928 and the 1979), it contained no appeal to the Holy Spirit to bless the Elements. In contrast with the East, the Western version of this prayer is traditionally very short, and only obvious in the Catholic Eucharistic Rite II which reads, “Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall, so that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Anglican priest’s change, to me, implied a radically different doctrine of Communion and of what was happening at the altar, which departed from the Church’s traditional interpretation of John chapter 6. If we did not need the Holy Spirit to change the elements, then they were a mere memorial, and why were we bothering? I refused to take Communion, and I never went back. I went directly to the nearest Catholic parish and inquired about RCIA.

My wife was not yet ready to convert, and a series of scheduling problems made RCIA difficult. In the end, we both joined the Church almost two full years after I had stormed out of our Anglican parish, by which time we had moved to Scotland so that I could pursue a PhD in Old Testament at the University of St. Andrews. In the interim, I read the Rule of St. Benedict for the first time, and the heavens opened. I compared it to the Mishnah, the earliest record of the Jewish legal tradition, and it had a rule of prayer that was based on praying the Psalms — praying them all, day in and day out. I devoured the Rule in an afternoon and felt I had found what I had been looking for since the age of 14.

We were received into full communion with the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church at Easter Vigil in April of 2017 in the parish church of St.-James-by-the-Sea. I chose Saint Jerome as my patron, and Carrie chose Saint Therese of Lisieux. I cannot say that I had the oft-heard converts’ story of the heavens opening upon their first reception of the true Eucharist. Instead, it felt like a fulfillment of this idea of tradition and unity which drove my journey.

I have since finished my doctorate, and we are now living in northern Kentucky, with two little boys and a baby girl.

I am working with some friends and colleagues from graduate school to establish an education initiative called The Littlemore Institute, named after the community founded by St. John Henry Newman. Our goal is to supplement education at all levels by establishing a homeschool resource library, providing tutoring, college-level courses, and public lectures. Our motto is borrowed from the great Scottish missionary monk, St. Columbanus: Christi Simus, Non Nostri: “We are Christ’s, not our own.”

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Mr. Cutler (as he was called — a deeply committed low churchman, he would have been offended to be called Father Cutler) was an extraordinary saintly pastor, who, though from a rich Boston Brahmin family, had devoted his entire ordained ministry to inner-city work among the poor. He was seen as the pastor of all of Charlestown, though ninety percent of the community was Irish-Catholic. He was a zealous activist for peace and justice. Mr. Cutler had a profound influence on me as a child; my mother used to tell me that even as a small boy I said that I wanted to be like Mr. Cutler when I grew up. The call to ordained ministry was present as far back as I can consciously remember. Childhood games often included playing church, with me as the priest distributing communion.

Eventually, Mr. Cutler retired. A new priest with a wife and children arrived, and we were required to leave the rectory. My parents, through intense and diligent work, were able to fulfill the American dream and purchase their own home nearby. The new priest was a high churchman; and in Sunday school he instructed us that we were not Protestants but Catholics — not Roman Catholics, but Anglo-Catholics. This was the best news I had ever heard. After being verbally and physically bullied in our largely Catholic neighborhood for being a “Protestant and Nazi,” I was thrilled to learn that I was Catholic, too!

St. John’s Episcopal Church was the center of my life. Besides being a refuge where we as immigrants were accepted and loved, it also was the formative spiritual community of my childhood and adolescence. We had a boys’ choir and a church Boy Scout Troop. In high school, we had a very active Young People’s Fellowship, because of which I had my first preaching opportunity on Youth Sunday. Seminarians from the Episcopal Theological School provided youth leadership, and one in particular solidified my vocation. As a senior in high school, I met with my bishop, and he affirmed my vocation: “Jurgen, you’ll make a wonderful priest; now when you go to college, don’t major in religion. You’ll get plenty of that in seminary.” He shook my hand, and I was a postulant!

College and Seminary

In 1965, I went off to college. I had been recruited by Harvard College but accepted a full scholarship to Amherst when my mother informed me Harvard meant living at home! My secondary education had been at the Boston Latin School. Six years of Latin and three years of Greek in high school and an interest in archaeology and psychology directed me to choose classics as my major. The greatest providence of college was meeting Gloria Gehshan, a lady from Smith College, on the very first day of freshman year. She would become my wife. We have been together most of our sixty-five years of life.

This was the turbulent ’60s and the days of student revolution. I joined the Students for a Democratic Society, the premier New Left organization and was very engaged in organizing teach-ins, demonstrations, and marches against the Vietnam War. This activism for peace and justice was for me an expression of my faith, and Christians like Merton, the Berrigans, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr. were my heroes. The underside of this era was also part of my life: sexual promiscuity, drugs, growing cynicism. By the time I arrived at seminary (the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge) in 1969, I was burned out and found myself in a deep depression.

Spirituality had not been a significant part of my Christian life, but my depression created a quest for inner resources. After dabbling in Eastern religions and New Age philosophies, I embraced Jungian psychology as my new “religion.” In my last year of seminary, I interned at an Episcopal church under a priest who himself was an avid disciple of Jung and who had an interest in spiritual healing. Having been well indoctrinated with a biblical hermeneutic of Bultmannian demythologization, in which all the healing miracles of Jesus had been discarded, I was not sure what these folk at the parish thought they were doing, but I dutifully participated. Though a senior in seminary, I had never participated in a Bible study or prayer group before — much less a healing service — but these Wednesday morning gatherings became utterly transformational. For the first time, I began to “experience” the reality of God and the power of prayer.

My Conversion as a Young Priest

As I began my curacy as a deacon in 1972, I continued my explorations in the Holy Spirit. The charismatic movement was emerging in the Episcopal Church. Nine o’Clock in the Morning by Bennett, Gathered for Power by Pulkingham, and Miracle in Darien by Fullam were narrations of priests and parishes totally transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit. “Spiritual Renewal” was the new buzzword in the church; Cursillo, Faith Alive, Marriage Encounter, the charismatic movement — all were efforts to bring new life to the church in the face of what was beginning to become evident: decline and decrease in the Episcopal Church. I was drawn to these movements, not just for the church’s sake, but for the sake of my own very thirsty soul.

In this quest, the Lord provided a spiritual mentor, an older woman named Elizabeth. She asked me, “Would you like to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit?” This was an essential and pervasive theme of the charismatic renewal: that the apostolic experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost was available today and was the rightful promised inheritance of every believer. My response was rather passive, “Well, why not?” She prayed over me on a number of occasions, but nothing happened. Then in June 1974, in the living room of the home of some Baptist evangelists who were friends of Elizabeth, while being prayed over with the laying on of hands, the heavens opened and the Spirit of God gave me a supernatural vision of the Blood of Christ.

From that point, everything began to change: my spirituality — my prayer became alive, real, and personal; my theology — I began a decided move away from liberalism toward biblical orthodoxy; my preaching — I began to preach Christ crucified; my ministry — the power and experience of the Holy Spirit was central.

My charismatic conversion, however, also produced problems. “Evangelism is a dirty word in the Episcopal Church!” my rector asserted at my proposal to start an evangelism committee. I felt a sense that it was time for a new call. After a few disappointing rector searches, I was called to be the rector of St. Paul’s, in Malden, Massachusetts. It was a small, dying, elderly, urban congregation; my youth was the major qualification of their call.

My Work as an Anglican Priest

St. Paul’s was a wonderful adventure for the next fourteen years of my life. The parish had a remarkable transformation. There were all the outward indicators of growth: membership, attendance, staff, income, program; but more importantly, we became the dwelling place of the living God and a mission center of living water (Ezek 47): conversions, healings, deliverances, deep worship, ministry to the poor. We became known as the “Charismatic Episcopal Church.” We introduced literally thousands of folks around New England to a deeper experience of the Holy Spirit through weekly healing services, preaching and teaching missions at other churches, and regular “Renewal” conferences hosted at St. Paul’s.

During this time, God was planting the seeds of my conversion to Catholicism. I began the discipline of being a penitent. My first confessor was a monk of the Episcopal community of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Father Carleton Jones. Our monthly meetings introduced me to Anglo-Catholic worship and spirituality. My many years of spiritual direction with Carleton ended abruptly with his sudden announcement that he was becoming a Roman Catholic. I remember vividly the words of the letter he sent to me explaining his decision: “I have come to the conclusion that the unity of the Church is not finally something to be strived for but rather a gift already from the Lord to His Church in the Petrine office.”

Radical feminism is a powerful lobby in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. At one diocesan meeting, a priest and seminary professor declared abortion to be a sacrament. Thus, I felt called to be a voice for the sanctity of life and organized a chapter of the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life (NOEL). My reputation as a charismatic left me somewhat on the fringes of the clergy as an eccentric, but my pro-life activism drew bitter anger and rejection from many of my colleagues. The abortion crisis, however, posed for me even a larger question: How could the moral compass of the church be so profoundly broken?

Towards the end of the ’80s, I sensed that my time at St. Paul’s was ending. After being rejected by the few possible prospects in the greater Boston area, I began earnestly to seek the Lord. On the Eve of the Epiphany, 1990, while reading The New Catholics, a collection of testimonies of converts to Catholicism, I received a clear word from God that I was to be a Catholic. In obedience to that word, I actually began exploring the Pastoral Provision. I met a number of times with a Franciscan priest to explore the Catholic faith. I also met with Father Andrew Mead, the rector of the Anglo-Catholic Church of the Advent. Strangely, the Holy Spirit seemed to say, “Not yet!” But the conversations with Father Mead produced an invitation to serve with him at the Advent.

Immersion in the deep, rich world of Anglo-Catholic worship and spirituality, far from being alien to my charismatic tendencies, was a profoundly charismatic experience. I was introduced to Keble, Pusey, and Newman, to Benson and Grafton, to the Triduum, the Veneration of the Cross, Benediction, the Angelus, and daily Mass. I remained at the Advent seven years, but again I sensed God was calling me elsewhere. Was it time to go to Rome? Again, God seemed to say, “Not yet!”

In Holy Week of 1997, I received an invitation to become rector of Christ Church Hamilton. Christ Church had been the premier Evangelical Episcopal church of the diocese. It had experienced a wonderful renewal in the late ’70s and ’80s and began to draw in many faculty and students from Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary. But the last decade had been a disastrous time of conflict and diminishment and, at the request of the Vestry, the bishop removed the rector. The parish had become a small, financially stressed, demoralized, depressed group, living in the memories of past glory.

Newly equipped with all my Anglo-Catholic experience and paraphernalia (eucharistic vestments, bells, incense), I went to Christ Church. Almost instantly, God renewed the church, liturgically, spiritually, and politically. Attendance doubled the first year and tripled the next, as did the budget. The staff and ministry of the parish were rebuilt; missionary work was revitalized. Seminarians came in droves, and many were ordained (some have even journeyed on to Roman and Orthodox orders). A vision that had animated my ministry, a vision of a church — fully Evangelical, fully charismatic — came to fruition at Christ Church.

But alas, even as we thrived, the din of the political turmoil of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion loomed. I constantly posed the question to the lay and clerical leadership of the church: What is God calling Christ Church to be and do in the midst of this crisis? One answer to that question came in the developments of what would become the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). A significant group of parishioners thought this was the direction we should go. Another large group, equally faithful and orthodox, was convinced that steadfast witness within the Episcopal Church was God’s plan. Each sought my opinion. My theological preferences were with the former; my catholic sensibilities (against schism) were with the latter. I proposed that we accept both directions as authentically led by the Holy Spirit and plan a future of two sister parishes, one a new church plant of the ACNA and the other a continuing Episcopal church at Christ Church. The two sister parishes would continue in mutual affection, prayer, and, where possible, shared ministry — a witness of reconciliation and charity over against the bloodbath of lawsuits and depositions going on in the denomination.

The Vestry adopted this vision for the future. We set a timetable for the next twelve months and invited each member of the parish to discern prayerfully God’s specific will for them. We developed the appropriate planning and organizational structures for building of the two new future congregations. I made it clear that I did not believe God was calling me to one congregation or the other. My call was to see through the birth of these two new churches.

This very crisis in the Episcopal Church had been raising questions of ecclesiology, authority, discerning truth, the doctrine of marriage, etc. I became more convinced that as rich and wonderful as the Anglican heritage was, it did not contain the spiritual DNA to resolve this crisis. As good a home as the Episcopal Church had been for me since childhood and as joyful and satisfying a ministry as I had had within her, my intention was to retire from active ministry in the Episcopal Church and then explore admission into the Catholic Church. But again God said, “Not yet!”

I rejoice that through God’s grace I have had a very honest, respectful, and mutually affectionate relationship with my Episcopal bishop. Although he approved the parish partition plan, at a private meeting, it was made clear to me that I would not be allowed to remain an Episcopal priest and be involved in the Anglican Church of North America — “You have to choose!”

I finished my work at Christ Church over the next six months. In 2009, I preached and celebrated my last liturgies as rector of Christ Church. The final Eucharist included the Vestries of both congregations mutually affirming and blessing one another. On the following Sunday, October 4, the Feast of St. Francis, I preached and celebrated my first liturgy as rector of Christ the Redeemer Anglican (CTR). I was inspired by the Lord’s words to Francis from the San Damiano crucifix: “Go and repair my church, which as you see is in ruins!”

The last three years as rector of CTR were the most joyous and fulfilling of my forty years in ordained ministry. Roughly 250 folks joined me in the exodus from the Episcopal Church; another 150 have since joined. God’s provision has been bountiful. But from the beginning, I also knew that this was to be for me a brief assignment; I felt called to be the founding rector and then invite CTR to search for their first new rector. In early January of 2012, the parish had successfully called their new rector. Concurrently, an Anglican ordinariate (Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter) was established in North America. At last, I heard the Lord say, “Now is the time!”

I gathered together CTR parishioners to explore, under the brilliant tutelage of Dr. Thomas Howard, the meaning of the invitation of Pope Benedict in Anglicanorum Coetibus. For ten weeks, we asked, “What does the Catholic Church really teach?” A convert from Fundamentalism and Anglicanism, Dr. Howard was able to instruct us both biblically and cogently about those subjects most troublesome to Evangelical Protestants: Marian dogma and devotion, the primacy of Peter, the infallibility of the pope, the veneration and intercession of saints, the doctrine of purgatory, prayer for the dead, etc. A second ten-week study program was focused on Anglican-Catholic Ecumenical Conversations and initiatives. I led twelve individuals forward to personally respond to the Pope’s invitation to Anglicans and to come into full communion with the See of Rome through the ordinariate.

Though I might have journeyed earlier to Rome in my own personal history, this was a collective historic moment for the beginning of the fulfillment of the vision of the reunion of Rome and Canterbury. That was the dream of our Tractarian fathers, the explicit goal of Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Ramsey at the launching of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) dialogues, and an implicit hope in the bold ecumenical theology of Pope John Paul II in Ut Unum Sint and his reenvisioning of a papacy for the whole Church. I am humbled to be invited by God to be a small part of this historic work. At noon on August 15, 2012, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, after forty years, I officially resigned my Anglican Priestly Orders; at 6 p.m. of that day I was confirmed and received into the Catholic Church. In February 2013, I received word that I had been approved for ordination in the Catholic Church. In fact, I was Pope Benedict’s last rescript.

Why Catholicism?

Since announcing my decision to become a Catholic and to seek ordination through the Anglican ordinariate, I have had many an inquiry from people wondering, “Why?”

My first reason is that this decision is an act of obedience to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Though a long personal journey of twenty-five years or more, I would add that as personal as it is, it is not just a private or uniquely individual call, not simply a private denominational predilection.

Over the years, I have read innumerable books, have had many searching conversations, watched hours of EWTN, listened to many testimonies and teachings — all of which have contributed to the decision to become a Catholic. But above all it has been a deep, constant, magnetic pull of the Holy Spirit to come to the center of the Church. It is this deep intuitive sense each time I enter a Catholic church or religious community that I am in the Church, not a church. We speak in Evangelical circles when a person of the Jewish faith becomes a Christian that they have become a “completed Jew.” To become a Catholic is for me to become a “completed Christian.” As I have already previously articulated, the driving vision of my ministry has been to build a church that was “fully catholic, fully Evangelical, and fully charismatic.” I have come to the conviction that one cannot be “fully catholic” apart from communion with the See of Peter. For that matter, one cannot be “fully evangelical” or “fully charismatic” apart from the rich and deep historical meaning of those words in the fullness of the Catholic Church. As has been said to me on a number of occasions by wise and mature Catholic friends, you need leave nothing behind of any Christian tradition that is of true Gospel value. All of it comes only to fullness. To become a Catholic is to receive from my Lord His last providential gift from the cross: “Behold, thy mother.”

There is in the Christian life a force of gravity, which draws the believer ever deeper into union with Christ. That union is not only a private mystical union — though it is that — but a deepening union with the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. It is a dogmatic principle of the Catholic Church that “this Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church” (Lumen Gentium, no. 8). If this is true, then this gravitational pull of Christ’s Spirit is universally active, drawing all humanity to Christ the Head and to the fullness of His saving grace, which He mediates through His Body the Church. John Henry Newman, an Anglican convert to Rome, insightfully quipped that there was no steady state between atheism and Catholicism! In the human soul, there is always that spiritual battle between the centrifugal forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil drawing us away from the love of God, and the centripetal dynamic of the Holy Spirit pulling us ever deeper into the love of God. There is a gravitas to the Catholic Church, to the See of Peter, that is, I believe, a true and objective charism intended by Christ to draw His followers into union with Him in the fellowship of the Catholic Church.

That of course already displays the second reason for my decision: theological. The great divide between the churches of the Reformation and the Catholic Church is in the domain of ecclesiology: What is the Church? In the Protestant world, Anglicanism has sought to maintain a catholic ecclesiology: organic, universal, and apostolic. Bishops, creeds, sacraments, and conciliarism have been maintained as integral pieces of Anglican ecclesiology, papal primacy alone being set aside. Within that catholic structure, Anglicanism has also asserted a principle of theological freedom and diversity. One may believe in spiritual regeneration in Baptism, but one is free not to believe it. One may believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, or one may disbelieve it. One may believe in the authority of Scripture, but one is not required to so believe. One may believe in the sanctity of marriage, but one may choose not to believe it. For much of my life as an Anglican, that freedom was a pleasant gift, but increasingly it had become a source of distress and a profound impediment to my priestly work as a pastor and preacher. How could I proclaim from the pulpit what the Bible teaches or Christianity asserts, when my bishop was saying quite the opposite? How could I advise a person in the confessional when the priest in the neighboring parish would advise the opposite? My authority as a teacher and confessor needed to be based on something other than my own best opinion.

Flannery O’Connor spoke of the glorious freedom she experienced in being delivered from the “tyranny of her intellect.” Credo ut intelligam! That has become my experience. It is the paradox of true intellectual freedom by submission to “the Church’s teaching.” It is a glorious freedom, not only in the mind’s love for God, but in the vocation of priest in the theological and spiritual formation of disciples of Jesus. Thus, this theological conversion is not first of all a conversion to the peculiar Catholic beliefs about which my inquirers challenge me: “What about Mary?” “What about purgatory?” “What about contraception?” Rather, it is a conversion to the faithfulness of Christ’s gift to the Church of an authentic authority to bind and to loose. At its deepest, it is a question of pneumatology even more than ecclesiology. How does the Spirit of Truth actually function in the Church? Whatever complexities and seeming incongruities may be discerned, the Magisterium is at minimum a reasonable and practicable answer to the question of truth that is trustworthy. At best, it is what the Church proclaims, the provision by Christ to His people of the gift of unerring guidance.

Finally and perhaps most urgently, my decision to become a Catholic was driven by our Lord’s high priestly prayer, “May they be one, that the world might believe.” The unity of the Church has been for me a primary and constant imperative of following Jesus. The unity of the Church is not only an imperative for the internal life of God’s people but an essential dimension of her evangelical mission. There is no greater scandal and impediment to the conversion of the world to the love of Christ than her divisions. Pope Benedict established the Anglican ordinariate both as a concrete instrument to begin to organically heal the divisions of the Reformation and as an essential strategy for the sake of “the New Evangelization.” As an Anglican, I have received this as a gracious invitation to reconciliation. I can find no valid, faithful reason to decline.

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