Becoming the editor of Anglican Compass is a full-circle experience. It’s possible that I wouldn’t be an Anglican without Anglican Compass, much less have been ordained a priest in this tradition. I spent my first 34 years in Southern Baptist churches, after all. Only God could have orchestrated the journey by which he led me…
Evening Prayer: A Rookie Anglican Guide
Evening Prayer can be a great way to transition from the busy rhythms of work or school into a more restful, reflective last chapter of the day. Multiple authors have explained the value of such prayer for finding God, emotional stability, and even verse memorization. Like all our offices of daily prayer, it can be…
Emotional Stability in the Daily Office
Stability is required in any relationship. This is no less true for our Divine relationship than it is for our human ones. Just as marriages fail if fueled only by emotional highs, so Christians who live their lives seeking ecstatic experiences soon burn out. As a teenager and young man, I was seeking these Divine…
Explaining Our New Prayer Book
When the first Book of Common Prayer was released on Pentecost in the year 1549, it was such a shock to the liturgical and theological intuitions of some portions of the Church in England that riots and rebellions broke out over the matter. Especially in Norfolk and in Devon, and most memorably in the city…
An Introduction to The Daily Office Podcast
Finding time for prayer can be really difficult. I’m an Anglican priest (which means I pray for a living, right?), and I know that as well as anybody. It feels like, as our culture of work takes over our lives more and more, we have to fight tooth and nail to spend time with the…
How to Pray the Collect Way: Let’s Go Deeper than Grocery List Prayers
You pray more often than you realize Prayer is far more common than we realize, that is, if we take the meditations of the Book of Psalms as a guide. There we encounter the Bible’s own prayerbook but what we discover often are meanderings and ponderings of the one praying. We might call these prayers…
AWANA Burnout? How the Daily Office Helped Me Love Scripture Memorization Again
What do Pioneers, Native Americans, a strange stick figure called Sparkie, Little bear Cubs, and Scripture memorization have in common? AWANA!—at least if you grew up in some churches in the early to late 90s. AWANA indelibly shaped my experience of church and early Christian formation. Every Wednesday night, I would get walloped by dodgeballs,…
Too Tired to Pray: What I Learned About Prayer When Words Wouldn’t Come
The day no words would come Whenever I’m with my family and I make a dumb joke, my parents like to roast me by saying that they look forward to eventually writing in my baby book the first time I tell a good joke. If this mythical baby book that has been dangled over my…
Reading Scripture Together: Recapturing Thomas Cranmer’s Vision
In 2008 Phyllis Tickle made the important observation that about every 500 years, a significant transformation takes place in the Church. She points to the arrival of Jesus in the first century, the collapse of the Roman empire five-hundred years later in the late 5th century, the Great Schism five-hundred years after that in 1054,…
