A Bright Morning I grew up the son of a Southern Baptist pastor. My entire young life was spent in church. I would go with my dad to youth group from an early age. On the weekends, when I was old enough, I’d do church projects and even learned to drive an excavator! Every November,…
Full Circle with Anglican Compass: The Editor’s Story
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…
Why I Became Anglican (And You Should, Too!)
After nearly four years of prayer, discernment, and hard discussions with friends and mentors, I officially left the Southern Baptist life I had grown up in to be confirmed into the Anglican Church of North America. This was a difficult decision for me. I had grown to love the biblical commitment of the SBC and…
A Liberty Student Finds Anglicanism
I reached a spiritual breaking point when I started college at Liberty University. Everyone seemed to be talking directly to Yahweh except for me, yet I couldn’t shake this feeling that something was off and that we were chasing not Christ, but a feeling, and that I was doing the same. Son of a Baptist…
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…
From Baptist to Anglican: On Apostolic Succession and the Real Presence of Christ
I am an alum of a Baptist university, a graduate student at a Southern Baptist seminary, an active volunteer in Young Life, and a youth minister in an Anglican Church. You might be thinking, “One of these things is not like the others, what gives?” I was a cradle Baptist. I grew up around Reformed…
A Gift of God: The Eucharist Revives a Weary Christian
“OK, let’s sing that verse again,” the worship leader said. “And this time sing it with everything you’ve got!” I was sitting in the back row of the church cradling a sleeping baby. I was lonely and exhausted—deeply disconnected from the upbeat music coming from the stage. A voice inside my head whispered back to…
Marching from Fundamentalism to the Canterbury Trail (By Zach Jones)
Growing up, words like “Jesus” and “Church” were commonplace. My parents raised me and my siblings in a Christian household, and I cannot remember a time where I did not know about how Jesus died for my sins and rose again. In my Baptist upbringing, the Gospel was shared almost every Sunday. I knew the…
Getting Over the Hurdle of Infant Baptism: An Atonement Argument
Like many current Anglicans, I grew up as a Baptist, a Southern Baptist in fact. I even went to a Baptist college on the campus of a Southern Baptist seminary and got an excellent foundational education in the Scriptures and Great Books. When I married an Anglican, we started attending Baptist churches but never found…
