“A meal tastes best when you’re hungry.”
It’s such an obvious truth, and one that my parish priest has been fond of repeating during the season of Lent. It explains why Anglicans traditionally fast in the days leading up to Easter. And it also, I think, captures a lot about my recent journey into Anglican […]
Hello, my name is Ethan, and I am a recovering expressive individualist.
You are familiar with “expressive individualism,” even if the term isn’t familiar. I’ll define and describe it below, but phrases like “be authentic” or “follow your heart” capture the idea to a tee.
I became an Anglican to “be authentic” […]
“Is this it?”
The thought snuck into my head every Sunday. Despite the faithful preaching, there was something missing from the standard order of three songs, a prayer, announcements, sermon, final song, lunch at Chipotle.
It wasn’t that I was looking for more components that suited my preferences. I wanted to come to church and worship God, not to be a consumer […]
We first enter through the bright red doors of an Anglican church, a preteen and two teenagers in tow. Questions permeate my thoughts, how will our children endure this shift, especially at this stage of their spiritual development? Is this even the right choice for our family?
We have all grown up within the church; however, never exposed to liturgical worship. […]
There’s a movement happening—a movement of followers of Jesus rediscovering ancient forms of worship in a way that ignites fresh love and zeal for Jesus and His Church. Robert Webber described this movement more than thirty years ago in his book Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. In the thirty years since Webber released his book, more and more Christians […]
My Anglican adventure began when I left home to go to a foreign country called Durham, North Carolina.
Foreign to me, because I am from East Los Angeles. I grew up surrounded by the stories of a loving family and an eclectic neighborhood’s influences of the ’60s. In the words of the spiritual, “My soul looks back and wonders; how I […]
“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 the man with the guitar: “What […]
For me, my “Anglican story” is intimately tied up in the desire to be anchored both in the tradition it represents and the calling to plant more churches firmly anchored in that same tradition.
A few years back, my wife and I were Confirmed in the Anglican Church in North America. This is interesting, because at the time, I was already […]
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 lines, and by the time […]
Back in 2016, I started Rookie Anglican in order to help make Anglicanism more accessible to Anglicans and the “Angli-curious.” From the beginning, this has involved a couple different kinds of posts.
You know, posts like the following:
The summers of my youth were spent in swimming pools, summer camps, and Southern Baptist “tent revivals.” I often felt pressured by those gatherings. There was always an expectation, though sometimes unspoken, to “make a decision,” or pray at the “altar,” or announce a “calling,” or say “just a few words” about your spiritual experience.
This spiritual climate persisted throughout […]
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 a wonderful foundational education in the Scriptures and Great Books. When I married an Anglican, we started attending Baptist churches but never found ourselves in a place where […]
Recently, Fr. Bryan Wandel wrote about how his Pentecostal faith set him up for the Anglican Church. Because I have similar sentiments, I shared it with several of my Pentecostal friends, and I recommend that you read the post.
However, if I might add personal reflection to Wandel’s piece from my own journey, it is this: “As a Pentecostal, I […]
At my ordination, the bishop gave me the option of kneeling or laying prostrate while he prayed over me. Laying face-down in a worship service in front of hundreds of people? That might seem odd, but for me it was a no-brainer. As a Pentecostal, this was my assumed position for laying it all before Jesus. And as an Anglican […]
This post is a part of Rookie Anglican, a blog dedicated to making Anglicanism accessible.
My Anglican journey began in a class about the theology of the early Church – specifically, with a particular article. Before we read J.N.D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines, our professor wanted us to read a short biographical article on […]
