I grew up in a Christian family in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan – a small college town where my dad was a university professor, and my mom a homemaker. We were active members of a local Baptist church. I was oriented towards the Lord from a young age. I was baptized in early elementary school, and felt drawn to ministry from my youth onward. Beginning in 8th grade I began attending a small, fundamentalist Baptist school nearby and then, to the disappointment of my teachers, enrolled at Liberty University, which they considered too “liberal” (!). While at Liberty, a turning point was taking an introductory philosophy class with J.P. Moreland, who had recently completed his Ph.D. under Dallas Willard. I took every class that I could with J.P. (who soon departed for Biola and Talbot), which exposed me to a Christian faith that was generous and intellectual, and moved me beyond the fundamentalist world in which I had been raised.
From Liberty I went to seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the suburbs of Chicago. My first year of seminary was a time of intense seeking after the Lord, and near the end of that year, in an elective class on prayer, the professor brought his local Vineyard pastor to class to teach on healing prayer. To the shock of nearly everyone, one of our classmates was dramatically healed during the demonstration time and others, including me, had a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit while being prayed for after class. This introduced an intense season of renewal and spiritual transformation. I attended the Evanston Vineyard for the remaining two years I was in seminary, and would spend the next 10 years ministering in Vineyard or Vineyard-adjacent churches.
Following seminary, at age 25 I moved to Bedford, England to become assistant pastor at The King’s Arms Church – a church full of young people, with a large ministry to those experiencing homelessness. That ministry included an emergency night shelter and transitional housing, and young people from around the country came to serve those experiencing addiction and homelessness, and to receive more intensive spiritual formation at the church. It was a rich season of ministry in which I helped start a second service, invested in young leaders, and learned the building blocks of pastoral ministry.
After two years I was invited to return to Chicago to work with the national director for church planting in the Vineyard. The Vineyard was now being led by Todd Hunter, and over the next two years I assisted the director in developing a system for church planter assessments, training, and coaching. I also started a new leadership and theology magazine, Cutting Edge, for which I interviewed various practitioners such as Eugene Peterson, Rick Warren, Will Willimon, Henry Cloud, and others.
I also began to consider church planting myself. Although I was unsure whether I was called to planting in that season, I was in my late 20s and eager for the “next thing”, and thus moved to Washington, DC to plant a Vineyard church. In many respects it was a case study in how to make every mistake in church planting. It was a “parachute” plant (I did not know anyone in DC), and in my earnest but naïve desire to work towards racial reconciliation and economic justice, I moved into a historically disadvantaged section of the city. I built relationships with African American pastors in the area, and pastored the church plant over the next three and a half years, gathering those who felt called to a multicultural, economically diverse church. Looking back, I’m not certain how much external impact we had – we truly did not know what we were doing. But the impact on me was profound. Working in the trenches of church planting, while building relationships in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, deepened my understanding of the realities of systemic injustice, as well as the profound resilience and assets of such communities.
During this season I was also introduced to new models of spirituality and mission. While I was preparing to plant a church, Todd Hunter gathered a handful of “young leaders” in the Vineyard for conversations on missional leadership, and introduced us to his mentor, Dallas Willard. It’s hard to overstate the impact Dallas’ teaching (as well as his presence) had on many of us during that time. After one of those meetings Dallas suggested I meet with Gordon Cosby, the founding pastor of Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. The Church of the Savior emphasized small mission groups as the church’s basic unit of life together, highlighting the “journey inward and journey outward” as an expression of kingdom life. I became closely involved with Church of the Savior, and watched firsthand how many small mission groups became some of the largest and most effective nonprofits serving the poorest in the city. Church of the Savior also introduced me to the practice of contemplative prayer. While I continued to value the charismatic tradition that had been so formative in my own life, I found the practices of contemplative prayer offered a mode of engaging with God that felt expectant but also sustainable.
Throughout this season of church planting, while I was grappling with questions of race and justice and contemplative spirituality, I was also beginning to read more widely: N.T. Wright, Oliver O’Donovan, church history, patristic theology. Our church services began to look less like a typical Vineyard, and incorporated more liturgical elements. I was also beginning to question whether I was the right person to lead our church in the multicultural direction to which we felt called. I was in my early 30s, and wondered what to do with my long-standing desire for further academic work. Pastoring in DC had resulted in new theological questions centering on the church’s mission, the political implications of God’s kingdom, and the public square in a post-9/11 world.
After careful discernment with my Vineyard overseers, I decided to turn the church over to our church’s leadership team, and pursue further graduate studies. Over the next four years I wrote my Th.M. dissertation under Stanley Hauerwas at Duke University, and then moved to England to complete my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge under David Ford, Regius Professor and Director of the Cambridge Interfaith Program.
We expected to spend three years in Cambridge, while I worked on my Ph.D., and instead ended up living there for eight. After three years I was appointed to a teaching position in public theology – teaching undergraduates in the Faculty of Divinity, and ordinands in the Church of England. It was an incredibly rich time – teaching theology, mentoring students, shaping future leaders in the church, praying Morning and Evening Prayer in community, engaging in conversations about missional leadership in post-Christian England. During that period I also participated in various aspects of “applied” public theology, which helped me better understand how the church might engage the world in contemporary questions. I worked on frameworks for Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue in academic and civic spaces, co-edited A Reader in Political Theology for Eerdmans, and was elected by my academic peers to help lead the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics in the UK.
However, as grateful as I was for these opportunities, I increasingly felt that academic life was too “ivory tower” for my own sense of call. I was interested in building teams, translating ideas into actionable insights on the ground, and working with practitioners. In my third year of teaching at Cambridge, I was invited to join the Centre for Social Justice, one of Britain’s leading think tanks focused on poverty and economic opportunity, to lead a new policy area that examined the challenges of faith, multiculturalism, and social cohesion. It was an opportunity to apply my work in political theology more directly to public life. Several months after arriving I found myself being asked to take on executive leadership at the think tank, overseeing staff, managing various policy areas, and briefing government ministers. As the lone American at a British think tank, it was a steep learning curve. But I loved the opportunity to translate a vision for God’s kingdom – justice and opportunity for the most disadvantaged in society – into tangible policies like welfare reform, affordable housing, and fighting human trafficking. I also loved the challenge of leading a complex organization, casting vision, and developing staff.
Throughout this period, Anglicanism had become increasingly important to me and my family. Upon our arrival in the UK, Alicia and I still felt some weariness from our years ministering in an urban context. While attending our local Church of England parish, however, we became conscious of how the liturgy and weekly Eucharist ministered to us in subtle but profound ways. Alicia and I were eventually confirmed in the Church of England, and all three of our children were baptized in our parish church, where I also preached regularly, in addition to preaching at various Cambridge colleges.
After eight years, however, we increasingly missed friends and family in the United States, and wanted our children to experience America during some of their formative years. When we returned to the U.S. in the summer of 2012, however, we experienced a significant degree of reverse culture shock. Much had changed politically and culturally in the years we had been away. The country was more polarized, and the centrist, bipartisan policies I had worked on in England felt more difficult to pursue in the United States.
In the midst of this disorienting season, and growing political disenchantment, I became increasingly convinced that the only hope was the Church. I was grateful for all I had learned in the worlds of academia and public policy, but I was feeling called back to full-time ministry, though I was unsure of the path. While praying about this, the opportunity arose to return to Washington, DC, where I reconnected with old friends who, during our years overseas, had planted Anglican churches with the Diocese of Christ Our Hope. I immediately began ministering in the city, and was ordained a deacon in 2017 and a priest one year later. In 2019 Bishop Steve Breedlove asked me to become Canon for Leadership Development, and I began to serve our growing number of churches and leaders full-time.
The last five years have been a great privilege, helping the Diocese of Christ Our Hope grow in both size and effectiveness. One of my first activities was to lead our diocesan team through a vision and strategy process, to be implemented in the years ahead. We clarified vision; we identified outcomes, goals, and metrics; and we developed the structures and staffing to put that plan into place. Thus, over the last number of years I have worked on implementing or overseeing the following:
- Given the size of our geographic footprint, we developed seven deaneries, each of which have specific leaders for mission, clergy care, and leadership development. Today, many of these deaneries have a vibrant common life, meet regularly, hold annual retreats, and pursue church planting and mission together.
- To address other areas of priority, we developed eight Strategic Ministry Initiatives (SMI’s) led by teams across the diocese, which included areas such as global missions, women’s leadership, justice and mercy, spiritual direction, and non-English speaking congregations. Each of these SMI’s have deanery-level representation, as well. In creating robust deaneries and SMIs we greatly expanded the number of leaders advancing collaborative ministry across the diocese.
- We developed clearer strategies and processes for church planting, along with guidelines for assessment, training, and coaching. Today the Diocese of Christ Our Hope has 49 churches or launch teams, and we have planted 26 churches over the last 12 years. Out of an annual budget of just under $1.9 million, we invest 40% of that budget directly in church planting or other forms of mission expansion every year.
- In our leadership development, we have grown from approximately 30 ordinands in the pipeline five years ago, to an average of 50 ordinands in the pipeline today, and we have doubled the number of our clergy to approximately 170. To aid in the formation of our ordinands, most of whom do not come from Anglican backgrounds, we created a robust, four-course Anglican Studies Certificate program. We also created a partnership with Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary which launched in the Fall of 2024: an Anglican-specific master’s degree enabling those with jobs and families to accessibly and affordably obtain an ACNA-approved seminary degree. We now have MA cohorts in Boston, Washington DC, and Greensboro, NC. Last fall I taught our inaugural class on Ascetical Theology, and this spring will be teaching an introductory course on historical theology. We also partnered with Made To Flourish to create two-year curacy programs for newly ordained, early-career leaders in our churches. Over the last few years, we have helped create 12 new curacy positions in our churches, and we are seeking to increase that number every year.
- To aid our common life together, given the geographical distance, we started several annual retreats. Our Come & See Retreat (for all ordinands, new clergy, and those curious about Anglicanism) introduces people to the vision and values of the diocese, and begins folding people in relationally. Our All-Leaders Retreat, which includes Deans, SMI leaders, Diocesan Council members, and the staff, come together to strategize and pray for the coming year. Last year we began a Gospel & Culture Symposium, in which all clergy are invited to present papers on a current theological or missional topic, to facilitate more open engagement with each other about challenging issues.
- In order to deepen the spiritual ethos of the diocese, particularly as it has grown larger, we wanted to highlight the importance of spiritual direction – for clergy, ordinands, and lay people in our churches. However, we did not have nearly enough directors – demand far outstripped supply. Therefore, three years ago we partnered with Selah, a spiritual direction certificate program with Leadership Transformations, to offer an intensive, two-year training program. We are now starting the fourth cohort of our Anglican Selah program, training 16 new spiritual directors every year. To date we have 48 newly trained spiritual directors, and the next cohort will start in March 2025.
It has been a great gift to be part of this work over the last five years. And it has been a great privilege to take all that I’ve learned from parish ministry, church planting, academics, policymaking, and consulting, to serve churches and leaders in our diocese. I recently experienced the joys of a typical week in my role: meeting with a potential church planter and his wife who want to become Anglican and plant a church in the Northeast; offering spiritual direction to one of our clergy; spending the evening with a rector and his wife who are struggling with a difficult pastoral situation; planning an annual retreat for clergy who are new to the diocese; meeting with seminary officials to develop new continuing education program for our clergy; and planning a strategy retreat for one of our growing churches, which is seeking to increase its missional footprint in the city. It has been gratifying work.
As I look to the next chapter of my life, my sense of call is primarily focused on three areas: mission-oriented teaching and thought leadership; building systems that enable churches and organizations to grow and thrive; and investing in pastors and leaders. It has been a joy doing that in various ways over the years, and my prayer is that God will allow me to continue doing it in whatever ways he sees fit.