I was raised an evangelical Protestant (Baptist, to be specific). I said the “sinner’s prayer” when I was six years old, because it was explained to me that I was by that age old enough to go to hell in the event of my untimely demise, and I didn’t want to take any chances. Indeed, I said it several times, just for good measure! And I meant it; I was completely sincere. I had “accepted Christ as my personal savior.” I was baptized (by full immersion, of course) when I was ten. But I wasn’t particularly intense in my Christian commitment. That came in high school, as a result of a dynamic youth ministry in my home church. I was inspired to “dedicate my life to Christ,” to seek God’s will for me in all things. That remains my “prime directive.”

I eventually enrolled in (and graduated from) an evangelical Christian college (Westmont). While there, pretty much as a result of majoring in music, I was exposed to the historic liturgy of the western church, and I knew myself to be inexorably (though, at times, reluctantly) drawn to the Catholic end of the theological and spiritual spectrum. While it was liturgy and music that snagged me initially, it was ecclesiology and the sacramental life that sealed the deal. When I knelt before the Bishop of Los Angeles to receive the sacramental rite of Confirmation at the age of 23, I believed that I was thereby entering the fullness of fellowship with the Church Catholic, of which I believed Anglicanism to be an integral part, the Episcopal Church being the American “franchise” for Anglicanism.

I still pretty much believe that. A few footnotes, excurses, and qualifications have been added over the years to the simple (simplistic?) view of my early adulthood. Yet, as an Anglican, I believe myself to be a Catholic, full stop. No lower case “c”, no italics, no quote marks. I am a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, and an Episcopalian in that order. I’m a Christian by call—Jesus said, “Follow me” and I said, “I will follow you.” I’m a Catholic by conviction, because it is the inelegantly and messily visible church, not some mystical ideal, that is the Body of Christ, and because it is within the unkempt life of that church that participation in God’s own life is surely and certainly found. I am an Anglican by choice, not for any overwhelming theological reasons (in fact, I make my choice in spite of some theological considerations that might lead me elsewhere), but because I believe I have an Anglican soul, that the Anglican way of being Christian is the one most likely to make me a saint, most efficient in perfecting my holiness. Finally, I am Episcopalian by expediency, because it is through the Episcopal Church that the Anglican way of being Christian is mediated and made available to me.

The ecclesiology that has formed me and continues to guide me is certainly more than autobiographical. I like to think I have some capacity for dispassionate contemplation and discourse. But I would be deceiving myself and others if I suggested that it is anything less than autobiographical. All that I may write is anchored in what I have shared here.