The Accidental Anglican

The Surprising Appeal Of The Liturgical Church

Todd Hunter, Todd D Hunter

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844745081
• eBook ISBN: 9781844748662
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christentum

Many are longing for historical connectedness and for theology that is "not tied to the whims of contemporary culture, but to apostolic-era understandings of Christian faith and practice." They also yearn for rhythms and routines that build spiritual health. Still others are responding to a call to participate in worship rather than merely sitting back and looking at a stage. Liturgy offers all of this and more.
In this book Todd Hunter chronicles his journey from the Jesus People movement and leadership in the Vineyard to eventually becoming an Anglican Bishop. Along the way he explains why an evangelical Christian might be drawn to the liturgical way.
Curious about the meaning of liturgy? Come and discover what may be waiting for you there.
Witty and wise, this personal memoir traces the surprising journey of one man from non-traditional church into the heart of Anglicanism, where he is now a bishop.

Part One

How I Became
the Accidental Bishop

1

Life on My Own Terms

In 2008, at age fifty-two, I was trying to retire—in a manner of speaking. I was beat half-dead by the grind of sitting in airplanes and made sick by hotel rooms whose fruity air freshener was covering up the body odor from the guy who just checked out. (Typing this paragraph reminds me how much I was hoping to never see the inside of a commercial airplane or hotel room ever again!) I wanted life on my own terms.

While writing this book I have been splitting my time between Eagle, Idaho, and Costa Mesa, California. But when this accidental journey began, before the church plant in Costa Mesa had been conceived in my mind, my heart was focused in the wonderful upstairs office in my home in Eagle, Idaho. Nearly two thousand books surround my desk and recliner. The picture window above my desk yields a view of the beautiful Boise Mountains and the local ski resort—Bogus Basin. White winter, green spring, hazy summer and golden fall—the mountains treat me to shifting seasonal splendor.

With these glossy calendar-like pictures in my mind, I thought I had it all figured out. I would not actually retire in the sense of stop working, but I would arrange things so that I could set the conditions for my life. That was the crucial vision for me: lifeon my own terms. I was keenly focused on having no more hard decisions, no more boring meetings and no more travel—only what I wanted to do. I wanted to sit in my office, glance at the mountains, read, think, write, speak and teach—when and where I wanted.

I had come to the conclusion that I no longer had the will or the emotional and intellectual energy to deal with the inherent politics associated with any sort of religious leadership. I was tired of the rat race of planes, trains and automobiles—especially because those races always ended in yet another lonely, smelly hotel room.

I love the television commercial sponsored by GoToMeeting. Perhaps you’ve seen the guy throw lighter fluid on his travel bags and set them on fire with his BIC lighter, or the woman push her rental car into the riverbed. I feel a vivid and personal connection.

I’ve been in charge of something since I was a teenager—for thirty-four years. Now, I was tired of running organizations, tired of the politics, tired of the complex decisions and the fundraising. Lest you think this chapter is one long whine, let me keep things real by giving you a peek into my heart and soul.

Jonah-like Temptation

I confess, I have my moments when I want a ministry that costs me as little as my sense of right and wrong will allow. It is a genuine temptation—one of the strongest of my life.

I come from a generation in which duty is a dirty word. Obligation is for the old-fashioned or for the grace-challenged. Duty is way too puritanical. It feels like it sets me aside. And aren’t I the most real and valuable part of all creation? “Come into the twenty-first century,” many of us cry, “and get a good book on the freedom of grace.” We say this as if grace has to do only with making us feel good about and ratifying our self-serving choices.

Well, I’ve got a good book on grace—Galatians. It is written by the original grace guy himself—the apostle Paul. His take on freedom and grace challenges me and speaks to many in my generation:

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. (Galatians 5:13)

Pleasure and recreation are deep things that call to the deep inner parts of most of us. Responsibility on the other hand is not intuitive or normative. It calls for some of the most mysterious and multilayered personal growth we will ever pursue. If you doubt it, interview someone who cares for others, such as police officers, nurses, schoolteachers or workplace supervisors. They will tell you that they daily have to set themselves aside and keep growing as persons to keep giving out to others.

My mind sometimes accuses me: How can you be tempted to flee responsibility when you consider yourself a serious follower of Jesus? James Lloyd Breck, a well-known Anglican leader in the 1800s, might say to reluctant church leaders like me: “It is base cowardice to run away from the church because she is not what she ought to be, and thereby leave her to those who care naught for her claims.”

He is surely right. But this is also a man who once wrote to his bishop: “I have had enough of governing. A young man should never be permitted to exercise rule.” And later to a friend: “I care not for being . . . the head. I have had enough of that for a lifetime.” Perhaps many leaders have perplexing and clashing ideas going on in them. We leaders can be like computers trying to simultaneously run Windows, Mac OS and Linux, good but incompatible computer operating systems. Not a bright move. I can almost feel the lost information, the chin-in-the-hands and the tears-falling-on-the-keyboard crash coming on.

My temptation toward life on my own terms was powerful in the latter part of 2008. I had to admit it. But, from what I often hear from others, I’ve also got a lifelong track record of being a kind, loving and others-oriented person. I actually don’t have a profound answer for why this is the case. I only have this explanation: I am not yet fully formed as a follower of Jesus.

Incredibly, in my malformed, misshapen inner self I sometimes even fall prey to atheism! I do—at least by one definition of atheism I have heard: Atheism is the thought that nothing good is going to happen here unless I make it happen. This kind of thinking is, like matches to lighter fluid, a sure-fire path to the kind of burnout that leads us to flee positions of responsibility.

My capacity for vision, my ability to see godly possibilities and my faith that such inspirations can come to pass, sometimes outrun my character. I feel no need to and cannot defend myself in this regard. But when I heard the voice of God say, “Todd, are you willing to consider that your multifaceted rationale for semi-retirement might actually be a convoluted means of sin and disobedience,” I listened. And in the end I obeyed.

The weariness of being “the responsible one” rears up on bad days. But it’s too bad for that broken part of me. I’m all in now. It’s too late to turn back. I’ve entered the race for the last run of my life, and I intend to finish—and finish well.

An Office of Service

Surprisingly, I am finishing as an Anglican bishop.

The ordained ministries of deacon, priest and bishop are emphasized in the Anglican Church, but not as a way to distinguish ourselves from other Christians. It’s a way of describing Christlike service to others—both those in and outside of the church. Anglican priest and theologian Richard Hooker, a bright light in early Anglican history, is said to have believed that

the [ordained] ministry serves the people of God. The fundamental order is that of deacon. Every priest, every bishop is first of all and always a deacon. Viewed thusly, the ordained ministry is subservient to the people and at its best it has always acknowledged that fact with gratitude.

That’s the bit I realize I was missing—“always a deacon . . . always serving others.” I was more like Moses, saying: “Lord, must I get water for these grumbling people again?” That was truly an inconvenient truth for me. I was looking for someone to give me water.

Me—a missionary bishop in the Anglican Church? Back in the game of church planting? Returning to one of the most responsible and risk-taking positions in the church world?

Not Out of the Blue

What struck me as accidental—like the surprised ouch! we feel when we hit our head on a low doorway—was not an inadvertent occurrence to God at all. It was a burning bush moment. God looked past my weaknesses to reemploy my modest strengths. With his grace-filled, confidence-giving countenance on me, I could feel my zeal for ministry return. Like weed killer, God’s presence and voice browned unwanted and dreaded weeds that choke out the desirable, growing and healthy parts of us. I could feel selfishness being killed—at least until the next cycle—and fertilizer being poured on the more desirable plants, such as faith, hope and love.

This was my journey back to faith and self-denial. The confidence and loyalty of faith, and the sacrifice and surrender of self-denial, are the foundations of obedience. They snuck up on me as if by accident, but in reality they were God-breathed.

Conversations, events and memories over the past ten months have shown me that my calling into the Anglican Mission in the Americas (theAM)—a missionary/church-planting movement sent from the Anglican Church of Rwanda and connected with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA)—has not
really come out of the blue. Reflecting back, I can now see a clear trajectory of events and people that prepared me to be an accidental bishop.

A Brief Background

For those who do not know the outline and shape of my journey, the following is a bit of background and context.

1976-1979. I was converted in the Jesus Movement at the age of nineteen. I was, as was somewhat common those days, encouraged to begin ministering immediately. I taught my first Bible study in a home within weeks of my conversion. I taught the high school class at a Methodist church and became its youth pastor around the age of twenty.

1979-1986. By twenty-two I knew I wanted to start a church, and at twenty-three I moved with my wife, Debbie, and our closest friends, Tim and Susie, to start a Calvary Chapel church in Wheeling, West Virginia, which later became a Vineyard church. Though it is now thirty years since we moved from Wheeling to Southern California, we have never replaced the wonderful friends we made there.

1987-1990. At age thirty-one, in 1987, I was called by John Wimber to the Vineyard in Anaheim to help pastor that large and growing church, and to help with the start-up of the Association of Vineyard Churches USA.

1991-1994. After experiencing a few personal faith setbacks in the late eighties and early nineties, we moved in 1991 to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to take over a Vineyard church and to supervise Vineyard churches in the southern part of the East Coast.

We also helped to start seven other churches in those three years. In addition, after fifteen years in ministry, I finally attended seminary, receiving a master’s degree in biblical studies from Regent University.

1994-2001. From 1994 to 1997 I was the National Coordinator of Vineyard Churches USA, and after the early death of John Wimber in November of 1997, I became the president of Vineyard Churches USA. I was only thirty-eight when I took the first role in the denominational headquarters. In 20/20 hindsight, I was too young to take such a role (too young to last in the job in any case).

It wasn’t that I failed in the post. The board gave me consistently high marks in my annual reviews. But I got bored in the task. I missed church planting, evangelism and hands-on spiritual formation and preaching. In addition all the challenges and opportunities associated with postmodernism and post-Christendom were presenting themselves by the late nineties. I was engaged with these issues through my work with young church planters in the Vineyard.

In my mid-forties I had a choice to make: stay on the sidelines or get back into the game and help others in evangelism, church planting and spiritual formation in the early twenty-first century. I felt called to and chose the latter.

2001-2004. From the Vineyard I made my way to Allelon, which at the time was a coaching ministry for church planters founded by Mark Priddy. Allelon took my family from California to Idaho in 2003. At Allelon I engaged with church planters from all over the world who were trying to crack the code of being church in the cynical years of the early 2000s. During this time I pursued and completed a doctor of ministry degree at George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Portland, Oregon. I also began to teach as an adjunct professor at institutions like Fuller Seminary, Wheaton College and George Fox Evangelical Seminary.

2004-2008. I spent 2004-2008 as the executive director of Alpha USA, an evangelism course run in thousands of American churches. I have a huge amount of respect for The Alpha Course. However, by 2008 I found myself again wanting to do something different. I left Alpha not because of any disagreement but because I didn’t feel that, being mismatched in terms of my gift mix, I was able to fully serve its needs.

This is where the story of the accidental Anglican begins.

2

Liturgical Leanings

I am the type of guy who works so hard at being present to any given person or moment that I rarely take the time to write things down or take pictures. I do tend to later reflect deeply on things, but I am not a good journal or diary keeper. Thus as I started reminiscing and making notes for this book, I felt like a kid connecting the dots on the place mat at a family restaurant. You probably recall the delight: “Look at that—dots that make an elephant!”

As I’ve looked back over my life, something like that has happened to me: “Look at that—events and people that make an Anglican bishop!”

The Initial Attraction

For example, a memory surfaced that reveals I had some liturgical leanings for quite some time before I joined the Anglican Mission. About eight years prior to joining the Anglican Mission, I started what I call “an attempt at alternative church, born from the angst of the early emerging church scene.”

This godly little experiment of a church was populated mostly by ex-church people who thought of themselves as “church alumni.” They were been there, done that, graduated and looking for the next thing people. In terms of body life, we had wonderful times exploring Quaker-like meetings in which everyone participated in spontaneous ways—which just proves that we were doing nothing really new. I am not sure we were even looking for new in the sense of “never tried,” just different, something that would again give us hope in church. To this day the members of that little church are some of my best and most cherished friends.

While this church, which was trying to be nonchurch, was different in many ways, we were attracted to what some people were calling an “ancient-future” vibe. Thus, we asked a local Episcopal church if we could meet in their facility on Sunday evenings. It was an ideal, iconic building in my mind. Beautiful wood and stone everywhere. Religious symbols and icons tastefully decorated the room. The church was rarely used on Sunday nights. It was a win-win situation. We got the use of good facilities, and they got a little rent money.

Blessed Sacrament Church was remarkably generous and hospitable to a bunch of rough-around-the-edges, barely churched Christians. Like motorcycle gangs checking each other out, evidently we still had on enough spiri...

Table of contents

• Praise for The Accidental Anglican
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part One How I Became the Accidental Bishop
• Part Two What I Like About Anglicanism
• Notes
• About the Author