Testimony

When I was a young man, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be a priest, or even a Christian for that matter, though I was raised by devout Christian parents. When I embraced the faith of my fathers in the 1970s, I was baptized in a little Evangelical church in NW Arkansas and a few years later was admitted to John Brown University (JBU) with a view towards obtaining a degree in biblical studies.

Evangelical Protestants don't believe in a clerical priesthood. They believe in the "priesthood of all believers", a notion they believe to be rooted in the New Testament as expounded by Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther. But no "priests" after Christ.

When I was attending college there at JBU, there was a nest of "Anglican Catholics", good fellows and friends. Though we were friends and college buddies, they relentlessly challenged us to go back beyond the Protestant Reformation, and take up and read. They pointed us especially to this mysterious group of men called the "Church Fathers." As a biblical studies major at an Evangelical liberal arts college, I had become vaguely aware of them, but they were not on our theological radar screens, by design of those who taught us.

But having been challenged by my Anglican Catholic friends, I went to our library and started pulling off books from the shelves re: the writings of the earliest Fathers, Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Irenaeus of Lyons, and suchlike.

I could not believe what I was reading: threefold ministry; the centrality of the Eucharist; the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; apostolic succession; the naming of the Church as the "Catholic Church." All happening before or at the time of or shortly after the last apostle, St. John, died.

It rocked my world. So much so that I put those books away and did not pick them up again for another 10 years, whereupon I began reading myself into a Catholic mind, and started making my way through liturgical Protestant churches and finally to Catholic faith and practice as manifested in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholic Anglicanism.

My call to the priesthood, though I did not recognize it as such at the time, began with serving as a reader in the Lutheran church, then as a reader and altar server in the Orthodox Church, then as an altar server in the Anglican Catholic Church, then as a hospital chaplain, then as a deacon in the Anglican Church in America and afterwards incardinated as a deacon to the Orthodox Anglican Church. Then, lo and behold, the Powers That Be in the Orthodox Anglican Church cornered me and said, "you will be a priest", which I had told them previously that this was completely against my intentions.

But you generally don't say no to your bishop, so there I was. St. John Chrysostom in his book "On The Priesthood" relates a similar story.

So, they made me a priest. Like I said, the last thing I would have ever imagined as a young man. And so I am, though most unworthy, but I have to say that I know that all priests and bishops worth their salt know that they too are most unworthy, and they really mean it, as I really mean it. It just isn't pious piffle. But for some inscrutable reason God has made us abject sinners deacons, priests and bishops. In my case, I can say that I can take solace not only in the fact that God forgives me a sinner, but that he has blessed me immeasurably with the opportunity to proclaim Christ in the preaching the Word of God, in season and out of season, and to proclaim him as well in the administration of the sacraments of Baptism, Holy Communion, Confession and Absolution, Holy Matrimony, and Unction. And because of this, I am a most happy old man.

The Life and Times of the Embryo Parson