I’ve been thinking of journeys recently. The last two days I sat in sessions at the Wheaton gathering on Evangelicals and the Early Church and heard a number journeys from a conservative evangelical past to a confessional evangelicalism or to Anglicanism or who dipped mightily into the early fathers, and I know plenty of stories of those who have walked across the Tiber or ended up in Constantinople by converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.
Which brings me to a new book, a story of a journey, and its the memoir-ish journey of Todd Hunter, Giving Church Another Chance: Finding New Meaning in Spiritual Practices
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Whose journey is your favorite journey to read or tell?
Todd has danced longest with the Vineyard Church, a strong and vibrant and growing and adjusting charismatic denomination. But along the line he wasn’t satisifed, he knew it and he backed down and ended up in a house church. Then he appeared as the President of Alpha USA, a big time evangelistic organization. But his journey wasn’t over, and the next thing Todd was probing the Anglican Church, and he entered the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) and is now a bishop.
What impresses me about this book, and I confess that I wrote the Foreword, is it’s focus on ecclesial practices and how ecclesial practices form us. Most of the “disciplines” of spiritual formation are about the individual, and sometimes it goes way over the top to enter into the land of the hyper-individualistic. We need someone to direct us toward the ecclesial disciplines that form us, and the lead us in our ecclesial journey:
Like lectionaries and eucharist and confession and architecture and sermons and offerings, which is what Todd does. I like this book.
I will be talking about this book from another angle tomorrow, but for today I want to focus on this word “journey.”
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