A Little Bit About Me
My ministry story is older than I am.
I was born into a ministry family—the son and grandson of ordained ministers. Often, those who grow up in ministry can look back on generations of religious tradition and heritage. My family was a little bit different, so my religious background is more varied. My spiritual formation has taken place in the Charismatic/Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, and Anglican faith traditions.
My grandfather was an independent Pentecostal preacher who became an ordained deacon in the Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church. He served as an associate member of that conference until his death.
My father was an ordained priest in the Charismatic Episcopal Church and served as a priest and pastor in that communion for several years. In 2006 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, where he participated in the discernment process for ordained ministry until his untimely death from brain cancer in 2016.
My mother is a pianist and church musician. She began playing for her Pentecostal church when she was a pre-teen, and continues to accompany worship services today.
It’s easy to overlook in the moment.
When I reflect on the influence of my family’s diverse religious history and heritage, I understand just how deeply my family’s faith story has impacted my own. My formative Christian experiences are rooted in each of the particular Christian traditions represented by my family’s collective journey.
I have had profoundly moving charismatic experiences throughout my life, including moments in which I heard God’s voice clearly or times when I saw visions of the divine beauty.
My first recollection of receiving Holy Communion is at my Grandfather’s United Methodist Church in Magnolia, Arkansas. I vividly remember kneeling at the altar rail as my grandfather traversed the chancel distributing the consecrated elements.
I learned how to worship by assisting my father at the altar and playing church music with my mother. Before I played music, I sang “specials.” Before I sang, I changed overhead slides as the congregation sang praise and worship choruses—a task that is much more difficult than it looks.
When you grow up as part of a ministry family, the church becomes a part of your childhood identity. You go to church, you hear about church at dinner, you play church with your siblings or stuffed animals. Church is an essential part of life. But it wasn’t until later that I learned just how radically transforming Christian community can be.
I had a profound experience of Christian community in the year I attended a predominantly African-American Roman Catholic Church.
I was in college, and one Sunday morning, as I was driving past St. John’s Church for the hundredth time, I decided to stop. I can’t say why; I just did it. I slipped in and took a seat in an open pew toward the back of the church. Almost immediately, a lady sitting in front of me turned around to greet me and ask my name. Imagine how surprised I was when, during the prayers of the people, she stood up to say, “I want to give thanks to God for my new friend Tim. And he has a good voice too. I think he should sing in the choir!”
To this day, I don’t remember sharing my contact information, but I received a call that very evening from Sister Jane, the pastoral life coordinator in charge of St. John’s. “Choir practice is at seven o’clock Wednesday evening. We hope to see you there.” And just like that, I was in the choir. I was one of about three white people in the congregation. I was never a confirmed Roman Catholic, but that didn’t seem to matter to the people—or the clergy—of the church. They welcomed me into the community without reservation. When my father had an opportunity to visit on a Sunday morning, he came in his clerical garb and was received fully as a priest by Sister Jane and Father Ken, who even asked him to read the Gospel at that morning’s Mass.
Fostering an inclusive Christian community was simply a part of St. John’s DNA. I will never forget brother Philco, the church organist, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist. But his wife was Roman Catholic, and St. John was her home church. So, Philco plugged his synthesizer into an authentic Leslie rotating speaker cabinet and set everything up to perfectly mimic the classic sound of a Hammond B3 organ. I truly pity anyone who has never experienced the joy and beauty of Eucharistic liturgy accompanied by a Hammond B3 organ.
The choir director, Gary, was a classically trained singer whose passion was opera. But he loved Gospel music too, and he knew how to make our twelve-member choir fill a room with music. Gary and I would hang out from time to time outside of choir practice. In those conversations, Gary told me some of his experiences as a Black man. He told me stories of being followed by security in department stores, about the indignities large and small that accompanied navigating the white world in which I was a native. That was the difference between Gary and me. We both experienced life in cross-cultural contexts, but while he was considered, at best, an intruder in my native territory, I was warmly welcomed into his.
The memory of the welcome those kind and generous people gave me has continued to live in me, helping me understand the power of Christian community. Experiencing the encircling love of a community taught me what it means to be both a stranger and a friend and that the only difference between those two categories is attitude.
I felt called to be a priest as a young man.
But I had my own plans for my life.
So I quit the Church, thinking that God would leave me alone. I was wrong.
I left Indiana and wandered the world for a while, living in Europe for a little more than a year, then in Western New York, before making my way to Tennessee. Even in those wandering years, God’s prevenient grace continued to work in my life and speak to my heart until I was ready to hear and heed God’s call on my life.
Hearing and heeding took a while for me, as I am frequently and willfully deaf and ignorant. Happily, neither of those character flaws poses much of an obstacle for God. I think the best definition of prevenient grace is “God’s holy persistence.” God has a way of interjecting into our lives; we hear God’s voice, we experience God’s call, even when we try to ignore or escape it. In the moments when fleeing leaves you tired, scared, and alone, God’s voice comes again: insistent, probing, forcing you to look at yourself as you are.
One of those moments for me happened at the central train station in Milan, Italy.
It was about ten minutes to midnight, and I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. Hundreds of people surrounded me, but I was utterly alone. I was so scared I was crying like a child. I was lost—more lost than I’d ever thought possible. I was lost, and I had no idea how to change my situation. I was standing in the middle of a train station in the heart of downtown Milan, and I’d missed the last train home.
I knew I was in trouble.
When I stopped a police officer to ask him where in the station I could find a bench or somewhere to sleep since I was going to be stuck overnight, he looked at me like I was crazy. In broken Italian, I explained my predicament, and, in broken English, the officer made it clear that I had no business whatsoever attempting a sleepover in Stazione Milano Centrale.
I was a stranger in a strange land, powerless and confused, with no guide, no direction, no understanding, and no way home. I was tired, broke, terrified, and apparently in somewhat significant physical danger. But those weren’t my real problems. My real problem was my unwavering determination to be in control of my existence. I had firmly raised my fist to heaven and shouted a resounding “No!” in God’s face. I had chosen to live life by my own rules, and I was going to be happy even if it made me miserable.
I knew that I knew best what was best for me.
I don’t have a dramatic conversion story. It didn’t happen that night or in the many similar nights that followed. My journey—my flight from God, to put it more bluntly—was a series of opportunities to hear God’s voice, each of which I readily ignored. Even in the moments when God’s voice was clear to me, I turned my head; I blocked my ears, closed my eyes, and childishly attempted to alter reality. Like Augustine, my rebellion was less denial than delay. I tried to put God off. “Not just yet,” I said. “Not just yet.”
My story doesn’t have a string-swelling camera close-up moment. It’s just a series of seemingly commonplace occurrences that, in retrospect, reveal me moving step by step closer to grace. Or, as I should put it, grace moving closer and closer to me.
It would be unfair of me not to tell you how the Milan story ended. I called my mom.
It’s incredible what one collect call to loving parents can accomplish. Once they understood my situation, my parents were able to orchestrate an international rescue mission of sorts. They called one of my workmates, who then borrowed a car and drove the hour or so from Lugano to Milan to pick me up at the station. If I remember correctly, he even brought me a hot dog. I know it’s a bit anticlimactic, but sometimes the end of the story is less interesting than the middle.
I met the woman who would become my wife at a wedding.
I hadn’t been invited to the wedding, at least not by the bride or the groom. Some bandmates of mine, friends of the wedding party, invited me to tag along. Having no objection to free food, I was more than happy to crash the party.
Kristin was sitting in front of me at the church, and it was apparent my friends had brought me along so I would have the chance to meet her. I was immediately captivated, and we hit it off famously. It turns out that Kristin was a singer, and she was on staff at a church. Getting to know her would mean I would once again be spending some time in a pew. My budding relationship with Kristin also reintroduced me to the habit of weekly worship. Because I wanted to be where she was, I started tagging along to services. Before I knew it, I was in the choir myself. Never underestimate the persuasive power of a Baptist choir director. That experience, singing songs of faith, hearing people talk about their faith, listening to the Bible being read and preached—it fanned the embers of faith lying dormant within me.
All along, Kristin was there, smiling, singing, talking with me when I felt like it, being quiet when it was clear I wasn’t ready to talk. Supportive, encouraging, accepting: it sums up my wife perfectly. As time went on, I began to feel God’s call on my life more and more intensely. I continued to brush it aside, even though I’d mention it to Kristin from time to time. Every time I brought it up, the answer was the same. “If this is something God is asking you to do,” she’d say, “I support you.”
When it became abundantly clear that this calling wasn’t going away, Kristin and I began to talk about it more frequently. In those discussions, Kristin shared something with me that confirmed what I was sensing and brought a sense of peace to the conversation. She had also felt a calling on her life for many years but could not precisely discern what form that calling should take. It became clear that my calling would in some way fulfill her sense of calling as well.
I discovered the Wesley brothers almost by accident. But when I did, it felt like coming home.
When I was in the newspaper business, someone I worked with happened to be a bi-vocational United Methodist Pastor. He invited my wife and me to take on worship leadership roles for his small congregation, and that is where I found the call to ministry I had experienced early in my life rekindled. Before long, I was in the candidacy process for ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church.
I’m not a cradle Methodist. But I have been exposed to the United Methodist Church since my childhood. As I became more involved in my congregation, I also began to study the doctrine and theology of the Church. I was amazed at how closely the Wesleyan vision of Christianity adhered to my own experience growing up in Charismatic, Anglo-Catholic contexts. In John and Charles Wesley’s writing, I saw an image of the Church that resonated with my soul. Here was an ecclesial vision that captured the sacramental, liturgical, charismatic, and evangelical faith that my parents and grandparents had taught me was so vital to the Christian life. I came to realize that I just might be Wesleyan.
My approach to Christianity is “Anglican in a Wesleyan way.” I fully embrace the catholic and evangelical faith of Charles and John Wesley along with the theological, liturgical, and sacramental traditions of the Anglican heritage handed on by the Wesley brothers. My commitments align with the values of the early Methodists: weekly communion; dedication to daily, disciplined prayer and Bible reading; and care for the marginalized.
I have a passion for communicating the riches of the historical practices of the Church, and I am always looking for ways to connect the dots between contemporary practices and the great tradition.
I was once leading a service designed to reach out to persons in addiction recovery. As the service moved toward a celebration of Holy Communion, I asked the music leader, who had a Charismatic and Pentecostal background, to play the popular Jesus Culture song “Holy Spirit (You are Welcome Here).” I explained the connection the lyrics of that song had to the ancient Sanctus hymn and the invocation of the Spirit in the prayer of consecration for Holy Communion. “That’s just really cool,” she replied.
In one brief conversation, I had helped her connect a song and a worship style she loved to something deeper and more historically rich than she had previously conceived. One of my goals in ministry is to facilitate conversations and connections like this one at every opportunity.
It is a strange task telling your own story, but I have learned that you frequently share your story in a life of ministry. At first, I found talking—and writing—so much about myself to be uncomfortable. But as I’ve grown more accustomed to recounting my story, I’ve found that I learn a little more about myself each time I reflect on my journey.
Even in the telling, sometimes a story grows.