Finding Home: My Journey from the Southern Baptist Convention to Anglicanism

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

If you’ve been following Theology Unfiltered over the past several months, you’ve noticed the silence. no new posts. No updates. Just… quiet. And if you know me at all, you know that’s not typical. I’m not someone who shies away from difficult conversations or uncomfortable truths. This blog has always been about wrestling with theology, honestly, about refusing to sanitize our faith for the sake of comfort.

But here’s the thing: sometimes silence isn’t absence. Sometimes it’s exactly what you need. If I am completely honest, I needed these months. I needed to step back, to breathe, to heal. And in that space - in that gift of quiet - I found something I didn’t expect to find. Something beautiful. Something that felt, for the first time in a long time, like home.

Shortly before Christmas, I walked into an Anglican church about an hour from my house. I didn’t truly know what all to expect. I was tired, honestly… tired of fighting, tired of being disappointed, tired of wondering if there was a place in the Church for someone like me…

I care deeply about historical theology, I refuse to stay silent when the vulnerable are harmed, and I believe that our faith should look more like the early Church than the latest trends in American Evangelicalism. I, like many of you, was questioning what the point even was any longer. Now, please don’t hear that as a challenge to faith as a whole; my faith in Christ has never wavered. However, burnt out, hurt, and still processing all the hurt from the last couple of years in vocational ministry, I asked why I should continue to participate in a community of faith at all. Why not just do it on my own?

Yet isn’t that exactly what the enemy would like most? To have us isolated and alone. The fellowship of believers is so important because, as Scripture teaches us, it is a place of mutual support, accountability, and strength and encouragement as we walk through the complexities of this life. But I digress.

What I found in that Anglican parish wasn’t just a church service. It was healing. It was a profound liturgy that pointed me closer to Christ than I’d felt in years. It was a community that welcomed me not as a project to fix or a liability that must be managed, but as a brother. It was, quite simply, the home I’d been searching for without fully realizing I was searching.

These past months, therefore, haven’t been dark. They’ve been restorative. They’ve been full of discovery and joy and the kind of deep, soul-level peace that comes when you finally stop trying to force yourself into a mold that was never meant to fit you. I’ve been learning what it means to worship in continuity with two thousand years of Christian tradition. I’ve been rediscovering the rhythms of the Church calendar, the richness of sacramental theology, the beauty of a faith that doesn’t reinvent itself every generation but draws from the deep wells our fathers and mothers in the faith left for us.

In many ways, this is me saying I’m ready to share that journey with all of you.

This isn’t just my story of leaving the Southern Baptist Convention - though that is certainly part of it. This is a story about what happens when institutions fail us, when the people we trusted to protect the vulnerable choose retribution over righteousness, and when we’re forced to ask hard questions about where we belong. But more than that, it’s a story about discovering that the Church is bigger, older, and more beautiful than any single denomination. It’s about finding that there are other options for those of us who feel spiritually homeless, who’ve been hurt by the very systems that were supposed to nurture and protect us.

If that’s you - if you’re reading this and wondering whether there’s a place for you anymore - I want you to know: there is hope, there is healing, and there is a home waiting for you, even if it’s not where you expected to find it.

Let me tell you how I got here.

The Longing for Historical Faith

If I’m honest, this journey didn’t start with a crisis. It started with curiosity - and then with love.

During my time in Bible college, while working toward my B.A. in Christian Ministries, something unexpected happened. I fell in love with historical theology. Not the dry, academic kind that treats the Church Fathers like museum pieces, but the kind of love that keeps you up at night reading Athanasius and Irenaeus, trying to understand why the early Church actually believed. It was the type of passion that leads one to read book after book, listen to teaching after teaching, and dive headfirst into debates surrounding things such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, Soteriology, the sacraments, and so much more. What it often left me with was a wonder as to why we so often act as if the faith began with our own generation, as if nothing important happened between the Apostle Paul and our favorite contemporary preacher.

I was blessed - truly blessed - with professors and mentors who took this seriously. They didn’t just teach systematic theology as a set of propositions to memorize; they taught us to engage with the great tradition of Christian thought, to read the Fathers, to wrestle with the councils, to understand how the faith had been “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) and then faithfully preserved and passed on through the centuries. They gave me the tools to dig deeper, to ask better questions, to care about what the Church had always believed, everywhere, by all true believers a part of His living Body on Earth.

And the more I dug, the more I realized I was longing for something I didn’t have a name for yet. I wanted continuity. I wanted to worship in a way that connected me not just to my local congregation or my denomination, but to Polycarp and Ignatius, to the martyrs and the desert fathers. to the great cloud of witnesses who had gone before us. I wanted to feel like I was part of something bigger than American evangelicalism’s two-hundred-year experiment. If you would, I was searching for something that stretched back unbroken to the Apostles and forward to Christ’s triumphant return.

The Apostle Paul urged the Thessalonians to “stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15, ESV). But somewhere along the way, I realized, we lost track of what those traditions actually were. We talked about being “New Testament Christians,” but we didn’t worship like the New Testament Church did. We claimed to follow the Apostles, but we’d abandoned apostolic patterns of worship, liturgical rhythms, and sacramental theology. We said we believed in “the faith once delivered,” but we seemed content to reinvent that faith every generation based on the latest trends, the newest worship style, and the most recent church growth strategies.

And here’s the thing: I wasn’t looking to abandon my convictions. I held -and still hold - deeply Reformed beliefs. I believe in sola Scriptura, that Scripture is the ultimate authority and measure of all doctrine. I believe in the priesthood of all believers, in the necessity of the Reformation’s recovery of the gospel, and in the importance of clarity and accessibility in worship. I wasn’t interested in trading those convictions for something else. Rather, I wanted to integrate them with the ancient faith. I wanted to be simultaneously catholic (universal), orthodox (credal), and reformed (biblical). I wanted the faith that the Church had always believed, rooted in Scripture and expressed through the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds.

Ultimately, the more I studied, the more I realized this wasn’t just merely an intellectual exercise. It was a spiritual hunger. I was longing for a faith that felt rooted - rooted in Scripture, yes, but also rooted in history, in the lived experience of two thousand years of Christians who had wrestled with the same questions, faced the same heresies, and emerged with a faith that was both ancient and ever-new. I wanted to pray the prayers that Christians had prayed for centuries. I wanted to celebrate the Eucharist the way the early Church had celebrated it. I wanted to live according to the rhythms of the Church calendar, marking time not by cultural holidays but by the life of Christ - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost.

To be clear, I genuinely believed for a long time that I could find this within the tradition I knew. That maybe, just maybe, there was a way to recover this depth, this continuity, this connection to the ancient faith without leaving the evangelical world I’d grown up in and spent the last 13+ years ministering within. But the more I searched, the more I realized that what I was longing for: apostolic succession without Roman additions, biblical authority without losing liturgical depth, Reformed convictions without severing connection to the ancient church… All of this already existed. It had a name. It had a home. And scholars far more learned than I am - individuals like Dr. Matthew Barrett - had walked this same path and discovered the same thing.

I just didn’t know it yet. But I was about to find out.

The Catalyst

Now, I’ve already written about what happened next, the circumstances that forced me out of the only ecclesiastical context I’d ever known. The details are in other posts on this blog if you so choose to go back and read them. What matters here is this: sometimes God uses our breaking points to redirect us toward what we’ve been searching for all along. I was pushed out, yes. But in that pushing out, I was also pushed toward something I didn’t even know existed in the form I needed it to exist.

Because here’s what I discovered: everything I’d been longing for; that deep continuity with the ancient Church, that integration of Scripture and tradition, that sacramental depth and liturgical beauty… it was not all lost to history. It wasn’t something I’d have to reconstruct or hope someone would eventually recover. It was already there, waiting. It had a name. It had a home. And it was called Anglicanism. So let me explain what that actually means.

Understanding Anglicanism: Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed

When I first heard Anglicanism described as “Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed,” I’ll admit I was skeptical. It sounded like theological sleight of hand, like trying to have your cake and eat it too. How could one tradition claim all three? Wasn’t that just trying to please everyone and ending up with nothing coherent?

But here’s what I came to understand: these three aren’t competing identities that Anglicanism tries to balance in some precarious compromise. They’re the essential elements of what the Church has always been, and what the Reformation ultimately was trying to recover. For me, as someone who’d spent years longing for historical depth while refusing to abandon biblical authority, this wasn’t a compromise. This was exactly what I’d been searching for.

As I always like to say in my sermons. Let’s break it down.

Catholic: Continuity with the Universal Church

When Anglicans say we’re “Catholic,” we’re not talking about Rome (though we do share much with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters). We’re talking about something older and broader: the universal Church. The word “catholic” simply means “universal”. The Church that spans time and space, stretching back through two thousand years of history and extending across every continent and culture.

This is about taking seriously the fact that we are not the first generation of Christians. We are not smarter than the Church Fathers. We are not called to reinvent Christianity every generation based on what feels relevant or culturally acceptable. We stand in continuity with the apostles, with the early Church, with the great councils and creeds that defined orthodox Christianity.

So what does this actually look like? For starters, we take sacramental theology seriously.

We believe that God works through physical means; through water, bread, wine, and the laying on of the hands. The Apostle Paul writes, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16, ESV). This isn’t symbolic language. This is real participation in Christ through the sacrament.

Now, here’s where the 39 Articles become essential. Article 28 explicitly rejects transubstantiation, the Roman Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine literally become the physical body and blood of Christ. We don’t believe that. But we also reject the idea that the Eucharist is merely a memorial, just a symbol with no real spiritual reality. The Articles affirm that Christ is truly present in the sacrament, that we receive Him spiritually by faith, but they refuse to define the mechanism beyond what Scripture reveals. This is gracious orthodoxy, that is, the holding of mystery without imposing philosophical explanations that go beyond God’s Word.

We also maintain apostolic succession. Our bishops stand in a line that traces through history to the apostles themselves. This isn’t about claiming superiority; it is about continuity. It’s about being part of something bigger than ourselves, something that didn’t start with us and won’t end with us. Article 36 affirms the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons, rooted in the Church's ancient practice.

This Catholic continuity means we have a liturgy that’s been prayed for centuries. We don’t reinvent worship every Sunday based on what feels fresh or culturally relevant. We pray the prayers the Church has always prayed. We follow the church calendar. We mark the seasons of Advent, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. Not because we’re stuck in the past, but because we’re connected to the whole Body of Christ across time.

Orthodox: Guardians of the Faith Once Delivered

When Anglicans say we’re “Orthodox,” we mean we hold fast to the ancient creeds and the Rule of Faith handed down from the apostles. We confess the Nicene Creed every Sunday. We affirm the Athanasian Creed. We believe in what the early Church defined as essential Christian truth at the great ecumenical councils.

In many ways, this is about being guardians, not innovators. Jude writes, “Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3, ESV). The faith was delivered. It’s not ours to remake. It’s ours to receive, protect, and pass on. The 39 Articles make this explicit. Article 8 affirms the three ancient creeds: the Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds as containing all things necessary to salvation. We don’t move beyond them. We don’t revise them based on modern sensibilities. We don’t soften the hard edges of Trinitarian theology or Christology because they’re difficult to explain in a post-Christian culture.

This Orthodox commitment means we refuse theological innovation. We’re not looking for the next big thing in theology. We’re not trying to make Christianity more palatable by abandoning doctrines that offend modern ears. We believe what the Church has always believed: that God is Trinity; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons, one essence. That Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, two natures in one person. That He was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, rose on the third day, ascended into heaven, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. These are the non-negotiables. This is the deposit of faith. And Anglicanism, at its best, guards this faithfully.

Reformed: Scripture as the Final Authority

Now here’s where it gets really important. When Anglicans say we’re “Reformed,” we’re not talking about being Presbyterian or adopting five-point Calvinism (though some Anglicans do). We’re talking about something more fundamental: the Reformation principle that Scripture is the final authority in all matters of faith and practice.

You see, the Reformation wasn’t about rejecting everything that came before. It was about asking hard questions: “Has the Church moved away from Scripture? Have we added traditions that contradict God’s Word? Have we obscured the gospel with human inventions?” And where the answer was yes, the Reformers called the Church back to biblical faithfulness. Article 6 of the 39 Articles states it clearly: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” This is the doctrine of sola scriptura, Scripture alone as the final authority.

This doesn’t mean that we reject tradition. It means tradition must be tested by Scripture. It means that when tradition contradicts God’s Word, Scripture wins. Paul writes to Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV). Scripture is sufficient. It equips us completely.

The Reformation also recovered the priesthood of all believers. Article 25 affirms that there are two sacraments ordained by Christ: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, not seven as Rome taught. We don’t need a priest to mediate between God and us in the way medieval Catholicism taught. Peter writes, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:9, ESV). Every believer has direct access to God through Christ, and Christ ALONE is the Sole Mediator between God and man.

This Reformed commitment means we read Scripture seriously. We preach expositionally. We believe the Bible is God’s Word, inspired, authoritative, and sufficient. And when the Church’s practice contradicts Scripture, we reform according to God’s Word.

The 39 Articles: Gracious Orthodoxy

So here’s the question I had when I first encountered Anglicanism: How do you hold all three together without it collapsing into incoherence? The answer is the 39 Articles.

The Articles were written in the 16th century specifically to define what Anglicanism is, and by proxy, what it is not. They maintain Catholic continuity (apostolic succession, sacraments, liturgy) while rejecting Roman errors (transubstantiation, purgatory, papal supremacy). They hold fast to Orthodox Doctrine (the creeds, Trinitarian theology, Christology) while refusing theological innovation. And they ensure that everything is subject to Scripture as the final authority.

So what do I mean by gracious orthodoxy? Simply put, the Articles don’t force you to choose between history and Scripture, between tradition and biblical authority, between sacramental theology and the priesthood of all believers. They hold the tension. They say, “Yes, we honor the Church’s wisdom across two thousand years. Yes, we take the sacraments seriously. Yes, we maintain apostolic succession. And we submit all of it to the authority of God’s Word.” If I can be honest, this was everything I had been searching for.

I didn’t want to choose between being historically rooted and being biblically faithful. I didn’t want to abandon the Church fathers to be a good evangelical, and I didn’t want to abandon Scripture to honor tradition. The 39 Articles showed me I didn’t have to. They provided a coherent vision of what the Church truly is: rooted in Christ, the apostles, Scripture, and two thousand years of wisdom continually reformed by God’s Word. And here is the beautiful thing: the ACNA has faithful parishes and dioceses that intentionally embody this. This isn’t watered-down Anglicanism trying to be all things to all people (The Episcopalians have that covered). This is classical Anglicanism, rooted in Christ, the Articles, and the Prayer Book. Committed to being Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed. All without compromise.

When I discovered this, I realized I wasn’t finding something new. I was coming home to something I’d been longing for all along. This was the faith of the early church, reformed by Scripture, preserved through history, and alive today. So when I walked into that ACNA parish in December, I wasn’t just visiting another church. I was stepping into a tradition that finally made sense of everything I’d been wrestling with for years.

Coming Home

That silence I mentioned at the beginning, the months away from this blog. The quiet that felt so uncharacteristic: it wasn’t absence, it was healing. It was the space I needed to discover that the home I’d been searching for actually existed, that the faith I’d been longing for was alive and waiting. And now, having found it, I’m ready to share what comes next.

This isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of a new chapter. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll share more about this journey, about my confirmation in the Anglican Church, about the process toward ordination (when we get to that point), and about what it means to live and minister within a tradition that holds Scripture, tradition, and reason together without compromise. I’ll be writing about the liturgy that has become my lifeline, the sacramental theology that has deepened my faith, and the community that has welcomed me home.

If you’re reading this and you’ve felt that same longing, for depth, for continuity, for a faith that doesn’t reinvent itself every generation. I want you to know you are not alone! If you’ve been hurt by institutions that chose reputation over being a living extension of Christ, if you’ve been silenced for speaking truth, if you’ve wondered whether there’s a place in the Church for people like us, I want you to know: there is hope. There is healing. And there is a home waiting, even if it’s not where you expected to find it. The journey continues. And I for one am grateful you’re here for it!