TAC Bishop Moyer's address at Becoming One Kansas City

Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) Bishop David Moyer's address from the Becoming One conference in Kansas City has been posted on The Anglo-Catholic. An excerpt:

I was raised as what I would call a “Broad Church Episcopalian.” In my childhood parish in Somerville, New Jersey, the Eucharist gradually moved from being a once a month main service celebration with “Solemn High Morning Prayer” (with the elevation of the cash!) for the other Sundays of the month to being the principal Service. It was dignified and reverent, and the beauty and power of the Prayer Book’s language took deep root in me.

I first felt a call to the priesthood at the age of fourteen through the holiness of the Rector of our parish. I would arrive in the sacristy on Sundays at about 7:15AM to serve as his acolyte for the 8:00AM Service of Holy Communion. (I arrive at everything early, and am a bit of a punctuality freak.)

Upon arriving in the sacristy, I would always see the Rector kneeling at the communion rail in silent prayer. I had no idea how long he had been there in prayer. He would rise from his knees ten minutes before the Service; would step into the sacristy in silence; put on his vestments; lead a prayer of preparation, and then to the Altar we went.

I was not in any way put off by his silence and refusal to engage in pre-Service conversation. I knew unconsciously that what he was about and what we would be corporately about was very serious, and very holy. I wanted to be like him.

I embraced the Anglo-Catholic tradition when in seminary through my attendance at the Church of the Ascension, Chicago – where I first experienced Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament (which took a mystical grip on me, especially in the silent moments of Adoration), and also through my two years of field education work at a parish in the western suburbs of Chicago under the tutelage of a fine priest who had been raised Southern Baptist in Texas, and who described his “conversion” to Anglo-Catholicism as “swallowing the hook, line, and sinker – Mass, Mary, and Confession!”

I’ll fast forward this to about ten years ago when in my third rectorship after 10 years as Rector of Good Shepherd, Rosemont, I was elected President of Forward in Faith North America. Forward in Faith internationally had entered into a “Communion Relationship” with the Traditional Anglican Communion. I came to know the TAC and Archbishop John Hepworth through meetings and conferences of FIFNA and FIFUK, and learned that the raison d’etre for the TAC was Eucharistic unity with the Holy See. I found myself being drawn to their purpose and mission.

As Archbishop Hepworth stated in his recent Pastoral Letter addressing disunity in the Anglican Church in America amongst its bishops, “Christian unity is not an option for the Church. It is the will of Jesus Christ made clear in the Gospels;” “For Anglicans, the healing of the separation from Catholic communion at the Reformation must be the first act of Christian unity;” “To be truly ‘catholic’ demands that one is in Eucharistic Communion with the Church led by the successor of Peter;” “From the most ancient times, that has been the understanding of ‘all the churches.’ The tragedy of Continuing Anglicanism – and indeed of the Anglican Communion – is the absence of Eucharistic Communion with anyone but itself;” and “It was to carry the dreams unleashed by the first ARCIC conversations that the TAC was formed.”