Palm Sunday Procession
My name is David Hyman. I’m married to Martha, a professional photographer and we have two sons. We live in the great town of Pittsboro, NC. I am an ordained priest in the Anglican Mission in America and I currently serve as the Associate Rector of All Saints Church – Chapel Hill Durham. I am also working with a group in my community to plant a faithful Anglican parish in Chatham County.
I am not a cradle Anglican/Episcopalian. I came to faith in Christ in a baptistic church and spent a number of years in charismatic/non denominational communities. During my twenties, I worked in Computer Software development and spent a lot of time ministering to youth through a parachurch ministry. That season of life and ministry was both formational and clarifying as it was during this time I noticed the deep compulsion to serve Christ and his Church. I suspected for the first time that I was being called to full time ministry.
It was also during this time I became increasingly uncomfortable with the obsession in our ministry community and in our church to be relevant; code in the church for mimicking the trends, styles, and icons of pop culture in order to maximize mass appeal for ministry. Each year, a new church or a new guru emerged that finally figured IT out. I watched as thousands flocked to sit at their feet to glean some grain of insight into how to make Jesus significant to the world, so that more people would join our churches and ministries. It was all very pelagian, as we trusted ourselves too much.
At first, I was compliant with this program but I became more and more unsettled. It was exhausting to always be searching for a silver bullet that does not exist. So Martha and I stepped out of organized ministry and church for a season and started a home church. The irony is not lost on me – I was tired of trying to figure IT out, so let’s start our own version of church. After a year or so of what really was an amazing experience of Christian community, I could not get away from the reality that Christ considers the Church as his bride. Indeed, he was one flesh with her. The Church is his Body. If the Church was indeed the Body of Christ, it was always and could only be relevant. As Ephesians 1:23 says, the Church is “his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” The fullness of Christ!
What emerged in me was a desire to find the Church. This came from an intuitive longing (kardia) and an intellectual desire (logos) to understand why my experience of churches had been so void of the rich tradition of the centuries before. There was the Great Tradition and 2,000 years of history that I needed to contend with. There is spiritual authority and apostolic succession. The Triune God did not leave us alone to figure this out for ourselves. For centuries the Holy Spirit had been speaking to the faithful. Why did the ethos of our contemporary worship forms and ministry strategies seem to ignore this reality?
As I was asking these question, Martha and I visited an Anglican church and it was as if we came home and we’ve never looked back. In 2002, with the blessing of Bishop Terrell Glenn, I attended Regent College in Vancouver, BC and enrolled in their Anglican Studies program. I was ordained a Deacon in March 2007 by Bishop Chuck Murphy and a Priest in September 2007 by Bishop John Rodgers.
My commitment to serving Christ in the Anglican Way is stronger than ever. I have been blessed by my involvement with the Anglican Mission and especially by the episcopal oversight of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda. I have been discouraged by the division in the Anglican Communion but I am encouraged as I see that faithful Anglicans in North America are joining together for on-the-ground unity in mission and ministry.
