2025 VESTRY CANDIDATE

This year we have one candidate for vestry that is able to serve a one-year term. The link for the absentee ballot will be available on June 1 at 2pm and will remain open until 2pm on June 8. If you’re available on June 8 to vote in person at our Pentecost service, please submit your ballot that day. Thank you for praying for the vestry and the work of the vestry!

It is such an incredible blessing to be a part of the Corpus Christi Family! Marcia and I both knew when we walked into our first service that we had found our church home. Military life requires us to move frequently and finding a deep sense of Christian Community is often a challenge, and so we are so very thankful for the way this congregation has opened itself to us and our two little ones, Grace and Joshua. Just in the span of the 10 months since we’ve arrived, Grace and Joshua have been baptized, Marcia and I have renewed our marriage vows, Marcia has been confirmed, and I was reaffirmed. It feels like a whirlwind, but was clearly God’s whirlwind as He seamlessly opened the doors of opportunity through the loving and graceful pastoral care of Father Morgan and the congregation.

Personally, my journey to the Anglican Church is a bit of a Hobbit’s tail: there and back again. Growing up in the Episcopal church, I was in the third generation of my family attending the Church of the Mediator in Allentown, PA. It was a loving and vibrant church, and gave me an intellectual foundation of the Christian Faith. I cannot recall ever doubting that Jesus is who He says He is and the Truth He proclaims. I also really appreciated the Book of Common Prayer and the Eucharistic Liturgy. But I also cannot recall being in a relationship with Jesus. It was this lack of relationship that allowed for me to lose connection with a church family during a significant portion of my early adult life, until I found myself deployed to Afghanistan.

It was during this deployment that my head met my heart and I began to experience a relationship with God the Father and His son and my Savior Jesus Christ. Two other life changing events happened in harmony with this growing relationship. First, I became attuned to spiritual warfare, and second my first marriage deteriorated and ended in divorce.  However, despite the dangers of the physical and spiritual environment I was in, I felt, saw, and knew that God’s presence and His peace, particularly through the Holy Spirit, which surpasses all understanding, was truly with me.

This peace and God’s purpose eventually led me to Marcia, a spiritual soulmate to journey life with. Her growing passion to know and love God is inspirational to me. As the Army has moved us from place to place, we’ve increasingly sought out God’s people to live and be in community with. His grace has provided at every stop along the way, and as He has grown us together, He has now led us back to that liturgy that I felt drawn to as a child. And this time, in relationship with Him, with a deep appreciation for the need to connect in community, and an awareness of the spiritual nature of ourselves. For Marcia and I, the ultimate show of grace that the Lord has provided us is our two miracle children, Grace and Joshua, and we are so thankful that they get to experience this formative season of their lives with the Corpus Christi Family!