Joshua Moore

My faith has been the defining feature of my life. I was raised in Baptist churches as the son of a Baptist pastor. Yet, my experience of faith was not of an individual moment of conversion but rather of growing into faith. As an older child I made a public acknowledgement of faith and was baptized, but I do not remember a time when I did not know and accept the gospel.

As a college student, I attended a Wesleyan college and was there exposed to a much greater breadth of the Church as well as its history. This broadened my experience of the Church from what I came to realize had been a rather small and sheltered corner. I learned to see faith more broadly and to treat fellow Christians from different parts of the Church with love and curiosity rather than the suspicion I had often seen in my youth. In those same few years, I was first exposed both to a more structured and historically rooted liturgy and to Anglicanism specifically.

I began to see how beauty and truth can be intermingled in our worship in ways I had not known, how the words we say and pray together as a body can and do form us, and the power and importance they carry as a result. And during those years at college, my love of the Eucharist began along with the desire for it to be a regular and more frequent part of my life & worship. Finally, I was also blessed to meet the woman who would become my wife. Together, we walked the Canterbury Trail as we learned to love one another.

Since then, over the last sixteen years, I have worked at learning what it means to be an Anglican Christian and to lead others into being formed by a stream of Christianity that is still forming me. I have been shaped by weekly and annual rhythms of communion, feasts, and fasts, learning what they mean, where they come from, and how to best participate in them now. And I have taken joy in teaching others what I have learned, helping new and mature Christians to deepen their own faith and learn new disciplines and practices.