My Canterbury Trail
When I think about my journey in vocational ministry, I can’t help but look back at a very specific season.
The season began not in a place of comfort and familiarity, but amidst an atmosphere of faith crises.
A longtime friend and mentor felt called by God to host a house church, and I was invited to provide musical worship. We would host time on Sunday evenings to engage in conversation, read the Lectionary, pray, and then share a meal.
But what made this group unique was a vision to care for two different groups: people either walking away from the Church or those journeying back into it.
Some folks were simply looking for a community to call home.
Others had been burned by the Church and were raw and fragile.They wouldn’t step into a church building, but they wanted Christian community.
Then there were those who were on a path back to the Church. The common theme amongst this subset was a call into the liturgical and ancient traditions of the Christian faith, namely Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The season of time I spent in this house church (tenderly referred to as “The Gazebo” because of its open structure and posture) was deeply impactful and life-changing for two reasons.
One: It exposed me to deeper concepts around what it means to be the Church.Two: It put me on the path that we Anglicans fondly refer to as “The Canterbury Trail.”
The Canterbury Trail is that path taken because of a longing for something deeper, more rooted, more spiritually rich, and ultimately more tied to the Great Tradition of Christian worship.
You might guess that my entrance onto the Canterbury Trail was facilitated by reading a legendary Anglican writer like NT Wright. But it was voices from further East who ignited my spirit. My Eastern Orthodox friend, and the book Everyday Saints (a very Russian Orthodox book), opened me up to the beauty of the liturgical tradition. This gave me a hunger to learn more about Church history and tradition, and for a time I even began attending Orthodox services locally.
Over the years that followed, God guided me on a journey that has too many twists and turns to share here. It culminated in me being confirmed into the Anglican Church in August 2021. In a providential way, my expanded role at Holy Trinity begins on the two-year anniversary of my confirmation. Spooky.
Upon further reflection, it’s interesting to me that this years-long journey had its genesis in what was often a vulnerable and intense place for people. It was actually through the crisis of others that I was drawn more fully into the Church, not away from it.
I should be clear that what I was going through wasn’t a “deconstruction” in any real sense of the word. The proverbial house of my faith life wasn’t having inner walls torn down, so much as it was having the roof expanded, the basement cleared, and the foundation reinforced.
If anything it was a “reconstruction” of what was already there.
Outside of my personal transformation, my time in this house church also reshaped how I saw the collective “we.” One can imagine, when you gather a group of potentially lost, raw, and angry people together, wounds can and will get re-opened, and sometimes hurts spill out.
I’ll never forget what my mentor said to me after a particularly hard gathering: “There is nothing actually safe about community. The closer you get, the clearer the cracks are.”
Life in any community is far less “safe” than an isolated or individualistic approach. Being seen and known is beautiful and scary all at once. The point is not to be comfortable, it's to be real.
Because of my time in Gazebo, I can no longer imagine myself wrestling through hard passages of Scripture alone. My spiritual doubts or concerns are no longer a private affair to be pondered during sleepless nights. It’s with trusted brothers and sisters that I want to journey through these questions with.
Practically speaking, life in our current world is simply too difficult to try and steel-man on my own. In retrospect, God used my Gazebo season to help me shed aspects of pride and ego that convinced me I needed to be “strong” and self-sufficient to truly have a vibrant faith. It’s actually because of my weakness that I need Him and others.
It bears saying that I in no way judge folks who have walked away from the Church. I’ve seen too closely and heard too clearly the stories of those who have been truly wounded to disregard these narratives as some kind of cultural polemic. Those stories are real, and they need to be engaged tenderly and thoughtfully.
However, these stories are not the end, nor the full picture. For every story about deconstruction I hear, there is another about a new life devoted to Christ, a small local church being the good news, a theologian thinking deeply about and engaging the issues of our age, or someone making simple choices in their lives that reflect Christ to the world.
I was once asked by someone, “What’s your five year vision for ministry?”
Although I appreciated the question’s intended meaning, five years was far too short-sighted in my humble opinion—and the question smacked too much of American Church Lingo.
That’s because I hoped that my ministry would be my entire life. I’ve never tried to frame my “vision” as some new “hack” or “strategy.” I don’t intend to reinvent the wheel. My hope is to call on the wisdom of the mothers and fathers who have come before us in the Great Tradition of the Church. My vision is to seek the guidance of Scripture. Ultimately, my vision is to seek the One who is making all things new.
Although over the years I’ve found great resources and joy in formalized and systematic curricula or methods for ministry, my plans are just that: My plans, not God’s.
I’ve often heard Rev. John quote Psalm 127 when speaking about planning or ministry efforts:
Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
The American church landscape is full of man-made plans, strategies, and labors, and I long to see us come back to the simple wisdom and truth of Psalm 127. Without seeking God in the midst of our efforts, we truly labor in vain.
What the future holds, I do not know. But I look forward with excitement and hope for what God is doing in this community of Holy Trinity, and around us as well. Already we’ve seen amazing things through God’s provision in this season and personally I’ve had my expectations exceeded in every case.
It’s my pleasure, and truly, my honor, to step into this new role at Holy Trinity, and especially to do so in community with you all. May God give us His vision for what lays ahead.
With love and peace,
-Nik Bartunek
Director of Worship Arts and Community
