An Episcopal Priest in El Paso

While in seminary a conservative Episcopal priest, Fr. Hal, came to Cranmer House to recruit some curates (assistant priests) to help him serve at St. Francis on the Hill. He chose my best friend and me to go and help him in El Paso, Texas. So I was made a deacon and a few months later a priest in the Episcopal Church and my first assignment was St. Francis on the Hill. I gained a lot of practical experience at St. Francis and I got to see an Anglo-Catholic in action. Fr. Hal was planning to retire soon and he spoke often of converting to Orthodoxy once he retired. At the time I did not think much about converting to Orthodoxy, but I heard everything he said about it and it stayed with me. Fr. Hal and his wife converted to Orthodoxy shortly after his retirement. St. Francis on the Hill was a parish with many problems. The main problem that I saw was that there were many different theologies in the parish. We had Evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and Liberals in one parish. What I discovered was that each group came in with a certain priest. When an Evangelical priest served the parish he attracted evangelicals. When an Anglo-Catholic served the parish the new members he attracted were Anglo-Catholics. And when a Liberal priest served the parish he attracted new liberal members. So when a new priest came to serve St. Francis he inherited all of these various and contradicting theologies that caused many problems in the parish. I would later discover that this was not just a St. Francis on the Hill problem but an Anglican problem. I spent a year in the Episcopal Church before I decided that the more conservative Reformed Episcopal Church was where I would rather serve. So I received and accepted a call in the year 2000 to serve at Holy Cross REC in Alpine, Texas.