Episode 152: Bishop Breedlove Testimony | Steve Breedlove

Alright, guys. We wanna open with prayer, and then we're gonna have Bishop Breedlove come up. You may get to fire some questions at him, but I want him to share a little bit of his testimony. He's not just a guy that comes in and does some sacramental duties and then moves on down the road. I want you to know him as a pastor and as a friend, a shepherd. And then maybe he's gonna share a little bit about Anglicanism because a lot of us—I grew up that way, but a lot didn't. So we wanna learn today.

Let's pray. Jesus, thank you for saving me. Thank you, Lord, that you love us and that you're here with us. Father, we believe that you actually meant it when you said, when two or three are gathered in my name, there I'll be right in the middle, right in the midst of them. So Lord, we invite you to come. You're the guest of honor. Fill Steve with the Holy Spirit. Let him feel so free, Lord. These are your people, the sheep of your pasture, and they're people that you've given him spiritual charge and authority over. So thank you, Jesus, for his leadership. Thank you for Sally. Thank you for their family. Thank you for young Steven, who is our church planter in Richmond. Courtney and their family. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Amen. You got one? I got one. Oh, you have one? Okay. I have been heavily paid by Lily to make an announcement. Oh, you didn't get the money to me yet. I'm sorry. I forgot. Okay. Disciples making disciples and families, October 24 at 10 AM, Sunday school class. Week from today. Alright, where is it? It's right here. Super easy. Alright, come back. There'll be food again.

Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Alisha. You've already had a wonderful service at 8:30 and looking forward to the 11:00 service. Quig asked me to launch into a little bit of a testimony about myself.

Bishop Breedlove's Testimony

I'm married to Sally. We have five kids and 15 living grandchildren. We have one who lasted about three months before she went to be with Jesus, so we have 16 that have been born. We have a large family, lots of boys and a few girls.

I've been following Jesus since I was 13 years old for fifty-eight years, but I actually think in many ways Jesus has been following me more than I've been following him. He's been pushing and holding me along the way.

I had an experience a few weeks ago that has really solidified the faithfulness of God to me. I was at Glen Eyrie, the headquarters for the Navigators Ministry in Colorado Springs. How many of you have ever been to Glen Eyrie? Just a few of you. If you ever get a chance to go to Colorado Springs, go to the Garden Of The Gods, and then look around the corner. The extension of the Garden Of The Gods is a place called Glen Eyrie where they have this castle that was transported stone by stone from Scotland and built into the mountains there. It's just a spectacular valley. Eventually, it came into the possession of the Navigators ministry.

I was there for a conference a couple of weeks ago with some bishops in the Anglican church, and I was reflecting on the fact that this was about the eighth or ninth time I'd been to Glen Eyrie. I suddenly realized that the first time I came here, I was 15 years old. I came to a conference there for high schoolers, and I learned a song that I still sing in my mind:

Higher than the hills, deeper than the sea, broader than the skies above is my redeemer's love for me. To the cross of shame, Jesus freely came, bearing all my sin and sorrow, wondrous love.

I sing that to myself when I need to be reminded. So I'm sitting there soaking this in, and I go in for breakfast, and these people stop me. They say, "Steve Breedlove," and I say, "Yeah." They go, "We were in your church when you were a pastor in Cedar Rapids, Iowa." That was when I was 34 years old. They reminded me of things and told me about a guy named Joel Brown who came to faith in Jesus Christ. They were close friends with him. That was just amazing.

The next afternoon, I'm walking through Glen Eyrie, and a woman comes up and says, "Steve," and stops me. It's Julie Suchlin. I was a missionary for four years, and she was on our mission team. She's now working there. So that was when I was in my fifties.

So 15, 34, 53. Last morning, I'm there having breakfast, and a guy comes up to me who looks like Jesus, seriously. He says, "Bishop Steve," and I go, "I know you." He goes, "It's Joe. I mean, it's Josiah." And I'm going, "What? Josiah?"

And because he'd grown his hair out—he used to have short hair, and it was down to his shoulders by now. It was his COVID gift. But anyway, the crazy thing about him: he's in our church in Beckley, West Virginia, and that was on a Friday. And a week from then, I'd already had an appointment set up to meet him for lunch in Beckley.

So my point being is that God gave me markers from when I was 15, 34, 52, and 71. And all of that just simply testifies to the fact that the Lord is faithful and good. Amen?

So sometime, if you ever have a chance, ask the Lord to do something like that for you where you can just remember the places where he is. Just to remind you of those faithful moments when you can be reflecting on the life that you've been given in Christ.

Family and Spiritual Beginnings

I was born in a family that was not Christian. They became Christians when I was 11 years old. My parents became Christians, and I became Christian a couple years later. There was a big change in my family—huge difference in the way things happened around my home. But I really didn't take off spiritually till I went to Washington and Lee University. I was from Texas, went to school in Virginia.

There, I became part of the Jesus movement in the late sixties. There was just this huge movement that the Lord blessed Washington and Lee with, and it was rooted in the prayer and the tears of a man who prayed and wept over the campus for three years before suddenly there was an explosion and a revival. By the time he was a junior, there were three other guys praying with him and weeping with him. And the next year, when I was a freshman, that went from one to four. One year later, it was 80 people who were in Bible study at Washington and Lee. This was all guys. There was no campus ministry. This was not part of anything. It was just the Lord moving.

We started up a program there that was really a great program, gathering students together to do sort of a young life thing. You know, we were all young life people, and we did a young life club sort of thing. But at W and L, because it was an all-guys school, we still were going to school six days a week wearing coat and ties. We had the foresight and the wisdom to invite girls from Hollins, Mary Baldwin, Randolph-Macon, and Sweet Briar to join us. And so the guys from VMI would sneak out over the fence and come to join us, because there was this attraction thing called Jesus.

My sophomore year, there was a young lady there who caught my eye, and she went to Hollins—named Sally. And we began a friendship that was an interesting journey. My son wrote a story about our courtship when he was in French class at the University of North Carolina. He says, "Dad, let's just put it this way: you don't come off looking very good." But my wife-to-be endured through those ups and downs, and we got engaged and got married right after I graduated from college.

Pastoral Ministry and International Work

I went to seminary, and I was a nondenominational pastor for twenty-nine years. There were a lot of great things that happened. We spent most of our pastoral life in Western Canada. Great experiences, great ministries.

But the last decade of my life as a nondenominational pastor, I began to minister to a lot of pastors. It just sort of happened that way. I ministered in a number of different countries. I did a lot of conference work, and we did repeat conference work. We went 12 times to Colombia. Four or five times to the same groups of people in Western and Central Canada. To Ecuador, to Brazil, to Romania—a total of 15 times in ministry.

What happened was that we were all in the nondenominational world, the baptistic world, the Pentecostal world. And I began to hear something, and something came into focus. These pastors from every continent literally—except Australia—all sorts of traditions, but nondenominational or independent churches, would say the same thing: "I am a pastor, but I do not have a pastor. I don't trust people because the world is competitive. And number three, it's been years and years and years since I've experienced anything from God that I wasn't in charge of. In other words, I'm managing it all. And the pressure is enormous because not only do I have to produce the experience for other people, I have to, in a sense, do it out of creativity."

In nondenominational ministry, there was this concept that everything had to be new and fresh and different every week. Whatever the latest model of success came from Willow Creek or Saddleback or Mars Hill, you had to figure out how to do that. I'll be honest—by the time I'd been around for twenty-nine years, in 2001, I hit the wall. It wasn't really burnout because I continued in ministry afterward, but I just couldn't do this anymore. It was lonely, it was competitive, and I had nobody to turn to.

I can't tell you how many times I wished somebody had come in and knocked me in the head and told me I was an idiot. I wished somebody had told me what to do—somebody who wasn't in it for themselves, somebody not competing for who was running the church. I longed for a pastor. I longed to live in a world where there were things that were more mysterious and more amazing and more inexplicable than what I was thinking about. I wanted to be able to worship, not just lead. I wanted to be able to rest, not just work.

Finding the Anglican Church

So when I hit that point, I did what a lot of people do—I became a consultant, went full time into pastoring pastors. But that just heightened the questions for me. Meanwhile, for the first time in my adult life, I began to look for a church. We were living in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we made our way to this little Anglican church that was getting started. I wasn't all that keen about it. It seemed different and strange. But my wife and kids said, "This is where we're going. Since you're gone half the time, we get all the votes."

Sometimes I would go and sometimes I wouldn't. But after a while, I began to get into the rhythm of it, and it dawned on me that this tradition called Anglicanism addressed all those things I was longing for. Pastors have pastors—somebody outside the church who can speak to everybody within the church from a point of disinterest. There was a collegiality I never experienced before. A generosity of people in this movement together asking, "What can we do to help you? How can we support you? How can we celebrate what God is doing?"

And there was this methodology of worship where I could come into the presence of God just as a worshiper. I'm the pastor, but I'm a worshiper. I'm carried along. I was reordained in 2005, and I have never imagined living a life in ministry and friendship and relationship and the work of God that is so healthy. It doesn't mean we don't have problems—the church has human beings in it. But there is a fundamental health and a vibrancy and a generosity and a care that has been incredible.

When I was elected a bishop, it felt like the Lord had called me to live the life that I had wanted somebody to be living for me all my life. What a privilege. What an honor.

My Journey in Christ

That's my testimony. Following Jesus for fifty-eight years, my internal life is not easy. I have my own doubts, my own struggles, my own temptations. I've had many senses of threat or accusation or internal condemnation. I'm just a guy. But the Lord has carried me through it all. There's a passage in Zechariah 3 that I go back to again and again, and it's one of my favorite passages.

And Joshua, the high priest, is standing before the throne of God, with the angel of the Lord—that's Jesus—standing with him, and Satan on the other side. Satan's accusing him and mocking him, saying how dirty he is. The angel of the Lord, Jesus, rebukes Satan and says:

"Is this not a brand plucked from the fire? I pulled this guy out of the fire." — Zechariah 3

When you pull something out of the fire, what happens to your hand? You get burned. Did Jesus get burned for us? Yes. So the Lord rebukes Satan and says, "Be quiet. Be gone." Then He turns to the other ministering angels and says, "Take off the dirty clothes and put on festival garments and put a turban on his head. Welcome to the party. Welcome to the party."

That's my testimony. I've been welcomed to the party. I've been plucked out of the fire. Satan keeps getting rebuked. And thankfully, I've been around long enough that Satan's getting a little bored with me. But I just say that tongue in cheek.

We could talk about Anglican things, and you may have some questions. Or we could do the riskier thing and have me give you a report card like the churches in the book of Revelation—what I see is good, what I see now. I love questions. I would really love questions if you have any. That's really fun for me and encouraging.

Anglican Heritage and Church Unity

One of the things you like about this church in the new members class is the booklet called "Our Anglican Heritage," which talks about the way the Anglican church has been a covering for other denominations and a force for unity in the church historically. Do you have a dream about that?

Lily's question is about the idea that Anglicanism has really tried to be a mediating and uniting force among churches. It has. Many times, Anglicanism is called the via media—the middle way—and it stands in between the reformed and charismatic, Catholic and sacramental, and tries to pull it all together. I do think that's part of the tradition that we've been given.

In terms of your specific question—do I have a vision for that?—I am on the Anglican Unity Task Force, and I do have a passion for the unity of the church. It's something I think about a lot. I have the opportunity in my ministry and relationships with other bishops to talk a lot about maintaining unity. My task on the Anglican Unity Task Force is more the strategic side—how can we positively build unity? Then we have another wing of our work that's about repairing disunity.

So yes, there is a passion that I have for that. Let me back up and give you a conviction: I actually believe this is true. I don't think this is just press. I believe the Anglican church has value not because it's Anglican—there are lots of legitimate ways to follow Christ—but I do think the value of the Anglican way has a couple of important aspects.

First, it is a rebirth of an expression of Christianity that was there at the very beginning. If you look at the early history of the church, there were centers of life. One center was Constantinople in the Eastern part, and there was the Western part—Rome and North Africa. But there was also a center which was less visibly organized, but nevertheless powerfully alive in the British Isles: Celtic Christianity.

Celtic Christianity had names like Saint Patrick, Saint Aidan, Saint Cuthbert, and people like that. When you begin to dig into it, what you see is that they did not build centralized institutions. Their passion was gospel penetration—taking the gospel into the world and learning to speak the language through the culture of the people so that the gospel became understandable to everyday people.

Whereas the East gave us gifts and the West gave us gifts, the Celtic faith, the Celtic expression, also had its own gift. They all shared a common way of worship—little variations, but fundamentally the same. You get the sense that this is really the way the apostles taught the church to worship. It just got expressed in different ways.

Well, if that's true, then what we have is an expression of the universal little c Catholic church, the united church, as expressed in Celtic Christianity, which emphasizes mission and accessibility. So it goes underground. If you look at history, it kind of goes underground in the British Isles because of some church wars. But anyway, some church wars resurfaces in the reformation. And Thomas Cranmer's impulse was exactly the same as that Celtic Christianity. He wanted to translate the bible into English, and he wanted to translate the prayer book into English, and he wanted every family in England to have a prayer book and a bible at home so that you do worship at home, you participate in worship, you don't watch worship happening in another language. You know it in your language. The songs are written in the vernacular of your world. And so he turned this into a passionately mission-centric movement. Same stuff way back when, same shared forms of worship, but now accessible. And if you look at the history of the Anglican church, it became the most mission-driven church in the reformation. It went all over the world.

So whereas I don't know whether or not I have a vision for ecumenical unity that goes bigger than I'm really hoping and concerned about unity in our diocese and unity in the province that we're in and unity in the Anglican world. But what I do know is that I do think we've been given a gift and a particular calling to resurrect and to live within what I believe God gave to the original church. He gave through the Celtic church a passion for gospel penetration. And I believe that's really the thing that we are meant to be as Anglicans.

Diocese of Christ Our Hope: Mission-Centered Budget

The diocese of Christ our hope has a legacy from our birth that 50% of all the money that comes into the diocese goes back out in mission and church planting. Our diocesan budget, which is 10% of the undesignated offerings of every church in our diocese, runs about $1,213,000 a year. But we take half of that and we put it back out in terms of mission. So right now, we're running about $650,000 to $680,000 a year back out in mission. In addition to that, we take 10% of what comes in and send it back to Rwanda and the ACNA. So now we have 40% that we live on, and about two-thirds or three-quarters of our staff is meant to support and fuel mission in the field.

It boils down to the fact that the office of the diocese is in our basement. We have about three or four people who do administration and operations, and everything else is meant to put money and mission out. It's half of the real dollars and about two-thirds of the energy of the diocese goes into supporting that.

My successor's been elected, Alan Hawkins. I've got about three more years before I pass the baton. It'll be twelve years that I've been able to be bishop. And by the grace of God, the exciting thing for me is by that time, the diocese will have given about $8,000,000 for mission and church planning during that time. We were just in an all-day meeting in Charleston, West Virginia, about three weeks ago, where we developed a prayer strategy and a plan strategy and an action plan for planting three or four new churches in West Virginia in the next two to three years.

Church Planting Activity

The diocese right now has 37 churches. Three came from the Episcopal Church originally. Every one of the others—all 34 others—are church plants in some level of maturity. We have about 34 church plants and missions actively in the diocese right now. Several of those have reached congregational status.

We have church plants emerging in Moore County, North Carolina, which is near Pinehurst; three or four new ones in West Virginia; another church plant emerging in New York State; and another one in Port New Albany, Indiana.

Regarding the one in Richmond with my son—I was just there last week and they are well discipled. Their worship might be a click more liturgical than ours, but I have to tell you honestly, I've never heard singing and people entering into worship like that. When we walked out, my wife Annette said, "Wow."

The church is incredibly healthy and growing. Even as they had to start right before COVID, which was tough, but now they have about a hundred people. They're already getting ready to send their first missionary out to Kazakhstan. They meet in a place called Cambrian Baptist Church.

One of the things you can pray about is that building. Cambrian Baptist is folding and they're now selling the church. The Incarnation has been meeting there for a couple of years and had been very faithful with a great relationship with the pastor, but the pastor left. So the church has now decided to sell the property, and they have three options. One of them is to sell it to Incarnation, but there are two other options. I really appreciate your prayers because they are well established there. It works well for them. It would be terrific if that church ended up in Incarnation's possession. That's something to pray about.

How ACNA Addresses Secularism and Cultural Issues

The question is, how is the ACNA positioning itself? I think as a province, its positions are clear. It takes clear positions and kicks out from time to time. The bishops will get together and make a statement that speaks specifically to issues of the culture and confirms what we already believe. It makes our stand clear.

But the ACNA's principle of action is to primarily let the diocese and the local churches figure out how to fight that battle. The tone of it would be, I think, how do we address the issues of culture with clarity, confidence, but also with love and respectfulness.

There are two things we probably don't do: we don't withdraw and build a wall, and we don't spend our time in what you might call culture wars. The tone would be more like, how do we engage? You got this issue, you got this thing going on. What does the gospel say to you? How do we help you see the good news? You hear what we're saying is actually bad news, but it's good news. Our prayer and our bent is to help you understand why the gospel is good news and how it's good news for you.

That said, I wouldn't take that too far because there are certain times when you have to take stands. We are citizens. We live in communities, and we have to take stands in some way or another. But the tone would be more about the fact that we are here to win people for Christ and to be agents that bring conviction and clarity to the battles that are going on in humanity, not to be people who are here primarily to protect ourselves.

Resources for Local Churches

There are resources the diocese is providing. Right now, we as a diocese are quite serious about equipping our leaders, lay and clergy, to be able to live confidently and clearly in the culture and in the questions the culture is coming up with.

What we try to do every year is we introduce a topic which we take a very hard biblical run at a particular issue that's really popping up in culture. What does the Bible say about this and how do we train people to live and think biblically?

This year, we're introducing our conversation at our convocation, which is the first weekend in November. You can sign on and join. You can watch it by Zoom or come to the convocation in Greensboro. Our conversation this year is biblical humanity, biblical identity. What does it mean to be a human being from God's perspective?

We look at all these things happening in our culture—all the conflicts around gender, race, sanctity of life—and they all root themselves back into what does it mean to be a human created in the image of God? What does it mean to be a human who's fallen? What does it mean to be a human who's been redeemed?

How does our humanity as creatures created in the image of God by a good creator who is also our redeemer—how do we think about ourselves now? Who gives us our identity? Do we name it for ourselves or is it given to us?

Do we declare who we are? So we're gonna establish a very strong conversation about a biblical foundation—planting our feet solidly on what the Bible says it means to be a human being. Then we're gonna unpack it for the next year with four other seminars, four other afternoon events: Biblical Humanity and Sexuality, Biblical Humanity and Race, Biblical Humanity and Dementia Disability, and Biblical Humanity and Mortality. And then we're gonna come back next November 2022 and talk about Biblical Humanity and Work, because so many people find their identity in their work.

We're just trying to change the conversation and give people the understanding of what the deeper question is here. For me personally, I feel pretty passionately about this. I think it's such an important part of our life perspective—just to ask the question: Who names me? Who tells me who I am? If we believe that we tell ourselves who we are, then everything's up for grabs. But what does that do? How does that play itself out in your life? How do you live over time?

One of our dear friends' family just went through this about four or five years ago—in the most tragic sense of the word—in terms of gender transition. The person who transitioned, it all came crashing down. They completely lost everything they were hoping for. She's changed her name three times now. And what's she asking? She's asking, "Who am I?" Let me just tell you: God tells you who you are. That's what we're trying to do. That's how we try to address it.

Resources and Implementation

Are these discussions appropriate for lay people? Yeah, absolutely. Are they appropriate for teenagers? In terms of teenagers, we're developing some other resources. You'd have to filter that as a parent. They're not graphic or anything like that—they're just straight scripture and how you deal with this. It depends on the maturity of a child.

One of the things we are doing with our youth ministries in our diocese is developing resources for youth ministries and parents around the issue of gender questioning. We're developing a support group for youth pastors, youth ministers, and youth leaders who can talk it through. We're developing significant resources to resource our youth leaders. We're also creating a hotline for parents—it should be online within the next couple or three months.

What happens when your child suddenly tells you, "I don't know who I am anymore"? Right now it's epidemic in our culture. Parents—the bottom falls out. Where do you go? How do you get answers? So we're trying to develop resources for parents, youth leaders, and youth ministers, and we're working pretty aggressively on that right now.

All the discussions we do—at our convocation and all the things we do throughout the next year—are gonna be recorded and available on our diocesan website. You can watch video and figure out how to watch this stuff on human identity and all the ways it plays out. I think small group conversations would be fantastic—watch the videos as a small group and unpack that together. That'd be terrific.

Identity Formation in Families

Thomas raised a question about the Old Testament pattern of good kings who raise bad sons, and how ideology doesn't get internalized on the home front. How do you ensure that doesn't happen in your world?

That's a really hard question. But I think what we've realized—and what I think many people have to come to grips with—is that bringing up your kids in an atmosphere that reflects the way God has filled your life with joy and beauty isn't enough. You gotta actually teach your kids.

You gotta teach your kids. In our world, you gotta start preschool because right now there are preschool books that are teaching alternative understandings of human identity. Where I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, there are gender neutral bathrooms in grade one. It's aggressive. It's very, very aggressive. So parents have to be even more aggressive.

I believe what I would suggest is that teaching and instructing your kids is really crucial. Discipleship has to become family life. Family life has to become discipleship. And let me say one other thing: education is discipleship. Whatever's going on in education is discipling your kids. So you've got to be able to stand there and figure out what to say back or how to deal with that issue.

Nevertheless, I think the thing that I wish I'd taught my kids better—I thought that they would absorb it. We would do family devotions and that'd be enough. I don't think I really discipled my kids very well. I wish I'd done a better job.

But the other thing too that I would say for me personally—this is more my personality or temperament type or what Sally and I've had to learn and repent of—is I think that we were in many ways too fearful. We were too tense about it. And I think what our kids needed to know is if we actually believe that God is good and powerful, then they need to see it in our sense of faith. Our faith, our rest, our confidence—not terror.

If your kids are going to be drawn to something where you're scared because you don't know whether or not it's gonna work, that's not the message you wanna communicate. So I would add to the intentionality of it and the specificity of it and the depth of the education and discipling of your kids—your own faith, your own rest, your own joy.

The joy of the Lord is your strength.

On Unconditional Love

Has my definition of unconditional love changed? I think it's changed in the sense that I've become more confident. I've become more confident in the unconditional love of Christ. More since it really is a fact, that it really is true—it's not hinged on my performance and those kinds of things. I think I rest in his love more.

In terms of how I relate to other people, I think I can look them in the eye and say, "I don't care whether you think that what God tells you sounds like prison—it's love. It's love. I promise you it's love. It is the way, the truth, and the life." I think I've become more confident, more able to look somebody now who disagrees with me and just smile. You know what? It's okay. You don't have to believe me, but I promise you, this is love.

In terms of how I love other people, I find myself being checked in my own spirit when I look at people and automatically come up with a critical, judgmental story. And just to realize everybody around me is working through their pain. So I think that my compassion has grown, my sympathy has grown, and my ability to be comfortable with somebody who's super different than me in their affect and presentation.

I'm able to go: here's who I am and this is who I know. But I know may not be there, and it's okay. You're a human. And I do think my sense of the dignity and the worth of a human, even if they never come to faith, has probably increased. I think I used to be a lot more oppositional in those conversations.

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It's evident by the early service and just how you speak that the word of God is alive and growing your heart, and it's not just a memory thing for you but it just comes out. I'm interested in what your favorite miracle of Jesus in the gospel is.

Oh, that's an easy one. Matthew chapter seven. Jesus comes off the Sermon on the Mount, comes down from the mountain.

At the end of the sermon on the mount, it says people were just astonished because he was teaching them as one who had authority, not as the scribes. So here's a guy who's just been recognized as having authority—authority is this big thing—and the next scene, he walks into Capernaum and a leper falls at his feet. I literally have chills right now when I think about this miracle.

First of all, the leper just violated all the principles. What's the leper supposed to be doing? Unclean, running away, and all that kind of stuff. And he doesn't. He's bold enough. He comes to Jesus and he falls at his feet. He's already broken through. And Jesus is sitting there and he goes, "If you're willing, you can make me clean." And in Mark's account, he says, "And moved with compassion, Jesus reached out and touched him."

Now at that point in time, what happened to Jesus? Ritually, what happened? He's unclean. He broke through and blew that off in order to take the uncleanness of the leper onto himself and return to the leper wholeness. That man—how long had it been since he held his daughter in his lap? How long had it been since he had hugged his wife? How long had it been since a friend put his arm around him? So he restored him to life, to community, to family, to wholeness. And Jesus had the power to take the uncleanness and not become unclean himself.

Then he turns right by and says, "Now go to the priest and tell him." Why? He was immediately disciplining him because that's what the Bible told him to do. So he's teaching him to apply the Bible. It moves from miracle into discipleship in a moment. I love that miracle.

He goes on to Capernaum, and there's a soldier—a centurion—who comes up to him. He goes, "I got a servant in my home that's sick," and Jesus says, "I'll come." And he says, "You don't need to come. Just say the word, and he'll be healed." The centurion says, "Because I too am a man under authority. Therefore, I have soldiers, and I've told them what to do."

He recognized in the man Jesus—and I don't think he knew the incarnation at all—he recognized in the man Jesus that Jesus had power. Therefore, Jesus was under authority. On the human level, the reason Jesus had authority is because he was under authority. And that all wraps up together to me in the most amazing scene. I love Matthew chapter eight.

Church Leadership and Accountability

Can I jump in on authority for a second, Steve? We're seeing all these church pastors and leaders fall—Mark Driscoll, Perry Noble, Ravi Zacharias, Harvest Bible Church—fill in the blank. So what do we have to protect us from falling in the same ditches? And what happens when somebody goes off either theologically or with their morals? What are the protections for deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops, etcetera? Who's watching the people who are watching?

Well, you try to build your system as watertight as you possibly can to make sure that the person who's in authority is given the responsibility and compelled to do something to intervene in behalf of somebody who's going off the rails.

In our diocese, our canons, our laws, our constitution and laws require our diocesan council to be aware of any clergy in our diocese who's in crisis. And they require me, as the bishop, to talk to the diocesan council in order to find out what we do appropriately to intervene by discipline and correction or rescue. And if I fail, then the diocesan council can bring me up on charges. It's a double reinforcement. I have a responsibility to be aware of things and to move and intervene on behalf of the health of others, and the diocesan council has the right to call me to account if I fail. In fact, in the college of bishops, it happened—they could remove me if I refuse to do my job.

Have you seen any bishops removed while you've been a bishop?

Three.

What if the archbishop, who's the head bishop, the overseeing bishop, what if he fails? There's a principle of canon within the ACNA canons which give the right and authority and responsibility to the five oldest serving bishops in the province to police the archbishop's personal life.

Maybe one more question, then we have to go to the next service.

Hi. Just a quick one. You were talking about all the symposiums that are upcoming and everything. Do you have the website that you can provide?

Yeah. Our diocesan website is adalphadeltahope.org. It's anglicanhopediocese. Adhope.org.

Alright, guys. It's been fun. Give him a round of applause. Thank you, Steve.