Art Moore grew up in Central California and in the Church of the Nazarene. If the church doors were open, his parents and all of the family were there – Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night and all special services. There was no option to stay home. A loving God, along with His people formed “the hub around which all revolved.”

The military draft was heavy in the air when Art chose to join the U.S. Navy Seabees in 1966 to “avoid” going to Vietnam. Art gave his heart and life to Christ in boot camp. His first assignment was Kodiak, Alaska, where he was active in an Assembly of God Church that trusted him to lead the Royal Ranger kids for the year. During this year Art acknowledged a “call to pastoral ministry” and planned to study for full time ministry upon discharge.

The plan to “avoid” Vietnam did not work. In 1967 and 1968, with M16 and construction tools in-hand, Art led a crew of Seabee Builders up and down the rivers and through the jungles of the DMZ area in Vietnam. The “call to pastoral ministry” did not fade through this difficult year.

After Vietnam, Art enrolled as a ministerial student at Nazarene Bible College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he graduated in 1973. Ordained as an Elder in the Church of the Nazarene, he was Sr. Pastor of 3 churches from New Jersey to California over almost 20 years. In 1989 Art moved from Senior Pastor to Administrative Associate to the District Superintendent on the Central California District Church of the Nazarene.

On Sunday, June 14, 1991, Art preached the last sermon he would preach for the next 18+ years. In a total “crash and burn breakdown” he resigned all his responsibilities and entered a long period of “dark night of the soul” where almost all he held dear was lost. There is no other way to say it, “I inflicted great hurt on myself, my family, my friends and most of all, my God.” There were no drug or alcohol issues, just wilderness, struggle and the sorting out of life.

By 1999, Art had established himself as a successful real estate broker/owner and God began to turn him to the Foundation that had not changed over the years of disappointment and turmoil.

About 2001 Art started a 10 year journey to pour himself into a quest to understand the Body of Christ as it was at its source, in the first few hundred years after the Book of Acts. What were these first believers like? What were early believers willing to die for, and more important, were willing to live for? How did they worship? What were the basic early beliefs before Calvin, before Luther?

Months and years of reading and study of the Ante-Nicene Fathers led him on a path to discover the ancient, holy liturgy of John Wesley’s mother church.

Wesley proclaimed late in his career, “I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England.” Sacred, historic, holy liturgy of the Anglican Church was a central and foundational part of Wesley’s ministry that is often overlooked. The world may have been Wesley’s parish, but the Anglican church was always Wesley’s church and the Book of Common Prayer always his form of weekday and Sunday liturgy. He was born Anglican. He died Anglican. John Wesley wrote to Henry Moore in 1788: “I am a Church of England man, and, as I said fifty years ago, so I say still, in the Church I will live and die, unless I am thrust out.”

This discovery modeled, for Art, the form of worship he had read most about in his studies of the ancient, early church.

Art experienced a renewal in heart and soul through his interest in the early writings of the Ancient Church. Art is a firm believer in contending for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude 3). He is committed to holding up the writings of the early church, not equal with, but next to the Scriptures. He believes that they can provide many correctives for what passes, in these days, as Christianity-lite in North America. Finding “the grandfather church of his Church of the Nazarene” led him to a warm, new Anglican home and an enjoyment of a form of this ancient faith.

In a succession of unexpected events, God opened a way to “restore” Art’s call to ordained ministry. His passion, aside from study of the early Bride of Christ, is to plant new congregations of people who have the same drive to enjoy historic, evangelical, Anglican worship.

With God’s help, church-planting work in the Pacific Northwest will be Art’s last “assignment and passion” this side of heaven. God, through a handful of Godly past friends and evangelical, Bible believing, liturgical, Anglican people have extended “restoration”! Thank you, God!

  The Wesley Hymn: Depth of Mercy!

Depth of mercy! can there be
Mercy still reserved for me?
Can my God His wrath forbear -
Me, the chief of sinners, spare?

I have long withstood His grace,
Long provoked Him to His face,
Would not hearken to His calls,
Grieved Him by a thousand falls.

I have spilt His precious blood,
Trampled on the Son of God,
Filled with pangs unspeakable,
I, who yet am not in hell!

I my Master have denied,
I afresh have crucified,
And profaned His hallowed Name,
Put Him to an open shame.

Now inlcine me to repent;
Let me now my sins lament;
Now my foul revolt deplore,
Weep, believe, and sin no more.

There for me the Saviour stands,
Holding forth His wounded hands;
God is love! I know, I feel,
Jesus weeps and loves me still.

What shall I say Thy grace to move?
Lord, I am sin, but Thou art love:
I give up every plea beside -
Lord, I am lost, but Thou hast died.

Source: Charles Wesley - “Depth of Mercy” first appeared in the Wesley hymnal, Hymns and Sacred Poems, in 1741. It had thirteen stanzas and was titled “After a Relapse Into Sin.”