Our Story
St Philip’s Anglican Church is a new church plant of the Anglican Diocese of the South, which is part of the Anglican Church in North America. We are located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
We arrived in town in June of 2024, and we’ve just begun meeting for prayer and fellowship. If you’re interested in learning more about us and how you can join in, please shoot an email to jim@stphilipsal.org. We’re excited to connect!
The Rev. Jim Barton is leading the plant. Jim was ordained in 2020 and has spent the past four years leading St John’s Anglican Church in Americus, GA. Jim is married to Kelsey, and they are the proud parents of 3 with a fourth on the way.
Our Mission
Our team believes that we are being sent to Tuscaloosa in order to call many to true and lively faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
True and lively faith means Believing in Christ, Belonging to Christ, and Becoming like Christ.
By faith, we learn to depend on Jesus and to live in the power of his Spirit. We are sinners saved by grace, justified by the blood Jesus shed for us on the cross.
True and lively faith is more than mental assent to a set of abstract principles. It demands the involvement of our whole selves: our heads, our hearts, and our hands.
Our prayer is that the church we plant would raise up a parish of spiritually vibrant households that carry the name of Jesus with authenticity, courage, and humility.
We want to be intentional about deeply forming the next generation to place their whole lives under Christ’s lordship. We want to play a role in forming sincere believers capable of being salt and light in a bland and dark world.
We want our worship to be patterned, participatory, and enculturated--true to the evangelical Anglican prayerbook tradition and accessible to those more accustomed to the prevailing norms of Christian worship in the American South.
The more closely we conform to the image of Jesus Christ, the more unified we will be as a church and the more effective we will be at calling many into God’s kingdom.
Why St Philip?
Why would we name a church after somebody? After all, despite whatever virtues Philip may have had, he was still a sinner saved only by grace through faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Christians follow Jesus. Why bring others into it?
We couldn’t agree more that our faith depends on Christ alone. No one else has died for our sins, and no one else has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven to sit on the throne at the right hand of the Father.
Yet one of the interesting--and humbling!--aspects of our faith is that God chooses to use ordinary humans to spread the extraordinary good news that Jesus is Lord.
The truth is, we all learn about what it means to be a Christian from others. When word about Christ’s resurrection was first spreading, everyone heard the good news of Jesus’ victory over death from someone else, and--strikingly--no one heard it first from Jesus himself. Jesus uses others to lead people into his kingdom.
What’s more, in the New Testament, we regularly see believers exhorted to imitate apostles and elders in the faith. The language of imitation is used in around ten different places in the epistles, most frequently by Paul, but also by John, and by the author of the letter to the Hebrews as well.
So yes: St Philip, Deacon and Evangelist, was just an ordinary man. We don’t pray to him, and we certainly don’t look to him for salvation. But as we were praying about planting an Anglican Church in Tuscaloosa, we realized that Philip’s story as it is narrated in Acts paired well with the character and convictions we hope will come to define our parish.
To name a few, Philip:
Preached the Gospel with clarity and conviction (Acts 8:5-8)
Was known to be full of the Holy Spirit (Acts 6:3; 8:29, 39)
Had a deep understanding of the Scriptures (Acts 8:30-35)
Built missional partnerships “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 8)
Offered the culture something better than the counterfeits it had become accustomed to (Acts 8:9-13)
Raised his children in the faith and fear of the Lord (Acts 21:9)
Practiced hospitality in his home (Acts 21:8)
Was persistent in works of mercy (Acts 6:1-3; Acts 8:7)
In these things, St Philip’s example is one that we will be trying, by God’s grace, to imitate. We celebrate the work God does through ordinary men and women. We hope that, like Philip, our life and witness also can glorify God’s name and extend Christ’s kingdom.