Welcome to St Charles! We are very glad that you are exploring our website.

I have been rector of St Charles since 2003 and am very proud to be so. This is a great Christian family.

I found my way here by the grace of God after visiting many parts of the country. I was born in California and raised in Miami Florida. Yes, I am a Dolphins fan. After Miami, I received a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Duke University and was a banker for several years before going to seminary. I attended Gordon Conwell for two years and graduated from General Theological Seminary in 1984. I served as curate for 3 years at St Michaels in Wayne New Jersey and St James in Hackettstown New Jersey. In 1994, my family and I went west as far as we could go, finding ourselves in Burien Washington for 9 years. In 2003, St Charles called me to be their rector. I have a great wife, Sharron, who can make anything grow in any dirt, and can shepherd any hurt person from being lost to being found. And the children are smarter than both of us.

But to get to know me, you need to know that it is more important to me that you know St Charles. We are a Sacramental Purpose Driven Church and this defines both my and our sense of calling and direction. We spend a great deal of time and energy focusing on this proposition and for good reasons.

First, as individuals we always need a reminder of who we are and who we are becoming. Second, we need to understand ourselves as a community. In the same way we have several shared experiences of a common journey, it is also good as a community to have a shared sense of definition and direction. That shared sense ought not to extinguish the individual variations of personality and personal ministry and focus, but it ought to certainly create a culture within which we can thrive and live out our individual expressions.

So I think of our church family as sacramental and purpose driven. What do I mean by that? To understand both sacramental and purpose driven I need to preface everything with some words we use in our Discovering Church Membership Class. In that class we suggest that St Charles is Canonical, Charismatic, Catholic, and we believe in the power of the Cross, the Sovereignty and deity of Christ, and the necessity of Conversion.

Christ is the head of our church. He died on the cross to pay the ransom of our sins, and Jesus calls us to conversion from our old life of sin into a new life wherein we follow Him. Within the Anglican structure of our denomination, we are canonical because we hold to the primacy of Holy Scripture. The Bible configures our world view as the objective revelation of God’s mind. We are charismatic in the sense that we experience the indwelling reality and power of the Holy Spirit and we believe that the regular way we enter into this experience is through the Holy Eucharist we celebrate each Sunday. At the altar rail, as we receive the elements of consecrated bread and wine outwardly, we are inwardly inviting God’s Holy Spirit to fill us anew. We are encountering God personally in an experience that transcends time and space and which transforms us. We are catholic because we hold to those doctrines and formularies of the church which have been handed to us by the saints of old and which the worldwide Anglican Communion holds to today.

It is from this framework that I believe we are a sacramental purpose driven church. We are derive our sacramental nature from the Anglo-catholic tradition and history which generated us. We are sacramental because of the way we worship. Each Sunday we leave the ordinary outer world of our lives of commerce and industry and walk into God’s presence. We do so with an intentional process enabled by our liturgy. Our opening praises take our focus off of self and puts it on God. We hear the Word of God read and preached which further draws us into the mind and will of God. We then step deeper into intimacy with God by prayer and confession of our sins. And then we enter completely into God presence in the practice of that rite given to us by Jesus himself on the night in which He was betrayed. The altar call to receive the elements of communion is the outward steps to God. The inner requests for God’s Spirit and the inner opening of our hearts to God’s sovereign will and presence  ̶  our yes to His desire for relationship with us individually and personally  ̶  is our spiritual transaction. In this mystical moment we discover that God is in us, and we are in God. We know God intimately in this sacramental moment. So for us, worship is a journey into God which is shepherded by the sacramental liturgy we follow.

This way of worship is defining for us and I would suggest is one of the ways we differ from many Purpose Driven Churches. Thus, it is important to make the distinction. We will always have a traditional liturgy at St Charles. It is also important to our community that our worship will always include Holy Communion. Some Anglican churches have reduced their practice of the Eucharist to once a month, as it was done in the Episcopal Church for many years before 1979. I believe that the Holy Eucharist is a necessary vehicle for the church. And while we are working on making the later worship time into an easier journey for un-churched folk, that journey will always lead to the Holy Eucharist and that charismatic moment which brings people to a direct experience of the God we worship.

We are also purpose driven in that we believe the Scriptures to be instructive for our daily life. We are, in words used above, canonical. God tells us His mind in His Word. That part of the Bible which is in a command form is important for us to follow. When we read Jesus’ great Commandments in Matthew 22:37-40 and Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20 we understand that God is telling us what He wants us to do with our lives. We see that these mandates are for us individually and personally and for us as a gathered church family. We can and do disagree about which baseball teams we cheer for and what dinner entrees we prefer, but we gather together as a church to fulfill together, and to teach each other how to individually follow, the Commandment and Commission.

The Great Commandment calls us to love God in worship and to care for others in love. The Great Commission calls us to share God’s love with others, to invite others into God’s family at our church, and to individually and as a family continue to grow in our spiritual and emotional maturity.

So as a church we are focused on Magnification, Ministry, Mission, Membership, and Maturity. We are focused on worshipping the Lord God  ̶  the one and only true God. We want to empower every member of this church to find his or her ministry and to do it. We are compelled to tell the lost about the redeeming love of Jesus Christ and to minister to our region as missionaries so others will see God’s love active and alive in the world. We continue to work at being a functional and friendly church family so that those who need to belong will find home in our midst. And we know that individual spiritual growth is a necessary part of being a living organism.

Keeping these 5 Purpose at the forefront of our community organization continually reminds us how to live together in balance. It keeps us corporately and individually in compliance with God’s will. We have been reminded that adherence to God’s will ensures an unlimited supply of God’s resources and so we continue to live thusly.

God has been doing something special for a very long time at St Charles. We have made a difference in many lives and God is continuing to call us forward. We must continue to be united in our sense of our present and future direction. And God is blessing us. We are growing. We are seeing individuals blossom in ministry and faith. What a joy to be a part of that!

Duncan