What is a Director of Ecclesiastical Affairs, exactly?

By Chris+ Myers, AMiA Director of Ecclesiastical Affairs

Since the fall of 2025, I have had the pleasure and honor of serving as the Director of Ecclesiastical Affairs for the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA).

The role centers on all things canonical, including our relationship with our mission partners, with other Anglican entities, with our clergy and our bishops. Our office interacts with candidates seeking ordination, with our clergy more generally, with our bishops and with our mission partners to assure that we are operating in accordance with our canons and constitution. In all things pertaining to this role, I am ably assisted by Beka LeMaster. She is an enormous help to me. Anyone who has had the pleasure of interacting with her knows that she is extremely capable and has an invaluable store of institutional knowledge.

The heart of this role, and the part I am most passionate about, is overseeing our ordination process. This is a robust ordination process built to serve our aspirants and built to serve the AMiA’s mission of identifying, equipping and releasing three-stream Anglican leaders for apostolic works. So far, my primary job has been to steward the system we have so that we can continue to provide a process that’s thoughtful, without unnecessary complexity.

We want to continue to have a process that serves the work of discernment. We want our aspirants to feel supported and to have clarity about where they are in the process. We want our clergy, and our rectors especially, to trust we are taking care of their aspirants and to have the appropriate information they need to best serve the aspirants in their care. We want our bishops to have confidence that when they are asked to lay hands on someone and ordain them, the candidate has been appropriately vetted and an appropriate season of discernment has affirmed the candidacy.

Tied up with discernment are questions of calling, of timing, of equipping, of formation, of relationships, of opportunity. While part of the job of Director of Ecclesiastical Affairs is administrative, another part is pastoral. I walk alongside these candidates and seek to help them in the intentional and measured work of discernment.

Even in the short months serving in this role, I have experienced a handful of inflection points where the process slowed down a bit. Sometimes this has been due to the need for more or better communication. But more often than not, these are moments for further discernment.

For example, maybe during the marriage assessment a couple needs to take a step back and actually contend more fully with what a life of ministry entails. Maybe it is before the exams that a candidate realizes he or she doesn’t hold to an Anglican understanding of the sacrament of baptism. Maybe the candidate, along with their rector and their discernment committee, has identified some areas of needed growth or needed equipping. There are many such possible inflection points, and part of my job is to help the candidate step back and ask, “What is God doing in this moment? What might the Holy Spirit be bringing to the surface at this inflection point? What is God forming in and through me through this process?”

As a missionary society that upholds the ideal of lifelong leadership learning, we serve our aspirants, our parishioners, our fellow clergy well when we allow time to sink into such questions. It is often, as I have already seen in this role, at precisely these points where God wants to meet us in his love and call us deeper into his divine life.

Chris Myers primarily serves as the Curate of St. Bartholomew’s Anglican. He graduated from Redeemer Seminary with an M.Div. in 2013 and was ordained as a priest in the Anglican Mission in May of 2014. He recently finished his PhD in theology from Durham University (UK), writing on the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He and his wife, Morgan, have two delightful daughters, Eleanor and Rowan.