About Our Bishop-Elect, Jim Hobby
[With information from the Thomasville, Georgia, Times-Enterprise,
“Papa is going to Pittsburgh to be the new Rook,” announced on of Jim Hobby’s young grandsons recently. Hobby, rector (pastor) of Trinity Anglican Church in Thomasville,Georgia, was recently elected by the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh to fill the office of retiring Bishop Robert Duncan, former—and founding—archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
Although he clearly got his game pieces mixed up, it’s no surprise the 4-year old budding chess player would assign his grandfather a position just behind the rank and file of the game: it’s where Hobby has faithfully served the last 30 years as an ordained member of the Anglican priesthood. But how does the rector of a relatively new congregation from a small town in south Georgia become the bishop-elect of one of the country’s biggest—some would say its flagship—diocese?
It’s not difficult to connect the dots. A graduate of Trinity School for Ministry, Hobby was ordained in 1986 in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh and his first two churches were located in Pennsylvania. He served two “yoked” congregations for four years before a three-year term in Darien, Connecticut. In 1993, he was called to Tallahassee, Florida, where he would spend the next 23 year in parish ministry and missions, and become a key leader in the emergence of a new Anglican diocese in Florida, one that would ultimately find its home within the ACNA.
Hobby’s influence within Florida began when he was asked to serve on the strategic planning committee for the Episcopal Diocese of Florida, then later on as a member of their Global Mission Catalyst Committee. As his influence among regional church leaders grew, leadership among the larger Episcopal Church would prove to have a profound effect on the landscape of the denomination he was serving: when the sands began to shift in the late 1990s, Hobby became an integral voice in the desire for a more orthodox faith.
Starting around 2005, he helped to solidify what would later be called the Gulf Atlantic Diocese (GAD). The “Anglican Alliance of North Florida” umbrella group became a safe haven for churches that made the hard decision to leave their Episcopal dioceses. GAD quickly grew to include the southern portions of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, including a group of Episcopalians from Thomasville who wanted to plant a new church in the Anglican Tradition.
[To be continued in September]
