Holy Trinity is best known as the place where the Alpha Course-which teaches seekers the basics of the Christian faith-launched in the late 1970s and has since been used by over 13 million people worldwide. Tomlin, who has led several Alpha courses, says the class works "because it offers an unthreatening, lively context in which to hear more about Christianity, but crucially also the chance to disagree, debate, and tell stories.

The revelation angered some church leaders, who eventually asked Bennett to resign. "His experience was explosive because the Episcopal Church is known to be a very proper, intellectual and historic church," said Rita Bennett, the rector's widow and president of the Christian Renewal Association in Edmonds, Wash. "Some people were happy and said they wanted to be prayed over too. But others were not happy at all. They didn't understand."

The event that was to include national and international church leaders would have displayed the significance of his six-year tenure, a time when the African primates began to lead rather than follow their Western counterparts. Instead the Nigerian is in a downtown D.C. restaurant-counting the hours until his plane departs ("six"), marveling at the snow ("a wonderful and fierce problem for me"), remembering what lies behind, and straining toward the future.

Confused yet? The phrase "Anglican use" refers to a limited allowance for Roman Catholics to use a revised version of the Anglican liturgy in Catholic worship. The idea has taken on a new urgency with Pope Benedict XVI's declaration of the Apostolic Constitution known as Anglicanorum coetibus, handed down back in November. As Hays rightly explains, this papal allowance "provides for former Anglicans to come into the Catholic Church as a group and retain certain of their traditions."