In his telling, the evangelical megachurch he was working for made a mistake in letting him teach. At the time, Austin Suggs was an 18-year-old in a gap year, working full time for the church.
“I was asked to teach a series in their high school ministry about different religions and also different denominations … and I was wildly underqualified to do that,” Suggs said in an interview with the Christian podcast Get to the Heart. But he set off to do his homework.
Suggs sought leaders of different faith traditions and began asking questions about their beliefs and practices. Although he found the task daunting, it instilled in him a curiosity that eventually led him to pivot from pursuing a degree in medicine to attending Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which is named after the 19th-century evangelist Dwight L. Moody.
“I went into Moody thinking I was going to be the next megachurch pastor,” Suggs wrote in a blog entry. “But somewhere along the lines, I became fascinated by church history and began this wild exploration into the roots of the church that has sprouted into my YouTube channel, Gospel Simplicity, where I get to explore the beauty and messiness of church history with some of the best scholars on the planet.”
Now in its seventh year, Gospel Simplicity has over 92,000 subscribers. Suggs has made more than 600 videos, including interviews with notable Christian scholars. On his channel, he has taken advice on prayer from a monk, moderated a Baptist-Catholic dialogue about the Eucharist, and shared his experience attending a Coptic Orthodox liturgy.
His channel’s growth led to invitations on various faith-based podcasts, including The Profile, which is part of the United Kingdom’s leading Christian magazine, Premier Christianity. In today’s media landscape, Suggs is considered a social media influencer—a personality with a notable following on digital platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
Now working on his channel full time, Suggs is in his mid-20s and has since graduated from Moody Bible Institute summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in theology. He is now pursuing a master’s degree at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
On September 30, Suggs spoke with The Living Church for nearly an hour over Zoom to discuss his journey—the kind the late scholar Robert Webber, who may have been a good subject for his channel, explored in his 1985 book Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.
Since December 2024, he and his wife, Eliza, have worshiped at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Baltimore.
A Historic Sense of Faith
Located less than two miles from his alma mater, the Church of St. John Cantius, a Roman Catholic parish in Chicago, was where Suggs attended a liturgical service for the first time.
“At that point, it was almost like religious tourism in a way,” he admits. Although he found the order of worship interesting, he never thought it would be life-changing. But the experience spurred him to engage Catholics and Orthodox Christians in conversations while studying at Moody. In college, two Anglican professors would shape his theology “more than anyone else.”
“The main thing I got from them was a more kind of like historic sense of the faith, a more sacramental sense of the faith, and just what it means to do theology well,” Suggs told TLC.
Dr. John Clark and Dr. Marcus Peter Johnson both taught systematic theology. The two jointly authored The Incarnation of God: The Mystery of the Gospel as the Foundation of Evangelical Theology. Clark serves as canon theologian for the Anglican Diocese of the Upper Midwest, while Johnson was at one point connected to St. Mark’s Church in Geneva, Illinois, a parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago.
Suggs said the professors taught him to think in new ways. Although he didn’t start attending an Anglican church immediately after attending their classes, “I really had an affinity for Anglicanism even more as an outsider looking in.”
It would be some time after graduation when Suggs would experience being a church insider. In December 2024, while on a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he and Eliza attended an Episcopal service. His wife, Suggs said, “hadn’t been interested in liturgy up to this point.” It was also his first time attending Episcopal liturgy.
“She loved it, and I loved it,” Suggs said of their inaugural experience. “And that’s when it felt like, oh, this is maybe something we could do together.” Upon returning to Maryland, they found St. Bartholomew’s, which they have attended ever since.
Quiet Walk of Faithfulness
“I found myself longing for an experience of worship that went beyond either emotionalism or intellectualism,” Robert Webber wrote in 1985.
For Webber, Anglicanism “preserves in its worship and sacraments the sense of mystery that rationalistic Christianity of either the liberal or evangelical sort seems to deny.”
The scholar, who died in 2007, wrote numerous books about worship and evangelism, and sought to blend the charismatic spirituality of his background with liturgical worship. An institute at Trinity Anglican Seminary is devoted to theological work and catechesis that continues his legacy.
Forty years after Webber’s book was released and 18 years since his death, Suggs shares a similar epiphany.
“I think the sense of liturgy—of a liturgical form of worship—not just on Sundays, but of a spirituality shaped around the Book of Common Prayer, has a sense of like: ‘This isn’t about mustering emotions day to day, like having this great big experience,’” Suggs said. “It’s more of a long obedience in the same direction,” he added, quoting theologian Eugene Peterson.
Suggs describes his journey in the Episcopal Church as a “quiet walk of faithfulness.”
“I think it’s the kind of thing that helps you stay for the long haul,” Suggs said. “I’ve watched a lot of people’s faith kind of burn hot and bright, but also very short. And that’s not what I want.”
In June 2024, he bought his first copy of the Book of Common Prayer (1662)—an International Edition published by InterVarsity Press—while preparing for an interview. Even before attending an Episcopal church, he had begun incorporating it into daily life.
He prays Morning Prayer regularly and considers the General Thanksgiving his favorite, especially the line “not only with our lips, but in our lives.” The words, he told TLC, are “really meaningful to me, especially [with] the line of work that I do.”
This June, he purchased the 1979 edition of the prayer book, which he and his wife began using. It also helped him grow more familiar with the liturgy at St. Bartholomew’s, which he calls “my local church.”
On October 2, he met with St. Bartholomew’s rector, the Rev. Dr. Mario Conliffe, to tell his story and his desire for confirmation. With a bishop’s visit scheduled in 2026, that step should soon be possible.
“What I started doing on YouTube, which was engaging with Christians of all different types of backgrounds, further cemented in me this sense of like, there are a few things I hold dear, but I’m willing to have open hands for like a whole lot of diversity within the church,” Suggs said. “And that’s okay. I think that’s a feature, not a bug.”
For Suggs, one of the biggest appeals of Anglicanism broadly and the Episcopal Church specifically is “this idea of being a big tent, of being able to hold within it people who have different viewpoints and different things, but being united around like a few much smaller essentials.”
In Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, Webber wrote about three stages of faith: familial, searching, and owned. The first comes from one’s early environment, the second from a period of questioning, and the third is nurtured when layers of tradition are peeled away so that one can find the heart of faith.
“The actual substance of faith, the content that stands behind every Christian tradition, is Jesus Christ,” Webber wrote.
In high school, Suggs had experienced a period of deconstruction, in which he had to let go of beliefs he felt kept him from a fuller view of his faith. He considered that time as one of the personal experiences that ultimately led him to the Episcopal tradition.
While deconstructing, he questioned his evangelical upbringing and later described a sort of “coming back,” an initial end of wrestling with his belief. And not because he had won every argument, but because he realized something truly significant: “I came back just finding Jesus really compelling and really beautiful, and wanting to live within that Christian story.”
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
