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By William B. Ingram

Following three days of meetings at the Cathedral of Christ the King, the bishops of the Charismatic Episcopal Church of North America will be in attendance on Friday night for the installation of Archbishop Charles William “Chuck” Jones as Primate of the Charismatic Episcopal Church of North America.

The Patriarch of the International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church, Archbishop Craig Bates. participated in the installation via internet communication. During a meeting of the North American bishops in the Fall of 2024, Archbishop Bates announced his retirement as Primate of the CEC-NA effective at the end of December 2024. Archbishop Jones was tasked with serving as the presiding bishop of the North American bishops as they sought God’s guidance for a new Primate. The bishops met in Atlanta in late January of this year for a season of prayerful consideration of a new Primate. At the close of the meeting the bishops unanimously agreed that Archbishop Jones is God’s man for the season.

Archbishop Jones sees this new place in his walk as fulfillment of a word given to him by Dr. Randy Clark of Global Awakening some fifteen years ago. At that time, Dr Clark prayed that God would give Archbishop Jones the same impact in his sphere of influence that God had given Dr. Clark in his sphere of influence. That “sphere of influence” was birthed many years ago. While Archbishop Jones accepted Christ at a young age, it was not until he found himself beset with clinical depression so severe that it led him to leave his job as head of nuclear medicine at a Charleston, South Carolina hospital and return to Alabama that he truly surrendered his life to Christ. That personal journey with Jesus started some forty-nine years ago,

Included in Archbishop Jones journey was working for an evangelical ministry in Birmingham and graduating from Bible college there in 1984. He came to Selma as pastor of First Independent Protestant Church, and later Church of the New Covenant. He learned of the Charismatic Episcopal Church in the early 1990s and was ordained as a priest in the CEC. At that point his congregation became Christ the King Charismatic Episcopal Church. In April of 1997, Jones was consecrated as a bishop. In 2005 became an Archbishop, the head of the Southeastern Province of the Charismatic Episcopal Church.

Archbishop Jones believes that both the original and continued vision of the Charismatic Episcopal Church is not three streams (charismatic, evangelical and sacramental) alone, but the mighty river which those three streams birth and feed. He puts it like this, “ The fullness of the Holy Spirit and His unmeasured anointing has always been God’s dream for us. The Holy Spirit and His anointing in fullness (which manifests Christ- likeness) is often referred to as ‘revival’ on both personal and corporate levels.” He adds, “I don’t believe that means we are just to wait for God to drop some kind of ‘Holy Ghost’ bomb (in a good sense) on us. Instead, I believe that God is waiting for us to step into the ‘revival’ that is Jesus and the compassionate supernatural life of fullness He lives. Ephesians 1:22c-23 says, ‘… The church which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.’