I was raised in a Christian home. Specifically it was the Church of Christ. When I was a kid, I thought of the Church of Christ as religion. That's simply what "church" meant to me. When I was in my 20's, I thought of the Church of Christ as evangelical Christianity. And a not especially good version thereof.
These days I think of it as a cult. But that's a bit of a long story (which is a polite way of saying I'll deal with the full story some other time).
In any case, I left the Church of Christ when I was 18. I stuck around long enough to get baptized but that was about it. I eventually came back to Christianity when I was 24 in November 2004. But that too is a bit of a long story (which is a polite way of saying I may very well never deal with the full story). When I came back, I eventually joined up with a fairly big Southern Baptist church nearby in March 2006. They're quite prolific in my area and seemed like a good fit with my views of Christianity as filtered through the evangelicals. If you believe in alternate universes, surely there's one out there where I happily lived the rest of my days in the Southern Baptist denomination, and possibly that particular SB church.
But that's not this universe. In this universe I had a horrible experience a few years after joining. The short version is that I made enemies with some of the wrong people in a small group of 20- and 30-something singles I had begun teaching. These enemies complained about me to a ignorant, busy-body church "pastor" of the church who never even attempted to listen to my side of the story before firing me as the teacher of the small group and sending out an e-mail to my mini-flock which virtually destroyed my credibility with them.
On the one hand, I have to cop to a certain amount of blame for what happened. Fair is fair. But on the other hand, NOTHING I did merited the treatment I received. I have to believe that in the hands of a less incompetent pastor, the situation might've been handled more fairly. But that isn't what happened. What happened is that this Pastorus Ignoramus blindly accepted the word of people with an obvious axe to grind simply to illustrate an unrelated point to his colleagues about "how to deal with problems". No kidding. Quote, unquote. He needed to show his subordinates how to handle these things. I was just a pawn in that church's politics. My termination took place in November 2010.
As a side note, I should say that I know for a fact that the church has now and has always had problems finding lay-members to host Bible studies, lead/teach small groups, volunteer and do other things. With respect to my experience, my hunch is that they haven't figured out why they're having such problems.
It does amuse me though that Pastorus Ignoramus seemed genuinely surprised when, after all the above took place, I was reluctant to return his phone calls and flat-out refused to meet with him to "discuss the problem". What would've been the point? Even IF I had somehow convinced the nitwit of anything, it was already too late to do anything about it because his ready, fire, aim approach had already ruined my reputation and ministry beyond "restoration", as the SB's are so fond of saying. I don't know but I'm willing to bet that the colossal prick still doesn't see what he did was so ineptly handled that a retarded monkey could have handled the task more competently.
As a postscript to this part of the story, it came to my attention that he was fired less than a year after his dust up with me because he had gotten far too big for his britches and the senior pastor at this SB church had taken enough crap from him. Then as now, I understood that it's wrong to take pleasure in other people's misfortunes... but I'd be lying if I didn't feel an extraordinary amount of schadenfreude at this bit of news.
-- Where To Go From Here; Wandering the Wilderness
Obviously there was no way I could continue at that SB church. Nobody would accept me there ever again. And to be honest, SB doctrine (to the extent they even know what such a thing is) had become less and less comfortable a fit over the years. It's harder to understand that when you all you do is sit in the pew every Sunday. But when you have to teach Bible lessons to a group of your peers, you start seeing holes in some evangelical doctrines.
Still, the Southern Baptist denomination was all I really knew so that's what I attempted to stick to. Again, if you believe in alternate universes, there's one out there where things worked out for me at SB Church #2. And honestly, that was very nearly the case here. The members I met were uniformly cool, I joined up with a new singles group and they were all great. No static whatsoever.
And then some familiar faces from SB Church #1 started showing up. Basically the Young Singles group I'd been fired from had fairly well disintegrated after I was terminated. It was so bad at one point (and may be still) that they didn't have even have a regular teacher anymore so they just stopped meeting except for occasional get-togethers at somebody's house. Some people might call that an unfortunate turn of events. Me, I see it as poetic justice.
Schadenfreude, remember?
Now, I didn't like very many of those people back when I thought I had a God-ordained calling to teach them. So what do you think the odds were of me sticking around when I had the option to leave at any time for any reason or for no reason? So I sent the group's teacher an e-mail telling him that I thought he was cool, the "natives" of SB Church #2 were all cool too but I'm sick of my bad reputation, I'm sick of being "infamous" and I just want to be left the hell alone from now on... and I realized then that there was no hope of that ever happening at his church so, in spite of the fact that it wasn't personal at all, I would not be attending his group or the larger church in the future.
Among small group teachers, you see, I figured this amounted to "professional" courtesy. If someone had walked away from my group at SB Church #1 way back when, I'd have liked to know why. In my misguided idealism, I would've tried to "restore" everything so that we could all superficially continue as One Big Happy Southern Baptist Family.
And to his credit, the small group teacher said he understood but wished things could be otherwise because he liked me on a personal basis and would've liked me to continue coming to the group. He added though that I was welcome back any time I want. This was February of 2013.
That, of course, raised the question of just what I would do from then on. The incestuous nature of SB churches meant that there was a statistical possibility of seeing one of my enemies at any other SB church I chose to attend. It was possible.
Incidentally, right about now, some of you might be saying to yourselves "but Magnus, but Magnus, our Lord said we shouldn't have enemies!" Um, no. He didn't. What our Lord said was that we should love our enemies and do good to those that hate us. At no time did he ever say we can't have enemies. Primarily that's because it's not entirely up to us whether we have enemies or not.
As I say though, I had to figure something out. While I was driving around one night, inspiration struck. Back in 2006 when I had first been casting about for a denomination to join, the main thing that kept me away from the Episcopal church was their abject incompetence when it comes to matters of Biblical authority vis a vis ordaining women and open homosexuals.
Yes, I believe both are unbiblical. If that disturbs you, there are more PC blogs you can find if you try really hard.
To be sure, that confusion didn't affect the entire denomination but at the same time I didn't want to have to worry about my soul in a church struggling over matters that were settled long ago. So, as per the above, I skipped the Episcopal church entirely and instead stayed with a fairly traditional brand of evangelical Christianity. As low as my opinion about the SB's might be today, at least they're right on matters of women and homosexuals. You have to give them that much.
But that was 2006. By 2013 the situation had changed substantially and there is now an alternative Anglican body in this country called the Anglican Church of North America. A parish thereof was located near my house and so I resolved to check it out. Over time, I had become more friendly to the idea of liturgical worship. The reason for that is because all Christianity has liturgy. As someone else once said, the issue comes down to what you're willing to put in writing. The main difference between evangelical Christians and the "liturgical denominations" is that one group was willing to write their liturgy down while the other one isn't.
-- All Roads Lead to Canterbury (or Nigeria)
When I say that my first Anglican worship service was culture shock from beginning to end, bear in mind that this was coming from the perspective of an entire lifetime spent in the Church of Christ and Southern Baptist denominations. At the same time though, there was an inescapable feeling that I'd experienced something ancient and powerful.
That has been my pattern for this past year. I've been attending worship services at this ACNA parish and loving it. I'd reached a point when I had begun considering myself an Anglo-Catholic. I recited the Rosary from time to time, experimented with various prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, developed a friendship with the rector of the parish and had generally begun settling in with the Anglicans.
However, I said I'd become Anglo-Catholic. I'll probably tackle it more in future posts but suffice it to say that I'd start having severe problems with the Reform theology I'd been taught (and had taught myself) all my life. But basically I couldn't get my head around certain obvious Catholic doctrines. So I compromised by calling myself an Anglo-Catholic. To people who asked, I said I was as Catholic as the Catholic church would let me be.
However, after some study on my part, I made two major conclusions. The first is that for as useful as ACNA may be, Anglicanism in America may well be doomed. The Episcopal church seems determined to embrace irrelevance while ACNA is not in communion with Canterbury and, in any case, doesn't seem to have caught on. Anglicanism may have been what Christianity was in America for decades but things change. And not always for the better. The second thing was that Catholics have been here all along, likely weren't going anywhere and had a structure which made the heresy that has engulfed the Episcopal church virtually impossible.
-- All Roads Lead to Rome
However, I did more research into Catholic doctrine and found that many of the doctrines I had problems with were either explained to me by ignorant Protestants/Evangelicals or else in an incomplete way by Catholic laity. When a qualified Catholic teacher or writer explains the doctrines, they become a lot more believable. Their relative stability combined with doctrinal and liturgical consistency made them an attractive choice.
This impression was only strengthened after recently attending a Catholic wedding, where the priest explained the value and purpose of marriage and thus how the only valid manifestation of that must be traditional man/woman unions. He spoke with conviction mixed with a generous helping of warmth and compassion. He wasn't malicious in his statements nor is the Catholic church in their policy. They have simply had 2,000 years to mull their policies over while most of their detractors are barely old enough to drink.
The other factor was a careful review of the writings of the early church fathers. An honest reading of their letters and private musings indicates that their religion was obviously Roman Catholicism. That is the church. The church. The one founded by our Lord.
Thus was born the idea for My Catholic Year. As the name should indicate, and as I said in my previous post, that entails living as a Catholic through the year of 2014. On some level, I'm reasonably confident this will result in full conversion and so I'll begin RCIA right away. Why delay the inevitable, right?
More to follow.
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