Wandering

Psalm 56:8 "You have kept count of my wanderings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?"

Bear with me—this post is a longer read than most will be. But before I can really explain where I find myself now, I need to look back on what brought me here. Please know that I do not judge these things—all of them are part of my story, and all of them are integral to bringing me to this place. My journey is not dissimilar to many others who have navigated this curious landscape of American Christianity.

The history goes something like this:

When I was born, my parents who were Roman Catholic, had me christened. Then when I was a year old my parents were divorced and when I was three, my mom had a conversion experience outside the RC church at a Charismatic meeting. She wanted to really encounter God and this charismatic movement seemed to provide that experience. She was recently divorced, alone with three children, she still had faith in God, and probably needed it more than ever. She wanted to study the Bible, to know everything it had to say and to live by it. Even though it certainly was not charismatic (there wasn’t a church like that in our small town) there was a Bible-preaching Independent Baptist church, so that is where we attended for several years. Our family at that point rejected the theology and traditions of the Roman Catholic church and became protestant in every sense.

Though I was very young, between three and six years old, I still can remember the hymns sung at that church, the sound of the piano, the color of the carpet and the texture of the pews, the school that was attached and where my Sunday school classrooms were. I can also remember how after one Sunday school class I told my teacher that I wanted to “ask Jesus into my heart.” She seemed very excited, and I was ushered out of the classroom to a back room of the church, dressed in a white robe and put into a chlorinated tank with the pastor in front of the church. The pastor asked if I wanted to be baptized, and did I want Jesus in my heart. I said “uh huh,” and down I went. My feet couldn’t reach the bottom of the tank. I was four.

Whether it was because of doctrine or some other reason, when I was six we left that church and went to an Assemblies of God church that met in the Grange Hall in our town. That also meant I had to go to public school for the first time since the Christian school was attached to the former church. I don’t have many memories of that church except for the very cool musical family that came and played blue-grass gospel music. We went to see them and apparently I had a cold. Mom had given me too much cough medicine and I slept through the whole thing. I was sorely disappointed when I awoke at the end of it, so we went back the next day so I could see the group properly.

Eventually that church fizzled and we went to a new church with a new school that I attended for fourth and fifth grade. That church was a Pentecostal church called Living Water Church and it met in a repurposed chicken house. Everyone was very excited when they put down new blue carpet, and the pastor said, “Everyone take your shoes off and get your feet wet in the water!” Of course we kids did, and at every service that followed. The pastor was very dynamic, very dramatic, and the church was full at every service. Watching him preach was a riveting experience—he would shout, he would cry, he would yell into the the mic, spit flying from his mouth, and when he was really into things he would do this interesting shuffle on one leg across the stage with the other leg out in front of him like Chuck Barry in Jonny B. Goode. His wife played the piano, his son played the drums—loudly. “Let God Arise, his enemies be scattered” they played, over, and over, and over again. People spoke out in tongues and then interpretations were given, prophecies were proclaimed, people were slain in the spirit, demons were managed, hands were laid on people, and money was given. Money was also stolen. And before long that pastor was no longer the pastor and Living Water Church was not the same. We left there with a lighter bank account and wounds that would henceforth cause me to question everything about The Church.

That put me at about age eleven, a rising sixth grader, heading back to public school and once again “between churches.” The pentecostal experience had left us pretty raw, and my mother accepted the invitation of some kind Mennonites to visit their church. We went, and that was where we stayed through the rest of my middle and high school days. It was calm there—preaching from the Bible, hymns sung a cappella in four part harmony, monthly hymn-sings, and the best potlucks in the world. This experience was the polar opposite to the Pentecostals, and may have been my first awakening to my need for a faith that was rooted in historical Christianity. The Mennonites were clannish and insular, but also very hospitable and accepting—after all, I couldn’t help that I wasn’t born a Yoder. They had generations of history and traditions that explained them. I did not, but I loved them and they loved me, in spite of myself.

In my high school years, until about my senior year, I was basically a good girl, but not what you’d call serious about my faith. I was coasting along—didn’t want to do anything too bad or too sinful. Either I was afraid to, or I didn’t want to upset my mother. As time went on I got involved in the Mennonite Youth Fellowship (MYF), met young people who were serious about their faith, and began to grow more serious about my own faith journey. I had been looking forward to college, to get away and to party, but largely because of the influence of these young people in MYF, I decided to abandon that trajectory and look into a campus fellowship.

I jumped headlong into Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), where we were encouraged by the campus leaders to get plugged into a local church. I tried. First I went to a Presbyterian Church on the recommendation of the IVCF campus pastor. A friend of mine started looking at Calvinism, and became so distraught at the concept of the those gnarly five points, in particular those of predestination and limited atonement, that she nearly lost her faith. I found that to be very disconcerting, so I left the Presbyterians and went to a Southern Baptist church that was walking distance from campus. I was a busy college student and socially, my IVCF activities and connections were all I had time for. I didn’t really have the emotional space to get involved with the people there. Eventually I stopped going to church at all. I still went to Bible study and fellowship meetings but church was not “it”.

Once out of college I went to a non-denominational charismatic church with my mom. Here I was given the opportunity to lead Bible studies, go overseas to study and teach, find mentors and loved ones, and grow as a young woman. I cannot deny that it was in this place that good, Christian people loved me and invested in me and helped to shape me, but there was still a void that was not being filled by the teaching of this church.

Over time, my heart grew hard to “church,” but I still had a very soft place for Christ. Somehow, in spite of it all, I wanted to know Him. I was a parched soul wandering in a landscape of confusing messages. Nothing made sense, but I still wanted Him in my life and to tell others about Him. I studied the Bible daily and tried to pray. My prayers usually felt flat and ineffective, attached to nothing but a bare hope that they were reaching their target. But I kept a daily “quiet time” in which I read my Bible and wrote prayers in a journal, and this was the essence of my religion.

My Personal Theology boiled down to this:

God was Real, Jesus was his Son, and the Holy Spirit was in operation in and among us, though I wasn’t sure how, but I believed fervently every word of scripture and that everything I needed for salvation was in that book. Through the scriptures, my faith was grounded. Nevertheless, I could not find any good example of that Church that Christ said he would build—that Church that would not be prevailed upon by the gates of hell. If what I had seen so far in my life was The One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, it did not resemble a bastion of the Kingdom of Heaven nor the Body of Christ.

My wanderings up to this point may be described mostly as a tumbling jumble of scattered doctrine, but on the Canterbury Trail I found a place where I could begin making order out of the chaos. It was in 1996 that I first began attending an Episcopal church with a friend, and after the chaotic church history I had experienced, it was good to be able to know what was coming each week in the order of the service, the liturgy, prayers, and weekly communion. It opened a portal of exploration into a more traditional faith that would remain with me even to today. That leg of the journey will be addressed my next post.