So, following Andrea's series on her backstory of why we're attending St. Anne and are seriously considering becoming Orthodox, I felt it was time to present my perspective. If I don't get around to it now I don't know when I will! Plus I don't think I'll feel like I can write on other subjects until this has been written. So, without further ado...
Where to begin? It is indeed hard to pick a point of beginning. My whole life, in a sense, has brought me to this point. For now, I'll try to stick to what's happened since we've been in Oregon.
OK, so for pretty much all of 2012 (through November, that is) we had been attending an EFCA church. We chose this church for a number of reasons, but a big one was their acceptance of members with a wide variety of positions on what they called “non-essentials”. I have to almost chuckle a bit because the EFCA, in attempting not to make doctrinal statements about certain issues, does so anyway by calling them “non-essentials”! But to be fair, they essentially hold to generally Reformed Evangelical theology.
Why was this “Christian Libertarianism” so attractive to me, you might ask?
Well, I grew up in the Presbyterian church, where I was kindof/sortof comfortable with their theology about Baptism and Communion. At least, I was pretty firmly in the camp of, “Communion might have some sort of mystical significance, but we can't know that from the Bible, so it's mostly just a symbol;” I held more-or-less the same position on Baptism. Ever since college I'd struggled about my infant baptism (paedobaptism, for the geeks out there), but ultimately (Maybe out of social convenience? Eeek.) took the infant baptism side of the argument. Most of the time. Well anyway, the difficulty in coming to Oregon and visiting the Lutheran church of Andrea's parents was that the Lutheran church does believe in the true body and true blood of Christ “in, with and under” the elements (or something like that). I was uncomfortable enough with that to say, “Ok, I don't think I can be a Lutheran.”
We started looking around. I didn't think a Baptist church would work because of the whole infant baptism thing, and I was wary of the direction the PCUSA was moving in, as a denomination. No other Presbyterian churches were within 20 minutes of where we were living. After visiting a few other churches, we came upon this EFCA church and I thought, “Hey, great! I can be with other believers and even though we don't match up perfectly on all areas of doctrine, we can still be a church together! That sounds good.” The EFCA believes that all Christians should be baptized, but doesn't take a position for or against infant baptism (at a denominational level...). So I was good-to-go in that department. After attending a few times we decided that we would start attending regularly. I felt like I could see that God was really and truly working in this church and I wanted to be part of that. I still do believe that God is indeed working in this and many other churches of all flavors around the world.
Also, I'm totally leaving out many of the discussions Andrea and I had about each others' feelings about these churches, but between my thoughts here and Andrea's in her posts hopefully you'll get an idea of the big picture.
Continued in Part 2.
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