Why Randy's Going East - Part 2

Previously, in Part 1, I shared that the EFCA seemed like a good home for us, denomination-wise, and that the particular church we were attending seemed like a very good one. To fill that out just a bit—talk about a family-friendly church. Our girls were very well-loved by the nursery workers and Sunday School teachers and it was hard to have to tell them we were leaving when the time finally came to do so. We were in a supportive adult Sunday School class of parents of young children, and enjoyed their company and sharing a little bit of our lives together. I say all this to emphasize that it was not because of the people at our last church that we left it. Quite to the contrary.

Getting back to the “Christian Libertarianism™” (I'm going to trademark that phrase and make MILLIONS!) thing... Looking back on our experience in the EFCA, in my opinion, if you're in a church that does leave a lot of doctrinal specifics up to the parishioner, the church ends up somewhere on this spectrum:

1. No one in the church will be able to agree on much of anything, because of all the differences in doctrinal opinion, and there will be chaos.
2. Everyone in the church will ”get along“ without really agreeing on deeper theological matters, and therefore just have a weak sort of surface unity.
3. There will (mostly) be a unity of doctrinal belief—it just won't be codified.

I think our former church sat pretty well in the 3rd category. I'm glad, because of the three choices, that's probably the healthiest. The bad news was that we found ourselves kind of on the borderline of the that "non-official" doctrinal belief. I brought up baptism in Part 1; our EFCA church didn't hold an official position, denominationally speaking, but the pastors personally wouldn't baptize infants and the general church consensus seemed to be that Believer's Baptism was the proper thing to do. I struggled a lot with the decision to have Madeline baptized at Andrea's parents' Lutheran church. When we finally decided to do it, it almost felt like we were being rebels with regards to our church. It turned out that when we told everyone there that we'd had Madeline baptized, they were basically cool with it and didn't make a big deal out of it at all. That was relieving in a way, because I wanted to believe that, well, maybe this isn't such a big deal that we disagree on these things and we can still be in the same church etc. But looking back on it, I realize that, albeit maybe subconsciously, we felt a lack of unity in that we couldn't relate to anyone in our church having gone through the same experience.

There were a number of other areas where we just didn't feel unified with our church. As a list:

• We found it hard to engage spiritually in 30 minutes of praise music and 30-40 minutes of preaching. I kept hoping that we'd eventually be able to get comfortable with it, but we never got there. I had a difficult time connecting with the music. I don't know if I can quite explain why. Well I'm not going to try right now, anyway.
• What seemed like a really causal attitude towards Communion. Just going to leave that one there for now.
• It was hard for us to fit in with the close-knit community there and feel like we belonged. It was just too much of a different culture or something, I guess.

Ok, so that may seem like quite a bit of gory detail on why we left a church. I swear, I'm not writing it out of malice. My point is to highlight the evolution of line of thought on churches:

1. As a kid/teen: "I grew up in a Presbyterian church, and that was good enough for me. Other denominations are fine, I guess. But I'm pretty sure I'm in the 'right' one."
2. At college: "I still think I want to be Presbyterian, but now I'm meeting all these Christians from some different denominations (mostly Reformed, though a few Catholic), and you know what, they walk the faith. Or at least as much if not more so than most Presbyterians I know. Huh."
3. Back at my home church after college: "Well, I'll stay here for now because I'm most comfortable here. But I'm not sure if I'm fully into Calvinism. I mean there are just so many grey areas in the Bible. You can make legitimate arguments from Scripture for both sides of a debate. I just want to be at a church where God is working and I can catch some of that."
4. Upon arriving in Oregon: "Where in the world should we go to church? Hey look! A church that openly states that there are some issues that are up for debate and they won't make us take a stand on them one way or the other, as long as we hold to some core reformed/evangelical beliefs. That sounds cool."
5. In Oregon, months later: "Well, maybe we just don't fit in here. Well then where do we go? There are still so many up-in-the-air questions to debate, for which each denomination wants us to confess, 'Yes, I believe such-and-such is true.' I mean I guess maybe Lutheranism sounds pretty good. At least they treat communion very seriously and have a service that has a lot going on in it with the Liturgy so my mind can stay focused. But I still don't know if I agree with them enough that I could ever join the Lutheran church...."

To be continued (again!)... Part 3