February 8, 2008
Wither the Protestant
To begin, I should give some background of who I am and where I’ve been. I was born in Illinois, and at the time my mom baptized me in a Catholic church. However, shortly after that my mom fell away from the faith for a period of time and it wasn’t until I was six years old that I had any other real exposure to a religious setting. When I was 6 my mom sent me off to the local churches Summer Youth program.
The church was a Salvation Army church about a block from my apartment. The youth director and I got along quite well and as the summer progressed he invited me to come to church and Sunday school, which I did. It wasn’t many weeks before I was responding to the altar call and giving my life to Christ. Yes, I was quite young at the time, but I still remember that I knew exactly what I was doing at the time and wanted to do it. Needless to say I started getting very involved in the Salvation Army church, and eventually my mom came back to faith and eventually joined the church with me.
For those who don’t know much about the Salvation Army, it’s an evangelical movement that sprouted from Methodism in England. It maintains a military type structure in how it is organized and is very focused on serving the poor and people’s salvation. However, something was stirring in me after years and years of worshiping in this church. I was hungering for something more, deeper and richer in tradition than what they were teaching. In particular I had heard about things called “sacraments” and I wanted to learn more about what those were about. So when I was in high school I started a journey that landed me at a Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod). My best friend and his family attended this church so I was quite comfortable going there and had even been there a bit as a younger kid for Vacation Bible School and such. It was at this church that I was introduced to the Liturgy, and I fell in love with it. I worshiped at this church for most of my high school years and into college. I even attended a Missouri Synod college here in town. However, in college I started to have some internal conflicts. I loved the liturgy and deep sense of history and reverence that was present in Lutheran worship, but as I sat through my theology classes, and spent time talking to other Lutherans it became very apparent that I was different. I just couldn’t go along with the notion of sola fide or sola scriptura. I felt that human free will was more ‘free’ than what I was learning from Luther, and that my notions of sanctification just didn’t fit with those around me. So in college, in addition to keeping my membership in the LCMS, I also joined a Methodist church near campus. Feeling that maybe returning to Wesley (the grandfather of the Salvation Army) would give me some comfort, since Methodism was much more in line with what I believed.
At this point in my story “life” took over. I got married, tried doing some Seminary but dropped out, had kids and got a job and bought a house. At this point religion took a bit of a back seat for me and I just decided to go along with my wife to her church. This was a large Lutheran mega-church that had gone through a charismatic revival and was more similar to Assembly of God or Baptist or Evangelical churches than Lutheran. I met many good people here, and it was a comforting place for the two of us to be, so I decided to just stick around there.
Then in 2002, around the time my second son was born, I started on a new journey. I began going to Seminary again in a working-adults program (one night a week). It was while I was attending this Baptist seminary that everything started to change for me in terms of my perception of God and faith, and most importantly, church and the Bible. The more and more I studied and learned about God and His history with mankind, the more and more troubled I became, thinking about where I was going to end up in any type of ministry. It was at this Baptist seminary that my faith was tested and challenged and in the end I came out a different person than when I went in.
However, that’s the next part of the story….
Written and posted by Jamison on February 8, 2008, 11:37 am.
Filed under: General Discussion, Looking Back, Our Roots
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Matt said,
February 8, 2008 @ 1:22 pm
Aw, man…doncha hate these cliffhanger endings?
Michael said,
February 8, 2008 @ 3:19 pm
I know. Fortunately, I know how the “ending” goes.