A friend of mine asked me today: "What is your choice of denominational affiliation and why did you choose it?"
Here's my response:
Here's my response:
I became an Episcopalian in college. Initially, I was drawn to the church for its sacra-mentality -- the complete immersion in an experience of God’s grace that was life-long and thoroughly incarnational. When I began exploring whether to be confirmed in the church, I interviewed the bishop a number of times. One of his most significant comments to me was, "We are a catholic church in love with freedom".
It's hard to pin down our sprawling Anglican identity to a few words, but the bishop's concise phrase comes close. Yes, we are deeply grounded in things ancient and universal, but we also have a propensity to explore fresh expressions and new perspectives, with no overriding authority to tell us no. When my seminary dean handed me my diploma, he did not warn me never to rock the boat as a priest of the church. What he said was, "Don't ever lose your guts."
Could any other tradition have provided me such a fruitful mix of structure and improvisation? Some churches possess great freedom but not so much of the sacramental. Some have theological depth or aesthetic richness but lack the gene for adaptation. Some have great spirit but less intellectual or poetic content. Some practice prophetic witness but have a weak vocabulary for mystery. Some think answers are better than questions.
The Episcopal Church has formed me as a Christian who wants and needs the best of all of these attributes, to the exclusion of none.
It's not a perfect church. We can be complacent, inward-looking, and unreasonably proud. We can ask too little of ourselves -- we've been majoring on that, in my opinion, since at least 2003. I for one would prefer less reserve and more passion, less order and more wildness. Still, it's home. It is family.
Since Kendra and I have married, I've found a great deal of all those good things in the Methodist Church, too. My fear, of course, is that United Methodism in America has become beholden to so many fundamentalist forces that it makes tradition with adaptation difficult in Methodism. While I think that’s the home to which God has been calling me for the past four or five years, I'm not sure it will ever be home in the same way that the Episcopal Church has been.
I realize, in writing this, that it's difficult to say that I've ever "chosen" a particular denomination. In fact, I'd say it's more accurate that God has called me into one or another for a time. It's hard to pin down any particular reason I've made the choices I've made. But it's also true that that's how the Spirit works. Maybe it's the wrong question to ask how I decided in which church I'd stake my identity and my calling. Maybe it's better to ask whose choice it's been all along? I'm fairly certain -- in the way I'm not certain about very much at all -- that it's been God's choice all along.
That's because I don't think I really even chose to become a Christian. I think God pursued me, hounded me, wooed me into a relationship through Jesus Christ in the Spirit that simply wouldn't have been (and isn't now) possible without the Church. Whether that's the Episcopal or Methodist or even some other tertium quid one.