A Crack in the Bubble

 One of the pivotal moments in our young family's journey to Mother Church was Christmas of 2017 when our senior pastor at the time was not present during one of the most important seasons of the liturgical year. Before I explain his absence, I think it's important I ramble a bit about how I came to see his absence as problematic.  At the time, we were driving 30 min every Sunday morning to attend a large "Evangelical Non-Denominational" congregation located in South Orlando. It was our first year of marriage and this congregation had been a good place for us to attend as we prepared for our lives together. We enjoyed the preaching/ Bible teaching we were receiving from the senior pastor and we even had a few friends that checked on us during those early months of adjustment. However, due to my wife's experiences with the Reformed Episcopal movement during her time in Northern Virginia, she felt a longing for more "smells and bells" on big holidays like Christmas and Easter. We would supplement the "high church" approach of a very warm Anglican (dare I say, Anglo-catholic) parish to counter-balance the "low-church" approach of our regular "big-box" evangelical congregation we normally attended. I was familiar with this parish because it sits right across the street from my parent's house and in Christmas Eve of 2013, I stumbled into a Midnight Mass there after my mother and father fell asleep early that night. I remember being completely lost in the liturgy and order of the service, but was captivated by the beauty and reverence. I always wanted to go back and have this experience again. However, I was still trapped in the snare of Protestant heresy and didn't return until Kimberly dragged me there for Ash Wednesday of 2017. I remember being so confused about what I was witnessing that day. It seemed to remind of the times I attended St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Pana, IL with my grandparents, but that had been years ago couldn't even be completely sure. I was so conditioned to believe that all memorized prayers and rituals were not "from the heart" and couldn't possibly the sign of an authentic walk with Jesus that I really just tried to appreciate it at a visceral level. I even made an assumption about the parishioners of St Alban's. I assumed because they were in some strange, little liturgical church that they were probably ultra-progressives and their views wouldn't jive with my conservative fundamentalist roots. I really have no idea why I thought this. Looking back I guess I could have thought that they were Episcopalians and in my experience, that's usually how people from that camp believed. In fact, I can remember a time when I believed anyone who attended a mainline protestant church was some (disclaimer: forgive me. This is pre-2017 Brent speaking here) liberal wacko taking up the mantle for every new perversion under the sun. I saw their lack of a standard for sin as a sign of a deficiency in their relationship with Jesus. That's how I justified it in my mind. I thought "these people are trusting in empty repeated words and works. If they were serious about their faith, they would have more serious quiet times where they would pray and read God's word, and He would illuminate the truth about gay marriage and abortion to them. But I met someone in 2004 that sort of derailed my little belief system. That person was my roommate Brock Friese. Brock and I were graduate assistants at Greenville College in Greenville, IL and we shared a house with the other GA's a block away from the campus. In my dealings with Brock, I had the opportunity to interact with someone who was very devout and centered in his approach to life. He was an active member within the Lutheran Missouri Synod. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but our close proximity made me interact seriously with someone from his world for the first time. Before Brock, I had been exposed to people with a liturgical worldview (yes, it is a worldview. I will do my best to explain it through this blog), but I had always kept them at arms distance. It didn't help that these other people most of the time happened to be eligible Roman Catholic girls I was attracted to, but couldn't allow myself to act on it for fear of being "unequally yoked." Yes, "unequally yoked" was a cringeworthy term our mother openly used in our family to described marrying those who didn't have "fellowship" with Jesus. . . So Brock was able to get past the defenses I had set up for females that could drag me away from the "true Christian family" I desired to raise. (Yes, I know how terrible this sounds) It was Brock that exposed me to the idea of a liturgical calendar. He was often leaving the GA house to attend services set up around the various events on the Christian Calendar. I had to reconcile this with fact that I didn't really have an equivalent on my Evangelical side. He wasn't loud or showy about his beliefs. His piety and humility stood in contrast to the Pentecostal and fringe home church circles I grew up in. Brock was challenging assumptions I had long held about people from the "high church" world. And even though I never attended a Lutheran service with him, it prepared the soil to open my heart to the experience and people that attended liturgical churches. This would allow me to attend St. Alban's with an open mind and heart. As I interacted with the parishioners, I realized they were zealous about God's Word. We were like minded in our worldview. Because I begin to perceive what I saw as an authenticity, it allowed me to delve deeper into their views. As I am writing this, I am realizing how big of a trap the belief system I grew up with was. It was set up to keep any dissenting thought away.  I will close this first installment of this topic with a prayer for people I knew that grew up in this lie. I imagine they are hurting too. I'm praying that the light of Mother Church finds those like Aaron, Adam, Blair, Joel, Ben, Peter, Nicholas, Josh, Joel, and David that were raised by well meaning parents, but were not exposed to 2,000 years of church teaching and the seven sacraments Our Lord has instituted through His Church for our benefit.