My Faith Story, Part I

I attended a wonderful program at my parish last night that featured the Rev'd. Jim Adams, founding director of The Center for Progressive Christianity. Father Adams spoke for a couple of hours on what it is to be a progressive Christian, and how we have largely abdicated our claim to the truths of the Bible to the Christian Right. Among the points discussed last night, the one that struck me as being most accurate and most worrisome was the notion that many of the people in the pews of Progressive Christian churches. such as my church, cannot readily articulate why it is that they choose to be Christian, and why they choose to go to church. In contrast, it was said, people going to Fundamentalist/Evangelical churches, especially of the "mega-church" variety, can often tick off a list of reasons they follow Christianity and why they attend their particular church. In short, Progressive Christians are either uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the idea of sharing their faith stories.

The only way I know to begin to change that is by sharing my faith story in this forum, where literally fives of people may read it.

I was baptized into the Body of Christ as a young child. I was old enough to remember bits of the ceremony -- the chill of the water, the white cloth used to mop the Holy Water from my newly Christened head, the anxiety of my parents -- but not old enough to remember exactly when this occured, neither the date nor my age nor even the season. The baptism took place at Friedens Lutheran Church in Gibsonville, NC, the church in which I grew up.

As a child, I don't remember particularly liking or disliking church. Much like school, it was a regular activity in which I had to participate. As with school, I figured at some point that if I had to be there I might as well put my best foot forward and get as much out of the experience as I could. In church I sang in the children's choir and served as an acolyte. In my church the acolyte's sole job was to light and extinguish the altar candles, as opposed to acolyting in the Episcopal Church which is much more involved and choreographed.

The normal "path" for children in the Lutheran Church, at least when I was a child in the Lutheran Church, was to start catechism at around 6th grade, join the youth group, and eventually make a mature statement of faith, a process known as confirmation. At about the time in my life that this would have occurred, my parents separated. My mother, sister and I moved too far away from Friedens to make it practical to continue attending services there. We talked for a couple of years about finding a Lutheran Church near our new home. We never went, even once.

I found myself drawn towards atheism as a teenager. I can't remember when I first heard the word, but I remember that I was shocked to learn such a belief system -- that is, the absence of a belief system -- existed. It seemed instantly comforting and familiar. Corporate worship was a distant memory by this time, and my only connection with Christianity was Christmas and Easter presents. Most years I was shocked when Easter Sunday arrived and the presents showed up on the couch.

In high school my atheism was prominent. During my sophomore year my English teacher did a unit on the Bible as literature. Days before our exam, and only as an afterthought, she polled the class to see if we were familiar with certain passages from the Bible not covered specifically during our classroom sessions or assigned as homework. She assumed we would have learned about these passages in Sunday School. There were three of us in the class who didn't know these unassigned texts. My teacher seemed genuinely shocked, and my classmates were quite obviously surprised to learn that there were non-churchgoers among them.

You see, in the South, after someone asks you who you are and where you're from, the next question is always, "Where do you go to church?" Usually, what is meant is, "Which Baptist Church do you go to?" There are plenty of folks in the South who don't understand that the Catholic Church is a Christian organization. I'm not lying.

I remember getting into arguments with people I sang with in high school over my lack of faith. A big part of that was my own damned fault -- I once spoke ill of Christianity, although I think I actually expressed disdain over all organized religion. One boy, a minister's son, said that he just wanted to hit me until I converted. That's the most warped example of Evangelism I've ever run across, even to this day. Another boy I sang with, whom I admired because of his beautiful tenor voice, argued vociferously with me over the concept of evolution. He asked me, "So you're telling me that if I put a fish in a pond for a million years it'll become a person?" My response was, "No, it'll become a very dead fish." Creationism arguments are rarely more poignant or insightful than this.

The summer after I graduated from high school I was hired by my high school choir director's wife to be a paid singer at the Presbyterian Church in downtown Greensboro. I dutifully showed up each Sunday, put on the itchy polyester choir robe and sang whatever music was put in front of me. I felt no connection to the music -- I sang sacred texts a lot during high school and assigned them no more significance than musical settings of texts from Shakespeare or John Donne. When the service was over I hung up my robe, got in my car and went home.

When I entered college in the fall of 1991 I was still an avowed atheist. I also considered myself to be heterosexual. By the time I graduated in the winter of 1994 I had rediscovered my identity in the Body of Christ, and understood that I was something I feared being all my life -- gay. Perhaps no other revelation about myself was more important in guiding me down the path towards faith, although it was a tragedy in my life that really caused me to start on that path in the first place. In my next entry, I'll talk about what happened in college that changed my life.