on your move to orthodoxy

ON YOUR MOVE TO ORTHODOXY
* I too was sought out and saved by the Grace of God near the end of the
twentieth century, just a few months prior to your own conversion. And as
one of my best and longest standing friends, I do not need to elaborate on
the hellish secular life from which the Gospel extracted me. I was but a
babe in Christ when we met, but my bookish nature had already allowed me to
generally pull ahead of others in my faith and even lead a few friends to
faith in Christ. In terms of my personality, you are also painfully aware
that Christ had a massive repair list on His hands when He brought me into
the fold. That work is ongoing three decades later.
* If you will recall, I had labeled the "evangelical" movement of the mid
eighties as the "effervescent movement and generally held it's minions in a
fairly unbiblical but justified contempt. The faith taught me in my
Biblical education was strictly based on scripture, antiquities, and
history. The element of faith was always the necessary mark of the follower
of Christ, but that faith was based on a rational assent. I found the
emotional goo presented to me as spirituality wanting in intellect, sense
and good hygiene.
* I also quickly concluded that God would not let fourteen centuries of
humanity burn with no recourse and chose rather to justifiably conclude that
God had always preserved his remnant from the dawn of time as illustrated in
the Bible. Just today the last remnants of dispensationalism were
effectively blown out of existence in my eschatological thinking. At the
very same time I strikingly found that I was held in genuine respect, which
is a rare phenomena in my life.
* My parents had held me in absolute contempt via their own addictions,
neurosis and bigotry. A disabled child with any value other than slave
labor and a target for abuse found no home in their cognition. Christ used
the gaping emptiness in my life to bring me into a Church that though
declining at the time was still fairly Biblical. And under the ministry of
a kindly elderly woman who coached the quiz team combined with some
literature, salvation came. But I had originally been attracted to that
Church because it was the only place my platitude of ghastly emotional
conundrums might find acceptance. The people held me as a contemptible
inferior out of their over bloated self esteem and I knew it.
* But in college I found true respect and spiritual growth in the teaching
of genuine Christian scholars I hold as among the most godly and humble I
have yet known. More importantly, the Church I became involved in possessed
the biblical aptitude and intelligence to overlook my emotional and social
maladies and find a young man who exuded passion for the cause of Christ. I
was accepted, loved and welcome into the homes of those people. For the
first time in my life outside of the chess club and the workplace I
belonged. And that Church at the time was steeped in traditional worship,
liturgy and high church hymns sufficient to make many a catholic or orthodox
comfortable. I fell in love with that style of worship and seek it out to
this day. It is home.
* My Graduate School experience allowed for even further growth in the
reformed tradition as I attended such a ministry as well. But when my
Father's death forced me home to care for my ailing mother, I made the
mistake of following a friend to a church that repeatedly showed contempt
for my physical limitations. Being a Bible college graduate as I was and
being convinced I could change the world, I signed up where I did not
belong. As a youth worker, I had promised myself that If I ever started in
that field, I would see the younglings through from middle to high school
graduation. I knew all too well the pain caused by the short tenures of
youth workers and had sworn not to follow that example.
* The next church I attended apparently wanted me there to be a token
"blind man" or something along those lines. My role was restricted to
attendance, answering questions about disability and putting money from my
meager resources in the plate. I thought I was happy because the church had
the traditional hymns and liturgy I liked and some fairly solid teaching
from an old interim pastor at the time. But as time went on, I was expected
to simply attend more and more meetings with no opportunity for ministry.
All too often I was taunted with the wealth and social standing of the
members, yet told not to turn to the church in need. I learned to dress
sharply, thinking these rich "Christians" would offer work, but discovered
that assumption invalid as well.
* So there the quandary surfaced. Every church I attended outside of my
home town embraced me warmly and every church in my home town looked down on
me for my social inadequacies, poverty or disability. It must be a regional
problem, right? Wrong. Now do not misunderstand my dyspepsia for a lack of
gratitude for all those years. I became a man at the hands of some rather
intolerant taskmasters. I stuck my ministry out at a church where the
pastor told me to keep my blind hands off the photocopier, an elder told me
"blind people can not work" and the church board insisted they would "hire
someone who can see" rather than place me on the payroll. And from that
youth group I made life long friends.. I met five of my six godchildren at
that church. And those people who befriended me and then departed early in
my tinnier remain loyal to this day. Implausibly, they possessed more
sense than I. And then several moved out of town for career purposes.
* The key is this. I sought belonging when I should have sought the Bible.
The church I spent the past three Sundays at genuinely respects me. And the
high church hymns and liturgy are there. They would probably call
themselves evangelical and they would be accurate in that claim.
Unfortunately, the very term "evangelical" has been soiled by the hypocrisy
and shallow approach to scripture common to the seeker sensitive movement.
And that movement has also unfortunately associated itself with contemporary
worship and political activism. The traditional worship of the ancient
church rubbed off on the first churches during the great reformation and
remains active in very isolated locations in the protestant evangelical
movement today. Protestant churches where the Bible is still taught do
exist and at least some of them have reverted to, or perhaps never left the
traditional style of worship. Whether through action or intent, this fact
allows them to distinguish themselves from the pagan secularism of the
shallow and rapidly failing seeker contemporary movement. A Biblical
"evangelical" protestant church more closely resembles the catholic or the
orthodox than it does the main line and seeker friendly protestant churches.
* The defining test for a Biblical Church is the extent to which it
complies in teaching and practice to the Bible and the millennia old creeds
and confessions the rich history of the Church as a whole offers. The
protestant reformation had a reforming effect on the catholic and orthodox
as well. When the protestant apostates fall to the very hypocrisy from
whence they sprouted, perhaps a reformed catholic and orthodox will rise and
take the place in the world of Christendom occupied by the fluff of the
seeker friendly country clubs. I only hope that the rich theology and
history generated in the first four centuries of the protestant movement is
preserved. I do not believe God will long suffer the tendency of the
effervescent seeker sensitive movement to excuse their own hypocrisy. So
hold in there. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!