Commentary: Converting to ‘liturgical,’ or why growing up a Christian in the South was not good

Did you know that authentic faith is expressed by worshiping Jesus in living rooms instead of sanctuaries? By listening to “teachings” by uneducated but anointed men? That was my neo-Pentecostal church.

Or, if you were a male who went to my Independent Missionary Baptist school, did you know that you identified with Jesus by having your hair cut over your ears, and rounded ever so mildly around the top?

Did you know that guidance for basic life decisions comes from mystical experiences? From the neo-Pentecostal version of “seeking the Lord”? From no-mind, trance-like states that “allow” God to speak to you?

Did you know that girls’ skirts should be no shorter than two inches above the knee? That teachers should check this with a ruler?

Did you know that God’s grace is not sufficient — until you have spoken in tongues? His grace was not sufficient during worship services in which we would sing, “Taste and see / that the Lord is good”, of course.

Did you know that impending damnation in the fires of Hell is the only reason to embrace God?

Did you know that seminary training is an obstacle to The Movement of the Holy Spirit?

Did you know that all those things that the Church has believed, taught, and confessed on the basis of the Word of God — throughout the centuries — are irrelevant to what the anointed prophets are saying today? That God changes according to where the donations are going?

Did you know that the primary reason for Bible classes in school was to learn moral principles and precise rules?

By the way — if you agree with the neo-Pentecostal, Latter Rain crowd, then you are spiritual, and if you don’t agree with them, you’re not spiritual. You are spiritual enough to agree with them if you are spiritual, and you are un-spiritual if you do not agree with them because you don’t have spiritual eyes to see. (Dizzying, no?)

Did you know that, later, in neo-Pentecostal schools, children must be lashed for misplacing decimal points?

Did you know that the Holy Spirit was guiding adults to spank kids for misplacing decimal points?

For saying “um” when looking at a flashcard, because that was pretending to know the answer when one did not?

After which, we would sing the song based on “The Fruits of the Spirit” in The Epistle to the Galations. “For the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace…”

For much of my adult life, I have felt like this: if what I went through was love, joy, and peace, then I really don’t want any of it.

Through winding life paths, many doubts, much lingering anxiety and fear related to God and the Bible, and admittedly a couple of decent churches and Christian organizations, I eventually arrived at Trinity Episcopal Church, and some changes began to take place within me.

Liturgical, sacramental Christianity reloaded the words “Jesus,” and “Bible,” and “living faith,” and “Holy Spirit,” and “creation” for me.

Those words are, across the globe today, loaded with all kinds of abstract content, varying from group to group, to the point of nearly being meaningless terms.

My experience of, and participation in, liturgical, sacramental Christianity began to unload the bad content from those words and reload it with good, stable, sturdy content.

Such an experience is lost on those who never knew anything other than liturgical worship — who never witnessed how masses of Pentecostal Christians really worship and believe today — and it is lost on those adult converts who see traditions as impediments to passionate faith, as obstacles to the Gospel message.

And my kind of experience is lost in the current culture wars within the Anglican Communion.

But without liturgical, sacramental worship, I would never have been able to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

After reading Anglican T.S. Eliot, reading Anglican C.S. Lewis, reading Anglican-turned-Catholic Thomas Howard, experiencing liturgical worship, learning about the symbolic and developmental strengths with Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, and meditating on passages from the Book of Common Prayer, I strongly suspect what, at bottom, I can only hope to be true: that the Lord is really there, and He is really good.

And all those Bible verses buzzing around in my head have been drawn into a new formation.

-CFB