Exes

Some might wonder why I have an occasional interest in the doings of the denominations I used to attend. As an Orthodox Christian I have found the fullness of the faith, so what matter is it to me what the Baptists or Episcopalians might be up to? I think it must be a similar feeling to being married (an experience I have yet to be graced with) and hearing news about a girl one used to date- perhaps even have been serious about at one point. You can be quite happily married and completely not interested in picking up an old relationship, yet still be interested in hearing what that person might be up to- you can feel joy to hear she has had a happy marriage with plenty of children, a pang of sadness to hear about her recent misfortune, or deeply shocked to find out she is in an abusive relationship.


With the (Southern) Baptists news tends to be funny in the way that one hears that the quirky girl one used to know is still up to her same old tricks. Things have changed for the Southern Baptist Convention, true (why, they actually have a black president now), but as far as Christian denominations go, they are still the most radical of Protestants. Wine is still grape juice; the Eucharist is still just a symbol (though I will agree with my Southern Baptist upbringing thus far: crackers and Welch's is definitely just symbolic!); and it is still vitally important that one baptized as an infant (in another denomination, of course) must have a "believer's baptism" (although baptism is also just a symbol and has no salvific value). Yet one must admire the Southern Baptist's resistance to the modernizing trends of today's culture (though I hear there are a few pastors out there who are on record as saying a beer or glass of wine once in a while isn't so bad- such shameless liberalism!)- despite not having anywhere near a strong a theological foundation as the mainline denominations, the SBs seem to be holding the line where the others are failing. Still, one does wish they could do so without being quite so Republican about it.

I left the Southern Baptists for the Episcopalians as soon as I was old enough to choose my own church to attend. At the time the Episcopal Church and the Anglican via media seemed very appealing- I was drawn to a more sacramental understanding of the Eucharist and baptism, though not quite ready to label those with an opposing view as communion-breakingly wrong. It was also at that point that I was playing around with a semi-liberal theology- female ordination and practicing homosexual clergy did not seem that big a deal to me, though I was unwilling to cross the line toward "Jesus was just a good man" and a rejection of the Christian creed. The latter aspects were why I never actually took the step toward being a confirmed Episcopalian- in my own muddled ecclesiology it was perfectly acceptable to take advantage of the open Communion policies of tEC. Still, for about a decade the Anglican Communion informed much of my daily spiritual life- my prayers came from the Book of Common Prayer, my Scripture readings from their lectionary, Cranmer and Hooker went a long way toward forming my theological understanding of the time, and when I attended church it was an Episcopalian Church.

News of the Episcopal Church these days is like hearing about that ex-girlfriend in an abusive relationship. You didn't quite break up on the best of terms (you found out she was cheating on you and stealing your money- to explain the parable in google searchable terms: muslim priests and lawsuits), but you still feel sorry to hear about the way she's being treated. Stuff like this (HT: T19) can make you quite sad- it's bad enough to hear about the problems of any Christian group, but it really hits home when it involves a group with which you used to associate. In the end, it was news articles like the above that caused me to start looking for something different and eventually led me to Orthodoxy (more than you can imagine- an abuse of church polity led me to do a google search on "canons" and led me to the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons as well as the various Ecumenical Councils. Not a path I'd recommend to all- glory to God, I have so far avoided the rigid legalism that tends to form when inquirers read the canons. Now, if I could just do something about being self-righteous over not being self-righteous). The abuse of the theologically conservative remnant of tEC at the hands of an ever more rigid hierarchy would be almost cartoon-supervillain levels of funny if real people weren't being harmed by it.

That said, there is some news in the Anglican circles that can make me happy- pretty much anytime the Orthodox Church of America's Metropolitan JONAH makes an address to the ACNA (a conservative break-away from tEC) will do it (it was his address at the inauguration of the ACNA that finally pushed me into an Orthodox parish). I highly doubt that we will ever see the entirety of an Anglican denomination join the Orthodox Church- the ACNA has too many "low-Church" elements, and the high-Church denominations tend to hew more closely to Roman Catholicism- but with Metropolitan JONAH's outreach we might eventually see a few more parishes trickle in. Time will tell.