My way of trying to encounter God within a church community may well be poison for others. We all bring our backgrounds with us. We’re all running from something. For instance, I know several people raised in the Orthodox Church who have fled to evangelical communities and found God there, or at least found a happier version of themselves. I know other people who share my sort of religious background and they can only find spiritual solace in gatherings of atheists. More power to them! We are all recovering from what we’ve experienced in captivity to ourselves.
When I first joined the Greek Orthodox Church in 1990 I argued the finer points of theology and church history with my long-suffering evangelical mother and sisters. (Dad was spared, having died in 1984.) I argued as if any church I happened to join was ipso-facto the gatekeeper to heaven. I argued in a way that implied that a human could find THE TRUTH and judge others by it. I argued in a way that denied that our brains process what we hear and see and touch and, therefore, all information is just another story. I even wrote a book (Dancing Alone) about all that is theologically and historically wrong with the Protestant Reformed tradition I’d fled. I laced my book with the zealous spirit of proselytizing certainty typical of the fundamentalist born-again religion I thought I’d escaped.
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