I thank You, Lord our God, that You have opened my eyes to the light of Your wisdom. You have gladdened my heart with the knowledge of truth. I entreat You, Lord, help me always to do Your will. Bless my soul and body, my words and deeds. Enable me to grow in grace, virtue and good habits, that Your name may be glorified, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
I genuinely dislike talking or writing about myself, it is an onerous task. I’m not one to normally share my feelings or what I am going through. But recently I have begun to really analyze some of my experiences and the struggles that I have gone through in regards to my spirituality and religious practice. To help codify my thoughts I felt that I should really write it all out and perhaps some of this will be of interest to others. Wrtiting about ones spiritual journey is especially difficult. How do we balance the spiritual with the secular? How much of one is reflected in the other? How honest are you willing to be in exposing the wounds, scars, and pain that difficult journeys often inflict? Writing a spiritual autobiography is not an easy task, even when it is short and not meant to be anything more than a quick explanation of how and why I am who I am, how I got to where I am today. But I think it’s important, not so much for other people to read, but for me to clarify my own position to myself, but in turn share my journey.
I come from a pretty eclectic religious background. My maternal grandparents, were very fundamentalist Christians (the 700 Club/Jerry Falwell types), my paternal grandparents, who I never knew, were Episcopalian. Both of my parents for their own reasons converted to Judaism. My mother converted around two years before I was born, began teaching kids classes at a local synagogue and met my father when he began his own conversion process shortly after being discharged from the Air Force. I have wonderful memories of attending synagogue on Shabbat mornings with my father, of Shabbat dinners with my family, and of getting really sick eating too much cheap chocolate gelt during Hanukkah. Indeed, all of my earliest memories revolve around Judaism. Both of my parents drifted away from any serious practice of Judaism around by the time I was 10 or so.
At the same time, I was exposed to the Christianity of my mother’s grandparents. And to this day, I consider them saints, my personal example of what it is to be a Christian. They were the ideal grandparents and without their influence and example, I might not be the Christian that I am today. As a teenager I remember going to Billy Graham and Harvest crusades with them, to Calvary Chapel church services and churches like Harvest in Riverside.
In many ways I am very grateful for the disparity of my upbringing. Exposure to different perspectives gave me the ability to more easily adjust to different people and their different outlooks on life. It allows me to more easily understand the different view points of various individuals and cultures and it has really helped me to appreciate the beauty and wisdom from traditions much different from my own. On the flip side, it left me with no solid grounding in religion. My religious upbringing left we with a tendency toward questioning and doubting everything, which in turn has forced me to really work through what I believe and practice and not just casually accept teachings from anyone. The way I was raised should absolutely never be the way children of Believers are raised.
In early 1989, having no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I joined the US Army. For basic training I was shipped to Fort Sill in Oklahoma where the next two months would have a profound influence on my religious beliefs. For the first time in my life, every minute of my day was regimented. I had no freedom, no time to myself. But on Sunday mornings we had the chance to attend church. I remember there were two options, a Protestant service and a Catholic service. To this day, I do not remember why I chose to attend a Catholic service. I had never been to a Catholic church, I knew nothing about Christianity apart from the fundamentalism that I was raised around. I had Catholic friends growing up, but none of them were particularly religious or ever talked about it. Regardless, I fell in love. There was something about the liturgy of the mass that just spoke to me. And so I spent eight weeks attending Catholic services.
When I entered the Army in March of 1989, I quickly began attending church. I’d like to say it was for all the right reasons, but in truth it was to get a small break from the rigors of basic training. Those couple of hours every Sunday morning were like a small breath of freedom. I chose to attend the Catholic services over the Protestant ones only because they always had cookies and punch afterwards. At the time it was a selfish decision but looking back I see the working of the Spirit in even the smallest of things. Those cookies, in their own way, led me to the Church. After basic training in Oklahoma, a year of advanced training in Texas, I was stationed in Louisiana at Fort Polk. While there I began attending classes with a wonderful series of brothers from the Franciscans. I was never able to be received into the Roman Catholic Church since the base at the time had a serious problem keeping a regular Catholic chaplain and I could not attend an RCIA class off base on a regular basis. But the Franciscans had a regular presence in the area and I would attend informal classes with them a couple of times a month for several years. The devotion and love of those brothers, more than anything else set the stage and opened my heart to the idea of a vocation.
Then toward the beginning of my third year in the Army I ran across an ad in a magazine for a Catholic Church that allowed their priests to be married. Suddenly it seemed like the best of all worlds. I reached out to the church to find out more, entered their seminary program which was composed of correspondence studies (this was all pre-internet) and began studying for an STL and eventual ordination. I spent two years (my last year on active duty and my first year out) studying and corresponding with the rector of the Seminary. I did not complete that program as there were some internal issues in that church and they suspended the program for a while when one of their bishops left.
When that bishop left, he gave me several names of bishops and churches that I could pursue ordination with. I wrote to several of them but only one would actually work with me in my situation at the time. We corresponded for several months and that following year, I believe it was early 1994, I traveled to Pensacola Florida where I was baptized, confirmed, and ordained a deacon and then priest in his chapel over a weekend. At that time, I began a small ministry of celebrating mass on Sunday mornings and visiting a couple of nursing homes. However, I had no episcopal oversight, no way to do confirmations or help a couple of young men that were interested in serving with me so I returned to Florida in July of 1995 to be ordained as a bishop in the hope that I would be able to do more (the naivety of youth).
So in the middle of 1995 I had managed to become an ordained bishop in the Old Catholic Church. But here’s the kicker – I had no oversight, no relationship to any other church, and very little formal education in theology, ecclesiology, church history, etc., I was mostly self-taught. I felt a calling to serve the Lord, but wasn’t going about it right. I think coming to that realization really hit me hard and I stepped back from doing any ministry work at all and decided that I needed to work on myself.
So as part of trying to fix my walk with the Lord I began doing a number of things. I started to systematically read the Word every day. I began by just spending a couple of months reading through it front to back. Then reading the New Testament front to back over and over. I started going to church weekly, visiting different churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant. And then I began to really study theology, history, etc., which caused me some problems. Because despite my background in Catholicism, I found it lacking when I began to study comparative Protestant theology and dogmatics. Reading the Bible more than reading about the Bible made a huge difference in my outlook. And somewhere along the way I made the determination that the Reformers were right and Catholicsm wasn’t the best way to practice Christianity.
I ended up attending Harvest Christian Fellowship on a regular basis (got baptized again with my wife) and eventually ended up serving there for several years. But my study of the Faith continued and I began to realize that, despite the wonderful work and evangelism that churches like Harvest do, they really aren’t places of edification for Christians. These big mega-churches are really just evangelistic tent meetings in a permanent place. The preaching tends to be more emotional than expository. Designed to draw you in and make that altar call and save your soul. But it’s the same thing every week. You go in, listen to evangelistic topical sermons, sing some popular catchy Christian praise music, get your emotional fix of feeling good about yourself, and then carry on until the next Sunday. And it isn’t working. Sure there are a lot of people attending. They make a lot of money. They make people feel good about themselves. But they aren’t changing people. They aren’t being hospitals for the soul. They aren’t edifying or disciplining or discipling. There is no elder or deacon visiting your home and checking on you, caring for your soul. And that isn’t right. It isn’t the way church is depicted in the Bible, it isn’t the way we are instructed to be.
Despite that, I was still pretty happy at Harvest. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I started a Bible Study group that met at my home and we began to really dig deep. We went back to the sources when studying the Bible, by reading the Church Fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans. We took the time to really question everything, bouncing ideas of one another, comparing our conclusions to the historical creeds and confessions, to what other people had already answered. Along the way we slowly evolved into a home church and things just went from there.
But there have been some weird interludes along the way (and I’ve greatly simplified the above biography). I’ve struggled a lot with being Jewish. I’ve stepped back a few times and explored that part of me. It was hard for a long time to try and reconcile that. I took some time and did some dedicated Jewish studies, even studied privately for smicha (rabbinic ordination). But I’ve come to realize that it’s okay to acknowledge and honor my Jewish past, that part of my identity, as being culturally Jewish without having to be religiously Jewish. Though, in all honesty, that was a difficult place to get to, at least for me. I’ve also struggled a bit with my past in Catholicism. I’ve found, despite the radical doctrinal differences that I now hold, there are things about Catholicism (and Eastern Orthodoxy) that I admire. Liturgy being the main one.
I have had a lot of identity struggle in my life, it’s something that I have had to be honest with myself about and face head-on. It is hard to give up something you’ve invested in, giving up being Catholic was difficult, not so much because I believed in it all, but because I was invested as a member of the episcopate – sadly, it was a matter of pride more than anything else. Balancing the idea of being Jewish culturally with being Christian took me a while. A few of my friends have asked me why I didn’t take on being a Messianic Jew (or a Torah-observant Christian or something similar) but those simply are not acceptable paths to me. Messianic Judaism is the result of really bad theology, of dispensationalism gone completely astray. Not to mention I have a really poor opinion of Messianic Jews who pretend to be Orthodox Jews and try to infiltrate Jewish communities for the Gospel. That isn’t authentic Christianity, it’s living a lie.
So through one of the most roundabout paths you can imagine I ended up where I am today. A Christian. A confessional evangelical. A Reformed Baptist. A Biblical Christian. A believer in a very real and personal Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.