I began church seeking after 24 years in the nondenominational world in January of 2019. I returned back to school after visiting home for winter break and can still feel that sense of emptiness I had at the church I had been involved in. This feeling of being called away had started underneath the surface a few months prior, but quickly became a sense of intense sadness.
I couldn’t understand why something that I previously felt I belonged in could be so detached from me now. I had community and relationships, and I was very involved in the church I was at and had been fulfilled in different areas of my life.
I had begun spending time with a group of Anglican bros a few months before. I knew little to nothing about their tradition, and I certainly did not initially feel drawn to experience anything new. For me, the “reformed” and non-denominational world had been a mold I had worked very hard to fit into. During moments of honesty I would admit that as “sick” woman there was no room for me to fill.
I don’t believe that any church group is not a place for disabled people or women, but rather that we all are called to be fully alive in the place in which God asks us to be. To try anything else is to force something that doesn’t fit and ultimately to damage ourselves.
The difficult part of being called elsewhere is that God does not always make our pathways easy or short. My journey was as much (perhaps more) about my relationship with the Lord as it was about my relationship to any type of church. From a practical standpoint there are a few hundred Christian denominations in the US alone. There were a number that I had experience with to quickly rule out, and I knew that my target was somewhere in the liturgical or “high church” variety.
My usual decision making is to go with the “good on paper” options, but I knew this time I would have to experience them myself. Approaching the more “Catholic” like churches felt like a betrayal of my previous culture and values. I didn’t know how to explore, or whether I just needed a break from organized church for awhile.
Whenever we make an unexpected directional shift in life, we tend to assess the values of our family and the way we have always done things. I didn’t know if this decision would mean that something had changed about myself or my values, for better or for worse. I had a conversation with a friend from college that had belonged to the same church. She shared with me a sermon series called Open Door Theology (link here: https://www.lifeindeepellum.com/open-door-theology/)that completely changed my perception of my own belief system.
The sermon series centers around a metaphor of a room with a door. Inside this room are all of the people you value and love like your family, and the things that you grew up with. This might be the way you worship or the specific values that they (and you) hold. For awhile you are fulfilled by everything in this room, but at some point you realize that there is a door and you begin to wonder what happens when you go through that door. To go through the door you must leave behind all of the people and the things that are so integral to who and what you are.
Beyond that door is a room completely different than the one you are used to, but in wonderful ways. The people there may speak or look different, or do things that you are not used to. You begin to realize that there is more than everything you knew in that first room. As you go through life you begin to notice that this room has a door also, and in fact you are not just confined to a room but in a home with a number of rooms, each with different and incredible things in them.
I think the most important aspect of this metaphor is that only I alone can decide to open a door and live in a new room, but when I do so I am not closing the door or totally leaving everything I knew before. I instead integrate all of these rooms to be the parts of a sum, just as a house is incomplete with any of it’s rooms missing.
So often I felt that I would be slamming the door shut on my first room and would never be able to go back. To the people in that room, you may be leaving behind everything that they know and going somewhere that they don’t understand.
Degrees and Acronyms 