Spiritual Background

In my first blog post, I briefly mentioned that I have learned many things in my spiritual journey. I am going to write on all sorts of different topics as I go forward, but my spiritual journey is worth mentioning early as it is the backdrop for so many of the other things I am going to talk about on this site.

I was raised in the Christian Church. To clear up any ambiguity, I am referring to the “Christian Church” that is one of the four related “denominations” of the non-denominational Restoration Movement. These other three non-denominations are the Disciples of Christ, the Church of Christ, and the non-instrumental Church of Christ. Theologically, the Christian Church lands just a little left of the center line of that movement. In the real world, they are conservative, Bible-believing, fundamentalist, evangelical, Republicans.

Having said that, the church where I spent my childhood and early years was a bit of a maverick. Officially, we held the same doctrine as our fellow Campbellites, but we were a bit weird. The average Christian Church or Church of Christ has 100 in attendance and sits in a cornfield. We had 1000 in attendance and were in a run-down inner-city neighborhood. Beginning in the 1970s, a change in lead pastors, combined with some demographic changes in the neighborhood brought the church size down to be a slightly larger than average Christian Church. In that time, the average attendee didn’t dress the same or come from the same ethnic or cultural background normally seen in the Christian Church. This diversity of population led to a more diverse orthodoxy as well. So, I grew up without conforming to the standard evangelical template.

I did not realize it at the time, but I was deconstructing and reconstructing my faith all along. If I was presented with a better doctrine than that which came down to me, I would swap out the new idea for the old. Thus, I became less and less theologically conservative as I grew older. I have continued this as an adult.

Many of my friends have been deeply wounded by the Church and the edifice of their Christianity has totally collapsed. Not so, with me. I replaced my ideas of Christianity one theological brick at a time. From time-to-time, I would come to examine a belief. If it no longer seemed to make sense to hold that belief, I was always able to set it aside and replace it with a better belief. I ended up in the same place as my deconstructed friends, but with a lot less personal trauma. Certainly, my parents helped me in this, but I think that the “weird” church I grew up in made this possible as well.

This brick-by-brick deconstruction/reconstruction has accelerated in recent years. As an adult, I attended a different church than the one from my childhood. I found my way into the rotation for the weekly communion meditation. I did this for several years. Late in 2019, I removed myself from the rotation because I found myself to far out of alignment from Christian Church doctrine. I found myself holding back and not actually being able to say the things that I wanted to say during the communion meditations. I will cover some of this dis-alignment in future posts.