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Articles Comparative Religion A Tour of Christendom
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| A Tour of Christendom |
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| Written by Dr. David Kyle Foster |
| Sunday, 17 August 2008 18:53 |
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The thought struck me just the other day that my life has been a tour of Christendom - that God has been leading me on a guided tour of the many expressions of the Christian faith, as though it was part of the purpose of my life. It’s not that I set out to become a member of churches in so many different denominations. I’m just naturally curious, and early on I discovered that one group that doesn’t agree with another group usually won’t accurately represent what that other group believes and practices. So you have to go find out for yourself. To date, (52 years and counting), I’ve been a member of churches in nine different denominations, have frequently attended services in churches representing another nine denominations, and as a result of my interdenominational speaking ministry have spoken in dozens more. From Roman Catholic to Southern Baptist, I have seen this great and beautiful Body of Christ from stem to stern, and I love it! I’ve been dunked and I’ve been poured. I’ve fallen down and been shoved down. I’ve chanted and danced and genuflected till I’m all hoarse and creaky. I’ve been a five-point Calvinist, and a no-point Arminian. I’ve spoken in tongues and preached against speaking in tongues. I’ve had holy orders in a church and been wholly ordered out of a church. I’ve believed and refuted every doctrine in the book. I’ve taught more positions than the Kama Sutra! My trek started in small town America during the 50’s and 60’s, where I grew up as the son of a Presbyterian preacher. My father was the only preacher in our town of seven thousand five hundred who would associate with the Catholic priest. I liked that. I should have known that a love for the breadth of God’s Church would emerge from his example. After leaving home, I did get sidetracked for ten years by humanism, materialism and a Guru named Maharaj Ji. Yes, I daily meditated, did pranam, said satsang, sang Arti - the whole works! But when I finally got saved, or when the salvation finally took from my infant baptism, (however one should say it), I resumed my ecclesiastical tour with a vengeance. It had been rather embarrassing to have fallen for a guru, (kissing his feet and all), so I became determined to carefully explore the full range of the Body of Christ before settling on what I expected to discover as the single true expression of His Church. My first try was the Roman Catholic Church. It was conveniently located a block from my place of employment, so I could go there each day for their noon Eucharist. I can’t remember if I knew about their rule against non-catholics partaking of the Eucharist, but at that point it probably wouldn’t have stopped me. After all, the priest wore tennis shoes under his vestments, so I figured it wasn’t a place that held too tightly to the rules. One day as I was ascending the steps of the cathedral, I felt a hand on my chest and a voice in my head telling me not to go there anymore. At the same time, my Christian co-workers (members of John MacArthur’s “Grace Community Church” in LA) were feeding me dire warnings about Catholicism. So I decided that the Roman Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon and stayed as far away from it as I could for the next twenty years. Next stop was the Evangelical Free Church. I began attending their seminary in Deerfield, Il., and since an EFCA church was the place to be if you wanted to hang with the professors, I joined up and got rebaptized - properly dunked you might say. My MacArthurite friends had pressed me to go to Dallas Theological Seminary, but I had heard that if you ever stopped believing in the pre-trib rapture, they took your degree away, and I didn’t want to risk that. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School was heaven. The professors (for the most part) were humble, yet brilliant men of God. There was a certainty to the faith, a deep, abiding love for it and all the lines were clearly drawn. What a precious jewel in the crown of the Body of Christ is the E. Free Church. After a few years, I waxed nostalgic and hoping to please my father, gravitated back to the Presbyterians (predestined perhaps). The only problem was, being complimentarian and pro-life, I was now too conservative to suit mainline Presbyterian gatekeepers. How very opportune it was that there was a new denomination on the block called the Presbyterian Church in America. So I joined up, and I loved it. The lines were even more clearly and sharply drawn, which soothed my post-cult anxieties. It was also a perfect ethnic fit for my Scots ancestry, beings as I was in the throes of waxing nostalgic. Before long I was a card carrying, five-point Calvinist. Internal storm clouds began to rapidly brew, however, as I began to be (secretly) convinced that the gifts of the Holy Spirit could operate today, if God willed it, just as much as they had in the early Church. As I dearly loved the PCA, I tried to keep my dirty little secret hidden and became a stealth charismatic. But, the best laid plans . . . . Seconds before the vote to license me as a PCA pastor was to be taken, a “friend” outed me right in front of the entire Presbytery. I tearfully confessed to harboring charismatic thoughts, and faster than you can say “supralapsarian,” I was out. Julie Andrews did say once, that whenever God closes a door, He opens a window. So I headed for the hills of West Virginia to hide out at my brother’s house and lick my wounds. Then began a most interesting chapter in this quest for God’s Church. I began visiting every church around. I didn’t care what they did. I was determined to see it all. And believe me, they’ve got some mighty strange houses of worship in them hills. I’ll never forget this one independent charismatic group that met at a house way up on a hill. We all sat in a circle without saying anything and ever so slowly folks would commence to praise and worship, then hoot and howl, and finally yell at the top of their lungs - all at once! It didn’t take me long to figure out why they met way up on that hill! But I stayed. I wanted what God had no matter what package it was to come in, that is, except for snakes! Before long, parachurch ministry opportunities called me westward. At a conference in Dallas on my journey west, I saw for the first time people falling backwards through metal chairs onto concrete floors without getting hurt. The guy doing the praying was a guy named John Wimber. The thing was, he wasn’t hooting and hollering at people or knocking them down or punching them in the stomach like I’d seen elsewhere. From twenty feet away, he was calmly asking the Holy Spirit to come and they were falling like flies all around me. It was either God or the devil and I was determined to find out which one! So I settled in Anaheim, Ca., became a member of his Vineyard Christian Fellowship and soon realized that it was God after all. Those were incredible years of learning to love God at deeper and deeper levels - of taking my head knowledge and letting it seep down into my heart. I love the Vineyard. It is a precious, precious expression of the Body of Christ. Wimber is gone now, but his wife Carol has written a biography of her husband entitled John Wimber: The Way It Was. In that book she tells the story of a time when John took his team of free-wheeling charismatic leaders to minister in the liturgical churches of England. As they listened to the ancient liturgical prayers during the service, Carol quotes one of the young men on the team as having said, “Wow! That was a great prayer! Can you imagine just reeling off a prayer like that? No wonder they wrote it down!” Carol writes: “John took it as an opportunity to teach on the value of the whole church, explaining that our kind of church can only afford to exist because of the presence of the liturgical church.” He continued, “We can be casual and free about all sorts of things like the church calendar, for instance, because others are preserving it. If they weren’t then we would probably have to do it. We’re all pieces of the same puzzle and we all fit in our right place, and don’t ever start thinking our piece is more important than the others just because He’s working with us in a special way right now in history. All the pieces had their time, and don’t forget it.” Carol writes, “They didn’t forget it. Anyone who hung around with John for any length of time appreciated the whole church.” That is why I loved John Wimber and the Vineyard. For almost ten years, in Anaheim, Chicago, Tampa and Nashville, I stayed in the Vineyard movement. There were two diversions in the midst of that “Vineyard” period, however. During a year in Largo, Fl. I joined a vibrant and exciting Southern Baptist church where God imparted a deep love and appreciation for that part of His Body, and for two years in Honolulu, Hawaii, I was a member of a wonderful Missionary Church. It was as if God was taking me like an eraser and rubbing me back and forth over the various denominations so that I would no longer focus on the lines that divided them but rather the faith that united them. At any place along the way where I became convinced that I had arrived at the one true expression of the Church, God moved me to a new city to encounter the awesome beauty of another expression of His Church. Seven years ago the Lord opened my eyes to see the importance and awesome beauty of the ancient church. As I was already so very much in love with the evangelical and charismatic streams, this led me into the convergence movement, where the three historic expressions of the faith (normally only found in three separate sectors of the Church) are blended together to form a triune ecclesial expression of worship. This is where I am today, as a priest in the Charismatic Episcopal Church. I don’t expect that God will move me further. I’ve gotten the message. I’ve seen the entire dazzling display of God’s glory in facets unnumbered, each of which still elicits moments of joy at the memory of them. I love it all. God has even reignited my first ecclesial love - for the Roman Catholic Church. The story of how He did that provides a fitting close to this saga. For many years, I harbored a deep hatred for my father. One evening as I was rehearsing some of his sins, (whether real or imagined I could not tell by then), the Lord suddenly made me aware that since I was literally my father’s (and mother’s) DNA, that I was therefore my father (and mother). He then said to me, “Since you are your father, quite literally, your continued hatred for him is actually the cause of the deep seated self-hatred that you have lived with your entire life.” Instantly, I realized that if I forgave my father, the fuel for my self-hatred would be eliminated. So I did, and so it was. Several years ago, as I was rehearsing a similar hatred for the Roman Catholic Church, the Lord spoke to me again, saying, “David, do you remember what I taught you about the consequences of your hatred for your father?” I said, “Yes.” “The same is true for your hatred of the Roman Catholic Church,” He continued. “If you take your ecclesiastical heritage back far enough, you were a Roman Catholic. Your hatred, criticisms and judgmental attitudes toward the RCC is, in fact, a sin against your ecclesiastical parents and it has created the same result as did the hatred for your earthly father. You have an internal restlessness, as does all of Protestantism, because of this dishonoring of your spiritual fathers. When you judge or hate them, you judge and hate yourself. This internalized self-hatred is a key reason why Protestants and others continue to split and divide, finding no place of rest in My Body. When you bless and honor and love your fathers, then the self-hatred will begin to dissolve and you will find peace for your soul.” Funny - He didn’t tell me to become a Roman Catholic. All He wanted me to do was to love them and to honor them as one would a mother or father. That’s all He wants us to do. Love one another. 1from "MasteringLife" newsletter #52 |
| Last Updated on Sunday, 17 August 2008 18:54 |