My Christianity has been leaning more left, if you will, since about 2005 after I got disenfranchised with the Pentecostal movement that seemed to be getting wackier by the day. By wacky, I mean the kind of name-it-claim-it, prosperity gospel sort of extremism that is prevalent in some mega churches today (Joel Osteen's comes to mind).
Up until then, I brandished a fairly fundamental, Protestant worldview. This world was going to hell in a handbasket and Jesus was our only hope. And by Jesus, I meant the white version hanging on the wall in many American homes, who was by no means a brown-skinned Middle Eastern, much less a Jewish Rabbi or Mystic. No the Americanized Jesus that hung on the wall of my parents house was California Surfer Jesus with windblown, brown hair, bronze skin and a big "hey dude" smile. Now, my parents were baby-boomers who graduated high school in the height of the hippie movement. They were, by no means, hippies, but the Jesus Movement influence was very real in my house.
We attended a summer Jesus festival in the Allegheny Mountains of Western Pennsylvania when I was 8. We listened to Keith Green and the Archers on the turntable console...when we weren't spinning dad's Beatles or Beach Boys albums. We were Middle America, Catholic charismatics turned Protestant, then Pentecostal.
Growing up Catholic, then Baptist and then non-denominational Pentecostal, I thought, gave me a well-rounded view of Christianity. But a common fundamentalist thread ran through all of those variants of the same faith--the world was going to hell unless it repented and accepted Jesus as the only means of salvation. Not only that, but multiple baptisms were required. I was poured, dunked and/or prayed over (for the gift of tongues) at every turn. I was neck-deep in a very narrow view of my religion and the world around us.
Only in 2005, after buying my first house, adopting two children, navigating a failing marriage and experiencing burnout at church, did I begin to consider any alternative. I learned of this movement called Emergent Christianity, which was sort of a fad after we entered the new millennium. In the discussions I had with "emergent" people of faith, I had to consider what Orthodox, non-Western and even Universalists saw in the Scripture. I saw that these people were just as devout about Christianity as I was, even if their faith seemed much different in practice and application of Scripture.
I stopped going to my church of almost 20 years.
My ex-wife and I, still married then, decided to join forces with other young families--four or five in all--and host regular get-togethers, including a big monthly meal, where we'd pool all our resources. Whoever the host family was that month was in charge of "the offering." They were tasked with finding creative ways to serve God by meeting a need in the community. It was the beginning of our home church...or so I thought. It didn't last long.
You see, with any gathering of humans around a common cause, politics and people's strong opinions always get in the way of doing good. I've found church politics to be some of the nastiest. It's part of what tainted my view of traditional church. I thought we'd found an answer. Keep the group small; be single-minded in focus and in action. It wasn't sustainable.
Shortly after that venture failed, I found myself in the midst of a real midlife crisis. I had a long-distance affair with a woman I'd met online from my home state. It nearly ended my marriage and certainly signaled it's doom. We decided to leave Tallahassee behind and swore we'd never return. Lesson there is, "Never say never."
So my world completely shaken, I broke free of the bonds of fundamentalism and fanaticism. I began looking at the core of my beliefs and re-evaluating them. I spent many years outside of church, only going sporadically while living in Indiana. Moved back to Florida and befriended the Baptist pastors at my local, beach church. Began seeing something in them that was different from most Christians I'd ever encountered in my life. They began to restore some semblance of hope.
Slowly, I returned to church, but I was a changed Christian. No longer a religious person, I'd let my convictions and questions guide me. I made a promise to my mom, on her deathbed in 2015, that I'd take my daughters to church. My youngest and I began attending Good Samaritan United Methodist Church in Tallahassee last year.
A radical change in my thinking and worldview made me a different kind of Christian. I'm now one who seeks inclusion, acceptance, social justice, love and to vanquish inequality, hate and hypocrisy. I have little use for the Church outside of it's ability to bring people together to help one another. It's the value and power of human beings working in concert that affects real change. That's where I tend to lean a little more humanist than religious. I'll share more on this later, but this is a good recount of how I became a different kind of person...a more Humanist Christian.
