The difference a real church can make to a fledgling Christian

I've written a few posts about my return to church.

It was indeed a return, as I was a fairly regular attendee growing up. Through, I think, fourth grade, my peer group would stay in the sanctuary through a particular portion of the service and then we'd be herded off to Sunday school, which was largely of a recreational nature. Past that point, we stayed through the entire service, and then went to a much more instructional setting, concurrent with adults convening to discuss particular Biblical books or themes. I was confirmed in the ninth grade. My Sunday-morning attendance tapered off some, but I got quite involved in the Sunday-evening senior-high fellowship. My motivation by then was chiefly social; some very appealing chicks were involved, as well as a number of my buds. There were ski trips and hayrides. There was wine and making out.

I should mention that my parents rather abruptly left that church, shortly after my confirmation. I'll come back to that. Let's just say this was the late 1960s and it involved politics.

I maintained a general spiritual curiosity even as my church-centered activities had come to have little to do with that. I found out about a Baha'i Faith fellowship in our town and started attending regularly. The idea that Jesus was among a lineage of great spiritual teachers was new to me and made sense to my seventeen-year-old mind.

Then came college and my headlong plunge into the hippie ethos. Drugs led to Beat literature which led to the sermons of the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching. Even wound up visiting a commune the teachings of which I'd been following for some time.

As the years progressed, however, and the concerns attendant to earning a living, becoming civically involved, navigating a rather abrupt career change, and, most significantly, surprising myself with the ideological conversion that opened the world of conservatism to me were my preoccupations, I had to admit that I'd settled into secular agnosticism. The ultimate ontological questions had moved far down the list of my daily concerns.

I wrote recently about the next step:

. . .  then the stuff that comprises most of the content of this blog became so egregious that I could find no word that more effectively characterized it than "demonic." 1 Peter 5:8 hit me right between the eyes. I saw it as far more than metaphor. America and Western civilization generally were indeed being devoured by the Devil.

As a conservative, I knew where I stood on such developments as "peace activism" (during the last years of the Cold War, fellow travelers - friends remaining from my bohemian days - were in my face constantly), climate alarmism, the notion that homosexuals could be married, and white liberalism's turning of a blind eye to the social pathologies that were the real source of the black underclass's  morass.

I look over this enumeration of the issues from those days and it looks like child's play compared to what came next: the election of a Chicago community organizer, mentored by 1960s radicals and liberation theologians, as president, codification of this notion of homosexual "marriage" in a Supreme Court decision, a significant move in the direction of socialist health care, appeasement of rogue states sworn to the West's destruction and hell-bent on acquiring nuclear arsenals, and finally, the "normalization" of that tragic phenomenon known as transgenderism.

That's when I knew that 1 Peter 5:8 was far more than metaphor.

My wife had vague, holistic notions of life's spiritual level, and it made for a generally sunny outlook on her part. Then again, she had little interest in staying abreast of the demonic developments that were appalling me.

So I began trying out this going-to-church thing. Visited a community church a few times. As a musician, it became apparent to me that the jangling-guitars sound of the praise band wasn't something I was going to be able to handle long-term. Then I attended mass at the local Roman Catholic parish for over a year. The predictable structure and recitation of basic creed appealed to me. But I refrained from taking communion. I'd duck out as that got underway.

I could see that to continue down that path was going to lead to the question of whether to officially join, so I drifted away.

Then I had a student in the rock-and-roll history course I've taught for many years at our local community college, a recovering alcoholic who was laying the groundwork for a life of ministry. He graduated and got a gig at a rural Methodist church and I'd run into him around town, always giving lip service to coming to hear him preach. When I finally did, I quickly became a regular. I now contribute the special music about one Sunday a month, help with vacation Bible school and participate in pitch-ins and such.

One thing I find in talking to congregants there about our respective formative church experiences is that they approached their childhood phases much more seriously than I did. That church from my boyhood, you see, was a Presbyterian Church USA congregation. The minister was even the PCUSA moderator during the turbulent mid-1960s.

Here's an interesting anecdote from those days: I first heard of Saul Alinsky during a service there. A girl about four years older than me attended one of his workshops in Chicago and was invited to fill in the congregation on her experience.

The final factor in my parents' leaving, just as I'd become an official member, the straw that broke the camel's back, was the PCUSA contributing to Angela Davis's defense fund during her murder trial.

People in my current church are prone to talking about when they got saved. I had no such experience. I do sometimes recall how it was to sit and listen to the minister's sermons, and what comes back to me is how abstract it all was. Every week, it seemed, he'd offer up a different take on what the cross symbolized. "So perhaps we can see the cross as a sign of . . . " It was years before I considered what a visceral event the crucifixion was, that it involved blood and torn ligaments and thirst and flies.

One thing about being in the kind of environment I now am is that these folks are able to provide a sound kind of encouragement - steeped in doctrine, not gauzy or muddled - to me as my faith walk deepens. They've been serious about it their whole lives. It would be pointless to try to jive them about being farther along than I am.

As I've said before, what has essentially happened is that I've been backed into a corner by God. I can't even formulate skeptical questions anymore. They fade like cotton candy in my mouth. I know too much to go back. It's as if, at a certain point, God said to me, "From here on out, the direction of this journey is going to be my call."

I don't do much kicking and screaming about it anymore. I can see that chaos and misery are the fruits of rebellion, and I have no use for that at my age.

Now, the key is to look back over the clear pattern of having been led to where I am and make it the basis of my faith in continuing to be led.

It all still feels a little funny to me at times, but less and less so. What really feels funny is the grotesque state of Western civilization. The idea of normalcy has been completely obliterated. On that score, what I feel is relief that I am now asking on a regular basis how to avoid being an agent of rot.

There is no answer to that except Him. There is no alternative, none that makes any actual sense, anyway, to being an agent of His grace.