ROBERT : One of my friends . . . .

One of my friends is a pastor of some considerable reputation, and a well-deserved reputation at that.
      He was not raised in the Church, and came to faith in his early twenties. In fact, he wanted to be a writer and decided that in order to be a good writer he should know something about religion, so he went to seminary.
      While he was in seminary, he began to build a faith, one brick at a time, so to speak. He went from being an agnostic to becoming a Christian to being ordained in the space of three years.
      He said that when he began to pastor his first church there were all manner of things that went on in the name of church that he had never seen before.
      He told me once that he sometimes envied me being brought up in a religious home where the things of the faith were part of the fabric of our lives. I, on the other hand, had no idea whatsoever what it meant to be outside the faith, until I was in my early twenties, of course.
      I was raised in the Church. For a while I was literally raised in a church — our family lived in the four rooms in the back of the church he pastored in Florida. I grew up with the faith of our fathers ringing in my ears, both the words of the song itself and the theology and practice that went with it.
      All of which was perfectly fine until the moment when my life began to crumble and I began to have a sense that either someone had lied to me or I had completely missed the point.
      I remember a specific moment — I even remember the chair I was sitting in and the date and the time, if you must know — when I realized that I had to construct a faith of my own, so to speak, one brick at a time. And sorting through everything I had been taught over the years in the Church made it harder, not easier.
      I told my friend that I was envious of his being able to come to faith without all of this baggage from his childhood. Sometimes, the Church can be a very difficult place in which to follow St. Paul’s instruction to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
      Although, Lord knows, the Church can be pretty good at actually causing fear and trembling.