Parchment & Pen Blog

My best friend while I was at seminary, Chris Woodall, has recently converted to Anglicanism. He wrote about this in his blog recently. It is worth a read. Give him some trouble—he always does me!

Here is a nice statement made by Chris:

The spiritual-life advertised by evangelicals all my life did not work for me. I don;t know if it’s my personality, my education, my experiences, or anything else. I think it’s a combination of all three and more. At least the "more" is what I think I was missing in the evangelical world. That is a consistent, ordered, orthodox feeding on the scriptures and the essential doctrines of our faith. For all of my earliest years in the faith, I was encouraged to set aside a chunk of time, preferably the earliest morning hours, to read scripture and pray and read devotional literature. The Holy Ghost was supposed to do the rest "within me". Of course this is not a bad set-up. But I wasn’t coming away from these devos[9] with the same spiritual-sounding jargon that others did. I felt un-spiritual and I tried harder. At other times I heard some things from people of authority that flatly contradicted the scripture in my mind. So why did they read it differently than me? Was the Holy Ghost the supplier of individual interpretation? Seminary studies only compounded the problem. We got the same true-grit style instruction, "stick to it, boys . . . God is good." How can you deny that God is good?"

But some theology classes seemed to introduce a more balanced approach. I heard more ideas on Christian formation than I care to remember. Any approach that came near legalism just couldn’t fit. One did stick out in my mind. Worship can be a central spiritual tool for the Christian’s growth. In fact, how someone worships pretty much says it all concerning their character and inner life. But up until then, worship for me had been about listening & learning.

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