[Note: About a year ago, I sent the following out to some family and friends. It reflects on my sojourn within the Episcopal Church. The story has been told frequently on my blog and home page. But since I have been critical of the powerful elite in the Episcopal Church--and really, such persons claiming Christianity but denigrating and abusing it as they do deserve criticism--I wanted to again reiterate that it's not Anglicanism nor every Episcopal Church parish that I rail against. The following was edited in two places--the bracketed note in the first sentence and one misspelling. Otherwise it remains exactly as I first wrote it. And I still fully own the thoughts expressed.]
Ten years ago [at the time I then wrote this entry] in 1992, 4 October was a Sunday, and in the Western Christian calendar, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. It was also the day I worshipped for the first time in a formal liturgy. The liturgy was the Rite I service of the Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The church was Trinity Episcopal Church in Lawrence, Kansas. To this day, I can recall the contemplative silence that greeted me as I entered the nave. A small handful of parishioners knelt in prayer in the minutes before the service began. I took a seat in the back, bulletins in hand, prayerbook at the ready.
When the service began I experienced a drenching in the written Word of God. Having studied Scripture on my own and formally at Bible college and seminary, I recognized the numerous biblical verses and phrases that made up the liturgy. And when the time came for the reading of the Word, I was delighted at the length of the passages--one each from the Old and New Testaments and from the Gospels, and a complete Psalm. No mere couple of verses and the preacher's take on them. Here was the written Word itself, large portions, and enough to sat