Reflections on My English Pilgrimage, Part 3

This will be the last of my reflections on my English pilgrimage; next week the blog will resume its normal schedule of posts. While the previous reflections have centered on history and theology, this one is more personal, albeit with connections to the life of the church that I hope will prove edifying to my readers.

As with any pilgrimage, one of the goals was to seek out the presence of God and, hopefully, gain some experience to shed insight or inspiration on my walk with the Lord. One need not travel to England or Israel to gain that experience, of course--God is everywhere, and just as readily encountered in the woods around one's home as in Jerusalem. But the practice of pilgrimage can provide a focusing effect on one's seeking, an opportunity to step away from the pressures of home life and to pursue God in places that still ring with the stories of countless saints who have also encountered the living Lord there.

While I certainly hoped to encounter the presence of God in a way that would challenge, convict, and shape me in my road of discipleship, one of my other goals for this pilgrimage was also to try to figure something out about myself. As anyone with a passing familiarity with this blog has probably already noticed, I'm something of a fence-straddler when it comes to the old divisions between high-church and low-church forms of worship. I write essays about evangelical theology and post them alongside Eastern Orthodox icons; I write hymns in the Baptist tradition and liturgies hearkening back to Anglican and Orthodox forms. The truth is, I don't quite know where I fit. Who knows, it probably has something to do with my deep-running psychological formation as a TCK in my early childhood (which produces something of a sense of perpetual, journeying rootlessness in one's life). But in short, I've always loved the whole breadth of the Christian tradition and yet never felt entirely at home in any one segment of it. It may be that I, like many younger evangelicals, am drawn by the gravity and grandeur of the ancient forms of the faith, in what appears to be a common generational trend. But unlike many of my peers, I've never sought to make a move away from my home tradition and into another one.

Whatever the cause of it, this sense of belonging everywhere-and-nowhere in the Christian church has long been a part of my experience. I've been a Baptist most of my life, both by heritage and conviction, but I've also been blessed to have deeply formative experiences in the Anabaptist, Wesleyan-Holiness, Reformed, Anglican, Pentecostal, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. I'm a committed Baptist pastor who is also, on the side, in fellowship with an Anglican apostolate and a Benedictine monastery. An odd duck, to be sure.

One of the ways this is expressed in my life is in the dichotomy between my worship with my home church and my worship elsewhere. My home church, where I serve as pastor, is my spiritual family, and nothing else comes close in that regard. It is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, if we were to look at the issue in the abstract and consider only the forms of worship involved, a striking pattern emerges: in my pastoral ministry, I worship in a low-church context; but on those infrequent occasions when I'm off on my own and the choice is mine, I almost always seek out high-church worship. I look for an Anglican high mass or an Orthodox Divine Liturgy to attend. I vary my customary worship--heartfelt praise songs, hymns, and extemporaneous prayers--in favor of more ancient forms: liturgies, collects, and creeds. While I'm gifted at leading low-church worship services, and truly enjoy them and find them spiritually fruitful, I had gradually come to wonder whether perhaps, if I were simply a worshiper and not a leader, I would feel at home in a high-church tradition. This was a question I had the opportunity to put to the test in my English pilgrimage, but the answer surprised me a little.

Almost all of the worship services I attended in England were high-church services (usually of the Anglican variety). And I loved it. As I wrote last week, the most profound emotional and spiritual experiences of my entire trip came during high-church Eucharist services. But after a couple weeks of this, I found myself looking around for a nice low-church service I could attend. I was yearning for heartfelt praise songs and the warm personal connection of an evangelical fellowship. Maybe it was just that I had been away long enough to feel lonely and ready for a taste of home; I don't know. But God graciously provided exactly what I longed for, in the most unexpected way. 

It was Saturday, and I had just left the conference in Oxford and was making my way toward Norfolk. I got off at a train stop in Peterborough to see yet another old cathedral. I wasn't attending worship in Peterborough Cathedral--not only did I not really feel like another high-church service at the time, but the cathedral itself had been redecorated as a children's museum instead of a place of worship (which was something of a letdown). Feeling bereft of God and longing for some worshipful singing and open-hearted prayer, I stepped back out of the doors of the church to hear a group of evangelical Christians singing together on the cathedral green. They were singing "Faithful One" (a worship song beloved in English evangelicalism, and one which has long been a favorite of mine). I sat down in the grass and sang along with them until they were told to stop by cathedral security guards. Then I went up to meet them and they prayed for me and my journey, and it was like drinking water from a deep, cool well. God had granted me just what I needed in that moment.

So where does that leave me? Still fence-straddling, I suppose. No, something better than that. It emphatically did not confirm my infrequent speculations that maybe I belonged in a high-church tradition. I found that I couldn't do without the beauty of low-church worship either. So all this has convinced me that I will never be satisfied with anything less than the entire Body of Christ. My home is the whole church, every part of it. Wherever brothers and sisters are gathered, whether raising their hands in song or bowing in an ancient creed, I am no stranger there. From my Baptist church at home to the little Orthodox chapel I attend on vacations, I will take joy in all the ways that the Bride adores her Beloved. And perhaps that's as it should be.