Rector's Blog: When I Became an Episcopalian

I became an Episcopalian because of a farmer’s market. In my early 20’s I was living in Venice Beach, CA, and I would go with my friends to a nearby farmer’s market on Sunday mornings. To be clear, I was broke and could not afford to buy anything there, but it was free to walk around and people watch and hang with my friends, so I found myself there often. One time they were holding open auditions for a commercial, so I tried out, and ended up booking it – my one and only commercial job. Another time I ran into a comedian I liked and spoke with him for a bit.

Neither of these things are why I became an Episcopalian.

During this time, I had recently decided to start going to church again for the first time in 7 years. I left church when I was in high school, after realizing that my denomination’s teachings on sexuality were incompatible with my beliefs to the degree that I no longer belonged there. That’s a very fancy way of saying I had gay family members and wasn’t going to go to a church where they weren’t accepted. So I left church altogether.

You might wonder why I didn’t just go to another church. I didn’t really understand that as an option. The church of my upbringing taught the Christian faith in such a way that when I disagreed with them, I didn’t think I was disagreeing with a denomination or a congregation – but with Christianity as a whole. So when that church became incompatible, my assumption was that I wasn’t really allowed to be Christian anymore. Not without living a lie. So I abandoned church, but I did not abandon belief: I wrestled with my own understanding of God constantly. Was God really loving? Really good? Really real? Was it all in my head? Is God the security blanket that keeps me from acknowledging the cold harsh reality of the uncaring universe?

As I’ve written about before, I had a conversion experience when I was 20. In a moment that has shaped the rest of my life, I realized that I believed in God whether I wanted to or not. And regardless of the plausibility or lack thereof, I realized I believed in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.

But I still didn’t know what to do with all that. Because my beliefs on sexuality hadn’t changed back to what they’d been before. What’s more, by this point I had befriended all sorts of non-Christians and I just plain didn’t believe they were going to go to Hell. So here I was believing in Jesus, but even further from the faith of my childhood than I was before. And I wasn’t sorry about it. I should’ve felt like a heretic, but I didn’t. At all. I felt like someone who was figuring out how to be faithful for the first time.

I picked up my Bible again from time to time. I read a couple of Christian books. I was on a subway in Boston reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and I remember feeling like Lewis was reaching through the page and shaking me, saying, “If you’re gonna believe in this crazy stuff, your life better look like you mean it.”

Shortly thereafter I moved to Los Angeles, which was about an hour from where I grew up, and started going to the farmer’s market on Sundays. I wanted to be a Christian, but I didn’t know how. Some people say you can be Christian on your own terms and all by yourself. Maybe they’re right. My experience has been otherwise. Community is central to this faith. It would be like saying you can be married on your own terms and all by yourself. It became clear to me that I wasn’t going to believe in Jesus all by myself. I was going to have to try to find a church that I could stand and that could stand me. I wanted my life to look like I meant it.

I decided to give the farmer’s market a break and go to church. But the idea of finding a new church was overwhelming. So I just started driving back to my hometown and taking my Grandma to our old church. The one I had left. The one I didn’t know what to do with. I knew the first Sunday that it wasn’t my place anymore. But I kept going for a couple months. I still loved the pastor there very much. And I loved my Grandma. Sometimes I’d come down the night before and do my laundry at her house. Then my clean clothes would smell like her cigarettes for a week. We’d sit in the same pew as when I was growing up. The people who remembered me seemed happy to see me. When the offering plate came around, my Grandma would slip me a $5 bill so I wouldn’t be empty-handed. She always did it without making eye contact, like we were dealing in contraband.

It wasn’t my church anymore. It wasn’t going to be. I wasn’t angry or bitter. I just didn’t belong there anymore. And one Sunday I skipped. I slept in. And I called up my buddies to see who was going to the farmer’s market. They were all sleeping in that day and I was definitely not going to go by myself. I resigned myself to a quiet morning. A few minutes later, my roommate peaked his head into my room. He and I were friendly enough but not really friends. We rarely hung out. We certainly didn’t go places together. He said, “Hey I’m thinking of going to the farmer’s market. You wanna go?”

So there I was back at the farmer’s market not buying anything. My roommate ran into some friends and was talking with them. I didn’t feel like meeting anyone, so I wandered over to look at some honey I couldn’t afford. I could only feign interest for so long and he wasn’t moving, so I went back and got introduced to people and started up the small talk.

You know how sometimes you’re making small talk with someone you barely know and they offer up more personal information than you expected? That’s me. I am the overly personal person. I said to this woman I barely knew, “I haven’t been to the farmer’s market in a while: I’ve been taking my grandma to church, but I skipped today.” This is not the way to sound cool as a twentysomething in Los Angeles. But somehow, miraculously, she replied, “Oh that’s funny, I’m usually at church too, but skipped today! What church do you go to?” I mumbled something about how it wasn’t really my church anymore and I needed to figure that out. She said she was Episcopalian. I said I’d heard good things about them.

Her next words were, I have come to realize, the most Episcopal evangelism ever uttered. “I don’t usually do this,” she said, “but there’s a new class starting up next week. I think you’d like it. Would you consider coming?” I was horrified. I did not know this woman. She was a friend of a friend of my half-friend. And she was inviting me to a class at her church? Wait, did she just say there was free dinner there? What day is the class again?

Next week I want to tell you about what happened when I showed up to that class, and about how not only was the dinner free, but there were cookies too. But for today I still marvel at the confluence of events that brought me into this church, this Episcopal branch of the Jesus movement. A year later someone asked me how I had found the church and told them this story. They replied, “Oh, so you didn’t find the church: It found you.” And they were right.