By Matt Friedeman
November 21, 2005

(AgapePress) - I thank God for that dead, liberal church.

It was theologically and spiritually frustrating then, it is theologically and spiritually frustrating now, and in all likelihood it will be theologically and spiritually frustrating in the future.

But that dead, liberal church, with pastor after pastor who was theologically and spiritually disappointing, did this for me: provided a Sunday school class that helped save my dad (and thereafter, my mother); taught me the Apostle's Creed; familiarized me with the awesome hymns of the faith; exposed me to the orthodox concepts of Christianity (although the pastors themselves didn't always believe in them); and showed me saint after saint who attended week in and week out and who loved me, loved God, and loved the opportunity to get the "me" and the "God" of that equation together.

Yep -- the local church of my youngest years is mainline, dead, and liberal, but there is not a chance in a hundred that I would be an evangelical pastor and professor today if it weren't for the faith that -- miracle of miracles -- was contained within that seemingly dead and going-nowhere assemblage in mid-America.

Don't mistake my intention, here. I really wish that the local church of my childhood had had Bible-thumping preachers who believed with all their heart the orthodox faith and believed that, as a sinner, I needed to hear the message of salvation by grace through faith or it was hell for me. I really wish that the pastors and the congregation as a holy unit had not just sung those great hymns but lived by them. I really wish that those saints who so loved me and God had found it in themselves to rise up and tell the district superintendents and bishops that we weren't going to accept just any preacher willing to take the job, for too much was at stake.

But my "really wishing" aside, I am grateful. In my teenage years I left that church, with my parent's blessing (incredibly enough), to attend a house church. I found Jesus there and a life trajectory that has sent me on a wonderful adventure in priestly service. As I look back at my life in that disappointing church, I am forever grateful for the conversion of my parents and their faithfulness to return to that place week after week. That alone was enough to change my life. But the teachings of Scripture and the church universal that seeped into my psyche from the liturgical habits of that local entity are also worth bending the knee in quiet reverence and uttering a prayer of praise to the Lord. If nothing else happened, those holy moments of righteousness and the sweet community that I shared them with helped seal me for God.

Mainline. Dead. Liberal. Thanks.