Not long ago, a one of the young people who joined us recently said “I had no idea there was a church like this. I wish I’d known about this a lot sooner!” Like many of you, I’m not a cradle Episcopalian. Two-thirds of Episcopalians are adult converts. I joined the Episcopal Church right out of college, almost 25 years ago. I spent most of my college career visiting churches with friends, but never found one that had the right combination of ancient traditions and intellectual freedom.

I actually could have come into the Episcopal Church sooner. I remember sitting at a stoplight one evening, at the beginning of my senior year, looking over at a smallish gothic church with one of those square Norman tours. The west window was lit up from the inside. It was really beautiful. I looked at the sign and thought to myself “Episcopal....hmmm...that’s like Anglican. I’m an Anglophile. Maybe I should go there?” But by time the light changed, I’d decided that that was a really dumb reason to join a church, and crossed it off my list.

 

About a year later, one of my friends in the German House began attending the same church. Every Sunday Mark would come home and tell me about it. “You really should come,” he always said. Finally, one day I did.

Initially, I was pretty intimidated because the rector was a very traditional Anglo-catholic. That church still has its altar against the wall, and the priest still presides with his back to the people. Despite the high threshold, I quickly fell in love with the place. The combination of the words of the Book of Common Prayer, the beautiful music, and a liturgy that was full of meaning and tied to the earliest practices of the Christian church was thrilling. This was a church where we got to have Eucharist and take the Bible seriously. This was a church where people were both proud of their heritage and good at poking fun at themselves.

I soon found that I’d walked into a church that not just tolerated but encouraged people to think on their own about issues. No one there was about to tell me that drinking, dancing, or card playing was going to earn me a ticket to hell. In fact, drinking, dancing, and card playing happened at church! No one was going to push me to profess that the earth was made in seven 24-hour days. Gay people actually came to church and were treated like everyone else. In a university town, this was the church that scientists and professors attended.

At first, it was a little strange to be in a church where I wasn’t being handed a list of rules. But eventually I figured out that the church did shape our thinking through the liturgy, preaching and Christian formation. However, instead of spelling everything out, we were being influenced by Big Picture ideas like these:

- God created the world and saw that it was good, so we start from a “glass-half-full” view of the world.


- Every person is made in the image and likeness of God and deserves our respect and love.


- God loves each of us more than we can ask or imagine.


- We have a responsibility through our baptismal ministry to make to make the world a better place when and where we can.


- God gave us minds to think, hearts to love, and hands to serve, and he means for us to use them.


- We can refer to God as “she” if that works better for us. No one is going to burst into flames.


- There are no outcasts in the Episcopal Church (especially meaningful during the early years of AIDS).

Listening to people who are glad to have found us makes me wonder if we are doing a good job of letting our own young people know why this church, this crazy wonderful Episcopal Church, is worth loving? Are we telling our children why this was our choice, why it’s meaningful for us, and why we hope it will be for them too? Are we explaining to them that climbing walls and skate parks and coffee shops in church are cool ideas but that at the end of the day it’s those big picture ideas that are going to give meaningful shape to our lives?

If you wonder too, and wonder how to communicate that, I commend to you to small books, 101 Reasons to be Episcopalian and Those Episkopols. 101 Reasons comes from a website where Louie Crew has invited people to send in their reasons. At this point, there are over 500 reasons. The most popular reason? “God loves you, and there is not a thing you can do to change that.” - The Rev. Tom VanCulin, Honolulu.