So, back to the "fun" church I attended when I first came to believe in God. This is my take on it, and it is very likely too narrow of a point-of-view to be completely accurate. But for what it's worth…

Like I said before, I honestly believe that this was the place I needed to be in the beginning. I learned something about worship and prayer and Bible study (although I have to say I gained more on that last point by participating in the inter-denominational Bible Study Fellowship program). I learned the need to serve the church. And I met and married my husband. All that was good. And then something terrible happened.

Actually, a series of terrible things happened. First, the pastor's wife died after suffering a very painful form of cancer for 13 years. Losing her did not shake my faith, or that of most of the other people who went to the church. But it was a big loss for our pastor, who had relied on his wife's perspective to a great extent as he lead the congregation. Simultaneously, a new assistant pastor was hired, one who had left a flashy corporate job to become a preacher…but unfortunately hadn't left behind his ambitious nature. He had plans for the church, big plans. And then, after a time, the widowed senior pastor met a very nice widowed lady and they were married. But the second wife didn't have quite the same goals for the church as the first. The second wife had big plans for her new husband. And gradually, the prevailing attitude of the church shifted from humble, "y'all welcome" to "Look how great this church is, and look how great the senior pastor is."

The new assistant pastor started new programs designed to increase the number of people who would attend the church. Loans were taken out to put the church "on the cutting edge" -- and previously, the church had been debt-free. They started talking about building a new sanctuary that was more "user friendly." The new wife started talking about having a men's clothing store provide suits for the pastor, with appropriate acknowledgement in the church bulletin, of course.

The senior pastor started writing articles that were published in denominational magazines. He was elected to the executive presbytery of the denomination, just about the highest-ranking position available to him. He stopped doing weddings and funerals and personal counseling sessions because he was too busy. More staff was hired to take on the load.

Then another factor came into play.

There was a movement within the denomination to which this church belonged. Reports came from the south that it was like the old revival days. People were being overcome with the power of the Holy Spirit. People were being healed. People were being saved in record numbers. Crime rates were dropping in the area around one particular church where the phenomenon was taking place.

As one of the executive presbyters, our senior pastor had to investigate. Enthralled, he brought the movement back to the church. The first time I remember him speaking of it during a Sunday service, his comments were frequently interrupted by people laughing. Not laughing at him -- this was supposed to be "holy laughter" from the Holy Spirit. It was distracting to say the least. Two visitors to the church were sitting near us, and they got up and left. My husband and I looked at each other in wonder.

The church started hosting nightly services from Wednesday through Sunday, where people could learn about and receive the "blessing." People from all over the city turned out for it.

I was interested. I went to every service I could attend. I saw people fall on the floor, laugh uncontrollably. They moved all the chairs out of the way so there was more room for people to fall down "under the power." Some folks would lay there for hours, saying their bodies felt so heavy, they couldn't move. It was chaos.

And there was something else fishy about all of this. You would have had to be on staff to know all of it, and I was. More people were coming to the church, yes, but fewer people were serving. I walked into the church nursery one evening during one of those services and found one person trying to keep track of more than a dozen babies and toddlers, many of whom were crying. Their parents had been paged but hadn't shown up. I pitched in to help, wondering what had happened to the long list of volunteers we usually relied on.

They were all in the sanctuary, trying to get the power. Along with the parents, who forgot to bring enough food and diapers for their children and didn't care how long their babies stayed in the care of others.

I never got "the power." I was willing -- I told God sincerely that whatever He wanted for me, I would accept. But no laughter, no falling down, none of that stuff ever happened to me. I even went to a special prayer gathering for women to meet a speaker from Australia. The "blessing" apparently flowed out of this woman into every person she touched. She put her hands on either side of my head and started praying...then commanding me to fall down. But my knees weren't weak, and I didn't feel any move of the Holy Spirit putting me on the floor. I waited and prayed, telling God I was willing. The speaker persisted, tilting my head back, back, back, trying to get me off balance enough to fall. I didn't fall. I was still steady, although it was hard to breathe. I finally shook my head away from her grip and tilted it upright again. She didn't know what to say, but, stammering, she told me to keep seeking "It."

It never happened. My husband and I grew increasingly suspicious. We searched the Scriptures. We prayed, we studied. I looked the whole "blessing" thing up on the Internet and was aghast at some of the things I read. "...laughter gave way to animal sounds until the sanctuary sounded like a petting zoo...women going through the pains of childbirth, their modesty protected only by the crowd of women who stood around them as spiritual midwives...marriages breaking up...children confused and teenagers turning to Satan worship..."

Of course, I couldn't imagine things getting so bad at my church that this sort of stuff would occur. And then...and then, it started to happen. A man took the worship leader's microphone and started singing about pigs. A woman received a "prophecy" that bald men would grow hair. Another woman delivered a "prophecy" on her tambourine, which nobody could interpret. A man encouraged people to growl like lions. A young woman standing near me collapsed on the floor and started going through the pains of childbirth -- and she wasn't pregnant.

Worst of all was one particular sermon that my husband and I will never forget. The senior pastor went up to the podium and said, "If you hear a small voice inside telling you that these things are not right, you need to turn that voice off."

A pastor of a Charismatic denomination, telling people not to listen to that still small voice within, the one we had been taught was the voice of the Holy Spirit Himself!

We agonized. We studied. We prayed. We sat down with the pastor to talk and ended the conversation still unconvinced. And finally, we left.

At that point, we were not in very good shape. We second-guessed everything. We felt comfortable no where. We didn’t trust anybody.

Thank God for liturgy!

In liturgy, we had the comfort of hearing the Word of God read from the Bible, and we knew it was the Word of God because there had been many, many centuries of Christianity to prove that these words bore "good fruit" -- the one test we had left that we felt we could count on.

In liturgy, we had the comfort of knowing that millions of other people had gathered to hear the same words, delivered in the same way, ever since the beginning of Christianity. There wasn't any "new work" going on -- it was the same, wonderful, holy Work that Christ had wrought on the Cross so long ago.

We attended an English-speaking Russian Orthodox church for a while, but that didn't seem to be a good fit for us. We landed in an Anglican church -- a small group of people, all "refugees" from various denominations. The priest was a former Southern Baptist. The deacon came from Evangelical Lutherans. We took our seats among former Episcopalians who saw their church take on a politically left agenda, former Methodists who wanted something more than the "feel good" sermons they had been getting, and so on. We learned a whole new way to worship the Lord that felt safe and holy. And we waited for God to show us what would be the next thing.

--Sparki