Encounters with tradition (7): Why I am still a Wesleyan

A guest-post by John Mark Poling

I was born in 1950, and grew up in an environment that was something of a mix between suburbia and Appalachia. My parents were both former Methodists who became Nazarenes in the late 1940s. So I am a product of the American Holiness Movement, Phoebe Palmer, 19th-century revivalism, the Camp-meeting movement, and to a lesser degree the teachings of John Wesley and other pietist movements. You must add to that mix a father who had an emotional breakdown in 1952, a rather frustrated and sometimes angry mother (adult child of an alcoholic), and the 1960s – which began for me with the Beatles and the assassination of JFK on my 13th birthday. C. S. Lewis died on that day as well, but it was another 13 years before I ever heard of him. I struggled with legalism (the original sin of our movement), and perfectionism (both real and perceived – our Achilles heel) for many years.

I have to confess, however, that I tended to be very self-righteous, and I assumed, as many conservatives did in the 1950s, that we were most likely the true and living church, so that any other group was regarded as highly suspect.

Today I am a Nazarene pastor. Quite frankly, I never expected to end up where I am. I did not study theology in college, although I did get a minor in religion. Our educational requirements are not as rigid as those denominations which demand an M.Div. for ordination; much of my education was through the extension program of the university where I already had a degree. I think that is why I enjoy reading Faith & Theology – it “puts the cookies down on the lower shelf” generally, plus I just find the topics interesting.

But I am not the Wesleyan I was. What changed me, more than anything else, was the world of books. Not until my mid-twenties did I discover Tolkien, Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer. Perhaps more than any of them, however, was a book entitled In Quest of the Shared Life by Bob Benson, which opened up a whole new world for me. This was in the 1970s. In recent years Philip Yancey, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and Henri Nouwen have been lights along the way.

Today I find fellowship in what would have been very unlikely places. For example, I spent a morning recently with a charismatic Episcopalian and a charismatic Catholic: you can’t imagine how unlikely that would have been 40 years ago. And to discover that Wesley himself supposedly had a glass of vino now and again – for a prohibitionist like me, well, that was a real eye opener.

I remain a Wesleyan for the most part because of people such as Dennis Kinlaw, whose preaching, teaching and (rather limited) writing convinces me that there is something to what has been called “the deeper Christian life.” I realize that stories of “conversion” to a different tradition are far more glamorous than mine – and even more so when the person has had intense theological training! But I do represent a certain type of believer: those who have been disillusioned with their cradle affiliation, and have made peace with it.

Encounters with tradition (6): from Restoration to Orthodoxy

A guest-post by Daniel Greeson

I grew up in a small sect (non-institutional churches of Christ) within the Stone-Campbell Movement, known otherwise as the “Restoration Movement.” My grandfather and father are both ministers within this movement and at the age of 16 or so I began the process of preparing for a life of preaching. I was that kid who sat in high school with a commentary on Isaiah and an open Bible, fiercely scribbling notes for my next sermon. I was shown a lot of grace those first few years at my home congregation and other congregations throughout the state of Arkansas.

It was during these formational years that I ran across C. S. Lewis and quickly devoured The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. This was the first time I had seriously engaged with someone from outside of my tradition, and I came away having learned a lot and questioning a lot. In the group I grew up in, we were the only ones who had the Truth, and all other denominations were wrong about pretty much everything. It was also at this time that a girlfriend’s father introduced me somewhat hesitantly (I now know why!) to philosophy.

I was soon off to Florida College where I spent two years in the Biblical Studies program. Here, I was first faced with the problem of modern biblical criticism. I did not feel that biblical criticism was ever critiqued adequately at the college. Basically, biblical criticism was “liberal,” and therefore wrong. Similarly, my theology classes exhibited a poor understanding of the texts and a superficial engagement with other interpretive traditions. At this time, I began researching the history of the Restoration Movement, and I found a lot of disconcerting things (e.g. what the founders of the Restoration Movement actually believed and did!).

Outside class, I was exposing myself to folks like Yancey, Bonhoeffer, Brueggemann, Barth, and other evangelical voices. I have posted on a former blog of mine that Yancey saved my soul. It was Yancey who introduced me to Bonhoeffer, Barth, and other writers. And it was really St Paul and Yancey who taught me about grace. I also began reading about the “emerging church,” and I found a resonance with postmodern sensibilities. What was helpful was not Brian McLaren et al., but what they were reading. I began the summer after my sophomore year reading N. T. Wright, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Hays, John Howard Yoder, Lee Camp, Miroslav Volf, Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Grenz, Marva Dawn, and others.

I transferred for my junior year to Western Kentucky University, majoring in Religious Studies and Philosophy. It was at Western Kentucky that I began making my break with the tradition of my youth. I soon ended up in a progressive evangelical church. It was here that I learned very quickly that I was not really as “progressive” or “evangelical” as I thought, and I became disillusioned with the emerging church. I discovered that it felt and reasoned a lot like liberal Protestantism.

So I began the process of trying to discern which tradition made the most sense to me, and which tradition I would feel comfortable ministering in (not that ministering is ever comfortable!). This seems a bit pragmatic now, and I freely admit that it was. I visited Disciples of Christ, Methodist, and Episcopal churches. But I felt at odds with what I found at each church, especially with a poor view of Scripture and of the basic orthodox Christian doctrines.

I was basically a sacramental and liturgically minded Anabaptist wannabe (kind of Hauerwasian, eh?). But when a friend said that he was prepared to stay evangelical even if it meant reforming almost every church he pastored, I knew that I needed to join a historical Christian tradition. I immediately turned to Orthodoxy (having already read Fr. Schmemann’s For the Life of the World), and began devouring books about Orthodoxy (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Vladimir Lossky, Fr. Georges Florovsky, Daniel Clendenin, Fr. Thomas Hopko, Frederica Matthewes-Green). I also attended my first Divine Liturgy, and after that experience – and talking with converts from Lutheranism and Anglicanism – I was on my way into a serious investigation of Orthodoxy. I have not been to another service besides an Orthodox Liturgy since.

Why Orthodoxy? I became Orthodox because I finally found a tongue in which I could converse and pray. It was a tradition that made sense of history, theology, ethics, and a sacramental life. In Orthodoxy I found all the positive points of my childhood faith (prayer, ethics, holiness, doctrinal focus) melded with the concerns of my newly found adulthood (philosophical and theological sophistication, beauty, and community). It was in an Orthodox church that I was able, for the first time, to worship God “in spirit and in truth.”

I did not become Orthodox to escape Western problems or to run into a cultural ghetto (God forbid!). I became Orthodox because I felt that I had encountered the early Christian Church. I became Orthodox because I had to repent to enter the kingdom of heaven. I became Orthodox because I found a spiritual father in my priest. I became Orthodox because I knew that through the grace of God one could actually become a saint. I became Orthodox because I became – in a real sense – contemporaneous with the Fathers of the Church.

I am grateful for all the Christian traditions that have shaped me. But I’m joyful about my entrance into the Orthodox Church, and I fervently pray for the salvation and unity of all.

“For the peace of the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord.” —The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

Encounters with tradition (5): becoming a global Baptist

A guest-post by Michael Westmoreland-White

I was not raised Baptist. I grew up in a family of active United Methodist Christians. Some of the strengths of that tradition are with me still: a stress on faith as an act of free will, a focus on piety of the heart, and strong emphasis on both personal and social sanctification – although I have never accepted any form of perfectionism or “entire sanctification,” not even Wesley’s “perfection of love.” But I quit catechism classes at age 12 and was never confirmed.

In my late teens, God used African-American Christians, primarily Black Baptists, as the human agents in my conversion. But before I could find a church home and be formed in the practices and virtues of Christian discipleship, I joined the US Army. A friend who was opposed to my joining the military challenged me to memorize the Sermon on the Mount during Basic Training. I did, and it led to much cognitive dissonance, but I compartmentalized my doubts and was soon deployed to Heidelberg, Germany. I didn’t want to go to the base chapel and looked around for a church to attend. There is a Baptist congregation in Heidelberg and, at least in those days, it offered services in both German and English with the same sermon. I went to both because I was hoping to improve my German.

The pastor introduced me to Christian pacifism. Pacifism is not rare among German Baptists; it is a significant minority position there. I became convinced of this view and sought a conscientious objection discharge from the army. So my initial initiations into Baptist life were through the African-American Baptist tradition in the US – an Exodus-shaped faith forged from the fusion of African religious views, the experience of slavery and its aftermath, and revivalism – and the German Baptist tradition which is broadly Reformed and deeply Pietist.

Returning to the States, I joined a local Southern Baptist congregation, not knowing the differences among Baptists. At the same time, I was cementing my pacifism by reading John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus and the collected sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. I quickly found out that pacifism was far rarer among Southern Baptists. Southern Baptists themselves are a blend of several strands of tradition, but I did not know that.

I would probably have stayed with the Southern Baptists if not for two overlapping experiences: seminary and “The Controversy,” i.e., the internal feud among Southern Baptists c.1979-c.1994. Depending on which “side” one is on, this conflict is either referred to in triumphal terms as “the Conservative Resurgence,” or denounced in horrified tones as “the Fundamentalist Takeover.” I have mostly been in the latter camp. Shortly after I responded to a perceived call of God to study for the gospel ministry (at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY), I discovered that Southern Baptists had been undergoing an internal power-and-identity struggle for several years. I had experienced Southern Baptist life as broadly evangelical, but not fundamentalist. For instance, the pastors I had known had never mentioned the word “inerrancy.” I had been taught that Baptists held Scripture to be authoritative with Christ as hermeneutical norm, and no one had ever mentioned any form of scientific or historical inerrancy. Now, I found that the institutions of the SBC were being taken over by those who stressed inerrancy (and defined it very much like the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy), were hostile to critical biblical studies, opposed male-female equality and the ordination of women, and were mostly aligned with conservative Republican politics. Later, opposition to legal abortions (with which I had some sympathy) and to either equal inclusion of GLBT folk in church life or civil liberties for GLBT folk would be added.

None of this sat well with me. It was alien to my experiences as a Baptist Christian in both Germany and the US. I decided that if the “conservatives” were right about who Baptists were supposed to be, I would be something else. So I began a deep search into historical records in the seminary library. I knew that Baptists had begun in the 17th century in England out of Puritan origins. I found that we also had minor influences from Dutch Mennonites – a branch of the Anabaptists. The Anabaptist emphasis on active discipleship, nonviolence, religious liberty, simple living, and disciplined, covenant community resonated with me. I nearly became a Mennonite, but I also discovered that some Anabaptists had cultivated a “withdrawal ethic,” and the Puritan emphasis on the “cultural mandate” had kept Baptists from following suit. So I remained a Baptist (leaving the Southern Baptist Convention for the Alliance of Baptists), but of an Anabaptist type.

Since that time, I have been employed at two Catholic universities, a Catholic seminary, a multi-denominational evangelical seminary, and in an ecumenical (but Mennonite-dominant) peace organization. Each of these contexts has caused me to re-appropriate my Baptist tradition. I have learned to compensate for weaknesses by drawing on others’ strengths, but have also deepened my appreciation for Baptist strengths in the face of others’ weaknesses.

For the past 15 years or so, I have been trying to experience and learn about Baptist life all over the globe. I have grown tired of descriptions of Baptist identity that draw only from Southern Baptist or only from North American or British categories. I want to learn about Baptist life from all these sisters and brothers, too. I want my Baptist identity to be a global one, not a parochial one imposed on the rest of the world.

I am a Baptist as part of the larger Believers Church tradition, that collection of denominational groups which always rejects legal establishment, which must be joined individually by personal faith and believers’ baptism, and which stresses active discipleship and gathered churches of visible saints. Such groups, which James Wm. McClendon named “small-b baptists,” include Mennonites, Hutterites, Amish, the Stone-Campbell movement, the Church of God (Holiness), most Pentecostal groups, many of the indigenous churches in Asia and Africa, Nazarenes, the Church of the Brethren and other “Dunker” groups, Plymouth Brethren, and so on. I am a Baptist, but it is even more important to me that I am “baptist.”

I am enriched daily by folks from other traditions within Christianity. But I am a Baptist because this is the limb of the Body of Christ where I feel called to live and serve. Being Baptist seems to me, despite some contrary publicity, to be one good way of being Christian.

Encounters with tradition (4): from Pentecostal to Vineyard

A guest-post by Frank Emanuel

There is a saying in the Vineyard: you don’t join the Vineyard, you find out you always were Vineyard. This captures the sense of family that I experienced when I finally found my home in the Vineyard movement. The Vineyard began in the 70s in Los Angeles, California. In 1977, John and Carol Wimber, easily the most recognizable names from the Vineyard movement, had left their Quaker church to be part of the Vineyard movement within Calvary Chapel. Calvary Chapel was the denomination made famous for starting the Jesus People movement of the early 70s – images of thousands being baptized in the Pacific Ocean made the cover of Life magazine.

The Vineyard blends Pentecostal spirituality with conservative evangelical theology. Many of the early Vineyard leaders were associated with Fuller Seminary, a conservative evangelical institution. For me, and many others, the Vineyard represents the best of both worlds, bringing together the passion of the Pentecostals and the assuredness of the evangelicals.

I discovered the Vineyard during the early years of my pastoral career. I was interning at my second Foursquare Gospel church when my whole world was yanked out from under my feet. A number of factors led to this, many of which were my own doing. I was a young Christian, four years into ministry but without a lot of real life experience. I had become cocky and thought I knew how everything should be done. It was also around that time that I began to question some aspects of Pentecostal theology; this did not help my case any. I found myself thrown out of my ministry position, in a strange city far from my family. All but one of my friends went to that church, so I was alienated on that front as well.

I remember calling up the Toronto Airport Vineyard and asking if they had any home groups I could go to. I explained that I was technically on staff at a local church so I was unable to come Sundays, but that friends kept telling me I needed to find what they called a Kinship (home group). I was invited into one not far from my house in Clarkson.

I don’t think I will ever forget my first visit. It was nothing like I expected; the worship was wonderful and intimate (I was the primary worship leader in my own church), and the teaching was simple. What struck me was the prayer time; they asked me to sit on a chair and began to sing songs of the Father’s love over me. I spent a few months healing up at that Kinship until an opportunity came to head back to Ottawa.

I landed in Ottawa with the intention of making my way back to Nova Scotia. There was no Vineyard in Ottawa and I quickly realized that I didn’t want to fit into the Pentecostal church anymore. I was busking a bit to make ends meet when I met up with my friend Mike – through Mike, I ended up in a wonderful little Convention Baptist church. My time in the Convention was restorative. It was also the time to sort out my life a bit more. I went back to school and completed college. I met my wife to be and was made a lay minister in the church. Things were going well, but I was still restless inside. It soon became apparent that this church wanted me to pursue formal ministry, but I knew in my heart that I wasn’t a Baptist.

I left the Baptist church with a fiancé, a job as a college teacher, and new hope, since a Vineyard had just started up in Ottawa. It was especially exciting as the couple that pastored this Vineyard came from my hometown; they had pastored the Alliance church around the corner from the house I grew up in! It looked like everything was finally coming together.

That did not last long. The Vineyard I had left in Toronto had been experiencing wonderful renewal. But as a result, folks in Ottawa expected the new church simply to be an extension of the same renewal. Probably one of the biggest misconceptions about the Vineyard is the belief that we are hyper-charismatic; the reality is, we don’t focus on these things, but we don’t stop them when they happen either. Our focus is on being Christ to the world. Sometimes God shows up in amazing ways, but John Wimber always exhorted us to stick to the main and the plain of the gospel. All this made planting a new Vineyard really hard, and my fiancé was hurt in the process. So we left the Vineyard, even though this broke my heart.

We were married and three years later we both felt a clear call to go back to the Vineyard. Lots had changed, but coming back for me felt like coming home. We spent two years helping close down what was left of that congregation, and not long after we were released to start a new Vineyard, to build one from the ground up. That’s the church we’ve been planting. It’s very much a part of me; I long to give back some of what was so graciously given to me. This is why I am a Vineyardite.

Encounters with tradition (3): from Congregationalist to Reformed Baptist

A guest-post by Guy Davies

Charles Haddon Spurgeon began his Christian life as a Congregationalist who believed in infant baptism. But soon after his conversion, he embraced Baptist views. His Congregationalist parents were a little disappointed in Charles’ decision to seek baptism. But they gave him permission to follow his conscience. His mother wrote: “Ah, Charles, I often prayed to the Lord to make you a Christian, but I never asked that you might become a Baptist.” The dutiful son replied with a note of typical Spurgeonic wit: “Ah, Mother, the Lord has answered your prayer with his usual bounty, and has given you exceedingly abundantly above all you asked or thought.”

I began my Christian life as a rather charismatic Congregationalist. I quickly became disillusioned with charismatic experiences as it became obvious to me that my “speaking in tongues” was just me blurting out incomprehensible nonsense. I needed something that would give my new Christian life depth and stability and I found this in the riches of Reformed theology. In Puritan and Reformed teaching, I discovered a convincingly biblical theology that was married to an emphasis on true experiential Christianity. Here I found head and heart united to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

The transition from Charismatic to Calvinist was accomplished in a brief period of time. But it took some years to shift from a paedobaptist Congregationalist to a Baptist. As a young Christian I learned that the great Congregationalist divines like John Owen and Thomas Goodwin were infant-baptists, as were the reformers and the early church fathers. Their argument seemed pretty convincing: baptism has replaced circumcision as the sign and seal of the covenant. As (male) children were circumcised under the old covenant, so children of believers should be baptised under the new. This view was based on a semblance of biblical theology and backed up by many of my theological heroes. How could it be wrong? Besides, I was just a little fed up with Baptist friends telling me that I needed to be baptised! As far as I was concerned, I was baptised – as an infant, and that was that.

But the more I thought about the matter, it became clear to me that infant baptism is neither implied by the Old Testament nor taught in the New. Reformed Baptists are committed to applying sola scriptura to the matter of baptism. We honour the reformers and Puritans – but on this issue, they were mistaken. This reminds us that our heroes have feet of clay. Tradition is to be valued, but the Bible alone is our authority. “Repent, and let every one of you be baptised” (Acts 2:38). In the New Testament, water baptism always follows repentance and faith.

There is a danger that when we changes our views we set ourselves against those we formerly agreed with. But I still hold to Congregationalist views of church government, and still have deep respect for infant-baptist Christians. There are aspects of the Reformed Baptist tradition that I am not entirely happy with. The movement has sometimes veered away from evangelical Calvinism into hyper-Calvinism and even antinomianism. Some Reformed Baptist churches will not allow infant-baptist Christians to join them at the Lord’s Table. To me that is uncharitable and sectarian. But I think that the Reformed Baptist position, as set forth in the 1689 Baptist Confession, is a faithful expression of biblical Christianity.

Encounters with tradition (2): from evangelical to post-evangelical

A guest-post by D. W. Congdon

There are certainly problems with calling “evangelicalism” a tradition. To some, it refers simply to the Protestant churches born out of the Reformation. To others, it refers to the pietistic, Anabaptist traditions. To others, more recently, it refers to the American Free Church movement, which is more a sociopolitical reality than anything else. And to others still, it refers to a kind of Christian fundamentalism. I wish to affirm all of these uses of the term, and all of them apply to my own journey as an evangelical Christian.

I grew up in your textbook American evangelical home: strong nuclear family, large extended family (presently over 50 first cousins), rooted in Scripture (devotions every night; Bible memory verses at every dinner), committed to biblical inerrancy and a male-female complementarianism (i.e., hierarchicalism), avid believers in six-day creationism, distrustful of anything related to the secular academy, loyal Republicans, Baptist heritage, descendants of Jonathan Blanchard (founder of Wheaton College), homeschooled, raised with strong moral principles, and active in our local nondenominational church at every level of ministry. And this description only scratches the surface.

In writing this post, therefore, I do not come with any experience in moving from one established Christian tradition to another. I grew up and remain an American evangelical of sorts. But within the course of my lifetime, evangelicalism became a much more fluid, malleable, and diverse entity. Within a single decade, I saw the rise of evangelical feminism, evangelical leftist politics, evangelical engagement with evolution (beyond creationism and ID), and most importantly, an evangelical engagement with ancient and contemporary theology in ways that had not been the case before. Of course, we might also mention the rise of the emerging church movement within American evangelicalism. Regardless of whether one sees this as a positive or negative development, it is at the very least indicative of how evangelicalism has expanded over recent years.

In my years as a student at Wheaton College, I went through a seismic shift in thinking. I arrived with no awareness of the diversity within the Christian church (which I honestly thought was limited only to Free Church evangelicals) and no understanding of the complex debates over the Bible, theology, politics, and other issues which I had simply taken for granted. All of that changed for me within the course of a year. As an English major, I did a lot of reading, and the three books that affected me the most during my first year were Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy – all by Roman Catholics. Finally, in the summer before my second year, I read Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and this turned the tide for good.

I experienced a rather violent “conversion” process, and it took me a full two years to work through some of the major issues. Besides physically throwing Noll’s book after finishing it the first time, I went through a polemical stage in which I set about rejecting my heritage. Numerous angry emails later, I began to emerge from my youthful ire into a more mature readiness to construct a positive position which upheld the important elements of my upbringing (e.g., fidelity to Scripture, involvement in the church, concentration on the cross of Christ) while incorporating the insights that I had gained from others, such as Karl Barth. One insight in particular came from the experience of attending an Anglican church during my last year at Wheaton. The discovery of the liturgy and the eucharist for the first time (!) radically changed me in ways that simply reading theology never will.

In the end, I still consider myself an evangelical, but I am a much different person than I used to be – hopefully for the better. I am not entirely sure “post-evangelical” is the best term to describe where I am today, because I have no intention of being anything other than steadfastly evangelical (though I define this term in a much broader way now). Even so, it seems to be the term most used to describe this new orientation within evangelicalism. If by “post-evangelical” we mean a commitment to Scripture, the Protestant solae, and the local church combined with a moderate-leftist politics, then this is indeed the “tradition” in which I locate myself today.

Encounters with tradition (1): from Pentecostal to Anglican?

A guest-post by Aaron Ghiloni

I did not leave Pentecostalism because I had somewhere else to go. I wasn’t conscripted by the Catholics or pursued by the Presbyterians. I left because I had to. Theologically frustrated, spiritually dry and emotionally exhausted, I quietly bid farewell.

Like many Pentecostals, I was nurtured in revival. From birth, I was born-again on a weekly basis (if not more frequently). This was my life, my family’s life. Therefore, departing was incredibly difficult. If you’ve gone through this, you will know what I mean. It was obvious that I must leave – still, leaving was gruelling.

And so, I not only left holy-rolling and tongue-talking behind, but also good friends and a lifetime of memories. I had nowhere to go. I shook, sighed, and swayed. The vertigo of an ex-Pentecostal is ferocious. Since my Pentecostal days I have worshipped with a Baptist congregation, studied at an evangelical seminary, and been employed by various churches (non-denominational, Methodist, and now Anglican).

I have gone from Pentecostalism to – what? Officially, I’m Anglican, but unofficially I’m undecided. I’m denominationally ambivalent. It’s not that I frivolously bounce about like an excited toddler or a volatile teen, but that for the formerly-staunch Pentecostal, traditions and denominations are greatly relativised. One can have only one first love. Once a Pentecostal, always a Pentecostal (at least in some ways).

Being a part of this or that movement is no longer that important. And while for career purposes I may identify myself with a particular church, it is not because they have won my devotion. I simply cannot change the fact that my heart beat the hardest and my blood pumped the fastest at an old Pentecostal altar.

New series: encounters with tradition

Understanding the function of tradition remains a central task for theology today – and ecumenical progress requires an ever deeper understanding not only of one’s own tradition, but also of the internal “grammar” of other Christian traditions. But this is by no means easy. Indeed, as Gerhard Ebeling once remarked, relatively few Christians have ever had to made a real choice between traditions – in most cases, one’s own tradition simply maintains its own powerful self-evidentness in contrast to all other traditions.

Ebeling’s observation highlights the complex difficulties surrounding ecumenical understanding: if I have never encountered (say) the Roman Catholic tradition as a genuine possibility for faith, and so have never had to choose between this possibility and the possibility of my own tradition, then I’ve not yet really begun to understand the Roman Catholic tradition at all.

For this reason, we can learn a lot from people who have made a transition from one Christian tradition to another. Such people have experienced tradition itself – they have encountered both the non-self-evidentness of their own tradition, and the attractiveness and coherence of another tradition. So if we listen to the stories of people who have made such ecclesial transitions, it’s possible that the function of tradition will become a little more translucent, a little more thinkable.

With that in mind, we’re starting a new series here at F&T, entitled “Encounters with Tradition.” The series will feature guest-posts from several people who have made a transition from one Christian tradition to another – from Protestant to Catholic, from Baptist to Anglican, from evangelical to post-evangelical, and so on.

Perhaps these stories of diverse “encounters with tradition” will help us all to encounter our own (and other) traditions in a fresh way.