I love church.  As a 25 year old American, that’s a weird statement to type.  Many people in my generation either have a strongly negative to church.  To those who do not subscribe to Christianity, church is a place of intolerance and judgment—and who can blame them, as churches throughout history have slipped into those evils.  However, even those who do subscribe to Christianity still don’t like church—it seems like an antiquity to many in my generation, a relic of a former time whose importance has been transcended.

But I love church.  Church has been part of my life since before I was born.  I can’t think of a time when I missed church three Sundays in a row—church is something that I’ve always been expected to attend, and once I reached a certain age, it became something that I felt worthwhile to attend of my own volition.  I love church because it’s a place to come together as similarly valued people and work through each of our struggles with the holy, and discern how God wants us to work in the world in which we live.

Up until about 6 months ago, I’ve attended conservative to moderate Baptist churches who were certainly less fundamentalist than what “Baptist” currently connotes, but who were (and continue to be) considerably less liberal than me.  Six months ago I began attending Highland Baptist Church, and for the first time in my life, my faith has been challenged from the left.  I’ve been left wondering more than once “is this stance too liberal for me?”  That answer has not yet been ‘yes’; but I am glad to be in a place that necessitates the question.   Prior to Highland, I attended two fantastic churches which I love dearly.  They are the places where I found God and where I began my life-long struggle to comprehend my place in God’s world.  In infinite ways, those churches have helped me along to become the person that I am.  However, when I made the decision to go somewhere else six month ago, there was a specific reason

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Robert Kahne: We Must All Find Our Way