My Liberal Christian Church Is Not Dying

From Huffington-

At the end of my 2004 faith crisis, when I realized that I didn't want to be identified as evangelical, I felt lost. Nobody likes to be labeled, but it's scary to not know where you belong.

It was around this time that I began visiting the local Episcopal church, where friends I respected -- smart, bespectacled types with good taste in books and music -- had already found their places in the pews. There, I was surprised to find that I loved the liturgy. I grew up in charismatic churches, attended by an inordinate amount of former Catholics who left the faith of their families, declaring it stale, spiritually dead and too ritualistic to allow for any movement of the spirit. I grew up among ex-Catholic Catholic bashers.

When I began attending Catholic high school and was forced to attend mass semi-regularly, I was prepared to be bored and maybe even a bit offended. But I wasn't. I remember talking to my mom one day after school and telling her that I might have felt the spirit there in that multi-purpose auditorium where the services were held. Sometime between the short homily and communion, where I sat awkwardly with the Asian kids as our Catholic friends climbed over us to reach the aisle, I felt something like the hair-raising tingle that I knew only from prayer services and youth rallies.

More here-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-d-fitzgerald/my-liberal-christian-church-is-not-dying_b_1683054.html