If you ever care to share those stories, I'm only a PM away.
What religion was I previously? Well, let me preface this by stating that I was adopted at birth. My birth family, or what I know of it, is a hodgepodge of religions. My father's father's family is Confessional Lutheran (LCMS), originally belonging to the "Danske Folkekirke," or Church of Denmark when they immigrated to the U.S. from Schleswig-Holstein, partly out of necessity for money, and partly out of a feared induction into the EKD, or as it was known at the time, the "Prussian Union." As Schleswig-Holstein had mostly been in Danish hands before Prussian takeover, they, as Lutherans, had avoided abandoning the Confessions as the German church had done years prior. My father's mother's father was an Irish Catholic whose family came from Contae Mhaigh Eo, while his wife was a mixture of Congregationalist and Dutch Reformed from Upstate New York. My father's parents, on the other hand, decided to join the Assemblies of God, and that was the religion my father was raised in until he married my mother (then they became ELCA). My mother's father, being, like his wife, pretty much half-Norwegian and half-English, was raised Episcopalian, while his wife was raised in what would later become the ELCA.
Keep in mind this is only my birth family.
In my adopted family, my mother was raised Catholic, and like many baby-boomers, left the church due to issues with dogma. My father's family was originally Orthodox Jewish from Poland and Russia, though is non-practicing Jewish now (they're the Creasters of Judaism). Thus, in the first few years of my life, I was raised in my mother's Christ Unity, a New Thought movement. At the age of five, curiously, I decided that I wanted to be Jewish, and so I began, with my father, attending a Reform Synagogue in my home town. Deciding to become a Bar Mitzvah, without officially converting (this was a Reform Synagogue), I ultimately spent twelve years in Reform Judaism, becoming a Bar Mitzvah, being Confirmed, and even teaching Judaica in Hebrew School for a number of years. Finally, I decided to officially convert. I went through the whole process, Beis Din, male drop of blood (from the same part they you-know-what as a baby, which I had been shortly after birth), and Mikvah. The whole nine yards. However, as I was Reform, many observant Jews would not consider my conversion valid. Really, the reason from a Jewish perspective that my conversion was technically annulled was because I converted out of Judaism less than a year after my conversion.
One day, in the spring of my Junior Year in high school, a Korean Presbyterian friend of mine invited me to a church outing of his. During this outing, the Pastor and a number of Elders kept hammering the apologetics nail. Finally, after a very, very long discussion, the Pastor asked me to read the New Testament. I obliged.
This is the part where we, as Lutherans, say that God imbued Grace through the Word. My eyes were opened. At this point, the only question was which denomination I should follow. So I went church hopping, from the RCC, to the ABA, to the NBC, to the SBC, to the DRC, to the UCC, to the UMC, to the DOC, to the EOC (ROC, UOC, and GOC), to the CC, to the EC, to the CON, to the CFG, to the OPs, to the TRs, to the PBs, to the NDs, to the Es, to the PCUSA, to the PCA, to the ECP, to the JWs, to the LDS.
I had no idea where to go, so a friend (ELCA in fact) suggested that I read the Book of Concord. So I did. All of it.
Surely I was a Lutheran. All I needed was a denomination.
Sadly, off to the ELCA it was. Boy was I in for a surprise. Thats all Im going to say. After marking that off my list, I was sad, as I thought it to be the only Lutheran denomination in the U.S.
Then I found the LCMS. Went through Catechism, was baptized Reformation Sunday of 2013.
Subtract from my LCMS experience a 10 week foray into Ásatrú (Germanic Neopaganism, though I never renounced Christ or my baptism), and Ive been there ever since. Now Im in college studying to be a pastor.
As to why I remain Lutheran . . . thats another story for another time.
Pax Christi,
WirSindBettler
