How the Spirit Moves Me

My senior year of college, I was a veteran member of Emory's Wesley Fellowship. I'd been on the Student Leadership Team for three years, the treasurer my sophomore and junior years, and the “university liaison” my senior year. One of my best friends at the time was a veteran of the group and its leadership team. We came from similar backgrounds in a few ways: we both had parents who were still married, we were both raised among “conservative” relatives and family friends, and we were both (mostly) raised as United Methodists.

More importantly, we came to the conclusion halfway through that year, after much soul searching, that we were going to label ourselves “Christian Agnostic Deists” (or CADs, for short). We felt that this reflected several things about our world-views. As I mentioned, we were both raised Christian. This was the tradition we were most familiar with, most comfortable with, even if we didn't always agree with what was said to us in church. We were both students of the hard sciences – he was actually a physics major at the time; I, though I majored in Anthropology, spent significant time in the chemistry and biology labs. Our scientific minds led us to want true proof of things; neither of us wanted to reject religion outright, but nor did we have the faith necessary to really be more than Agnostics practicing at one faith or another. We ultimately tacked Deist onto the end not just because it made for a fun acronym, but also because we both agreed that somewhere, somehow, we felt there must have been a creator. Maybe not the Judeo-Christian-Islam creator, but a creator nonetheless.

My lack of comfort – that exists to this day – comes from a bouncy personal religious history, I suppose. Spent the first few years of my life in a family that felt,to me, more secular than not, then jumped from non-denominational to Baptist to Presbyterian (USA) to United Methodist in rapid succession. Was baptized at age nine (thanks to my mother's Southern Baptist heritage) as a Methodist, and confirmed at age thirteen. My parents still attend the Methodist church I was confirmed at, but all was not yet settled. I attended Catholic high school, and found many things to love about that faith. After being Methodist in college, I spent a year teaching for a school run by the Presbyterian Church of America. Following that experience, I rebelled against religion in general – in some ways – for a year and a half, before returning to the calling I'd felt three and four years earlier – to pursue seminary. And that brings us to here :)