I happen to be American. This profound fact is woven deeply into my being. It is not a casual fact; the land upon which I was born and sired is inseparable from who I am. The words of Sir Walter Scott apply to all noble souls, from whatever country they hail: "Breathes there a man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!" I am glad for my country and its democratic ideals. My grandparents emigrated to America--the land of opportunity and freedom. Opportunity and freedom are important things, and my family, though humble blue-collar workers, made the most of them. Indeed, given my lack of scholarly promise early on, I would probably not have had the opportunity to go to college or to pursue graduate studies had I lived in another country, especially one where only a few can place in the universities. This is also the country where my grandparents became Christians and freely reared their families in the faith. I owe a lot to my country.
    Still, it seems to me that even early on I felt lost in the vastness of American democracy, one of an unconnected crowd, or like one of many cream-colored Chevys coming off a 1950s assembly line. There was no ultimate sense of belonging, no essential identity in a land called the melting pot, nothing truly transcendent to which to aspire and hold on. I was brought up in a large independent church where the Gospel was preached, but even this didn't give me a sense of being part of something meaningful, or what is more, something sacred. It has slowly dawned upon me over the years that I was searching for something that I had heard of all my life, but never could connect to-the Kingdom of God! It is amazing how such a prevalent biblical notion is lost to us Americans and to most of Western culture.
   We have no personal and meaningful understanding of king and kingdom. Our worldview is shaped by the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, our own and the French, where we did away with the old-world hierarchical structures and exalted the individual, proclaiming equality for all. "Freedom" has become the great and sacred rally word of the Western world, and it is interpreted to mean freedom from anyone meddling in my personal affairs. We are a culture of individualists who have loosely banded together to protect ourselves from the chaotic forces outside that would destroy our individual rights, our freedom, and our fun. There is simply no room for kings and their kingdoms; they belong to fairy tales! This attitude tends to be our common creed, our rock-bottom identity, Christian and pagan alike.
   In the last few decades, however, loose political structures have no longer been able to keep the chaos out. The freedoms of one group impinge upon another, and what was once more or less a unified structure is now cracking up into bits and pieces. The world no longer seems to be a safe place, even for relatively affluent and powerful Americans. Our excessive individualism has alienated us from one another, and we find ourselves alone in a sea shifting in crazy and unpredictable ways. Rootless because of our inability to commit, we have come to the doors of what seems to be the end of democracy gone bad: chaos. This has created a crisis for Christians in the West, both Protestant and Catholic. Perhaps because the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence, I remember feeling jealous of Roman Catholics when I was young. I knew very little of Catholicism, but Catholics with their hierarchy, tight large families, mysterious ceremonies, convents, and monasteries all belonged to something united, had something bigger than the individual, something sacred. Unfortunately, even though Catholicism is part of the structure of the Kingdom, the chaos of individualism has long been infiltrating the Catholic Church in the Western world as well.
   My evangelical background brought me to this question: Are we essentially "saved" individuals who have a "personal" relationship with God, who band together loosely in independent societies we call churches where we sing a few culturally relevant songs, receive a teaching, and plug our kids into a program that hopefully will protect them from evil things ever ready to pounce and devour? Underneath such a religious identity is another, often unquestioned one, and that is one of personal freedom. We may think "No one has any authority over me and my family! I will not obey anyone or anything that crosses my will or my way of doing things. My relationship with God is real and personal, and I will share my testimony when called upon, but don't ask me to tithe! Do not pry into my personal life, how I spend my time, or what I do for entertainment. I am an American! I bow to no one! Give me a loosely structured service where I can be free to be who I am! I am justified by grace through faith! I do not have to do anything in church-formality is contrived and dreadfully out, spontaneity is natural and in! I want to come away feeling alive!"
   It is beginning to dawn on many that these attitudes are essentially culturally driven and reflect the values of our society. They are not Christian values, and they do not reflect the biblical worldview or that of the Church throughout most of her two-thousand-year existence. We have confused democracy with our faith and have distanced ourselves from Christ our King and His Kingdom, refusing to pay due homage in any real and meaningful way. We have opted for a loosely committed club in which we all have a vote and call it "church." If certain individuals desire more, they may be offended at the lack of commitment of others. Try as we might, when we walk in the radical individualism of our culture, we cannot attain true unity nor a sense of belonging to something bigger than what meets the eye. In the end, we are left to ourselves; it is the American way.
   There has got to be another way! But where? In my journey, I have always believed in the Church, but never felt that I really experienced it, at least not in the way in which my soul longed. This desire has driven me to a life-long study of Scripture and the Church Fathers. My journey has brought me and my family to the Charismatic Episcopal Church (CEC), a wonderful place of treasures both old and new. I have found, however, that this way has been very costly-it costs us our freedom as it has been culturally understood. To enter genuinely into the CEC, or any other church in apostolic succession, is to enter into a sacramental worldview and to leave behind the rationalistic, self-centered worldview of the Western world. It is to submit oneself to the teaching and authority of the Church even when it does not line up with our cultural opinions and preferences. In a sacramental worldview, people bind themselves to God and to each other by sacred oaths that cannot be broken without dire consequences. In the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, the Holy Eucharist, Holy Matrimony, and Holy Orders, Christ the King binds Himself to us; we are bound to Him and to each other. In these sacraments, God's grace is conferred upon us, empowering us to keep our vows. We make a radical commitment and enter a new family; a new sense of being, belonging, and purpose floods our souls. We come out of the chaos into the warm glow of kingly light. For most Westerners who have been deeply indoctrinated by democratic ideals, however, this is a difficult step to take. However "saved" we may feel, and however real our personal relationship with Jesus may be, we still understand ourselves as free and independent individuals. But freedom that is superficially embraced as "doing what I want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else" is no freedom at all. Freedom in the biblical sense is given to us by God to aspire to high ideals. It means freedom to embrace the good, the true, and the beautiful as Scripture and nature reveals them to the depths of our souls. A free Christian is submitted to the authority of the Church. A free Christian is in fact a servant of Christ who has laid down his or her life for the King and become a servant of His servants. He is one who bows at the Name of Jesus and confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:10-11).
   Every true Christian will, in theory, agree with this idea of freedom. However, when it comes to practice, a more instinctive, primal urge takes over and redefines the Gospel commands. This instinctive urge is for freedom and independence as they have been fed to us from our culture since our infancy. Thus, churches are created with no sacramental vows, liturgy, authority structures, or link to the traditions of the past. These things are condemned as contrary to the spirit of "salvation by grace through faith alone," the lens through which many of us have been taught to look at Scripture. Vows, liturgy, and tradition are not unbiblical; however, they seem un-American, and that is the real reason why we reject them.
   It takes, therefore, the radical step of redefining ourselves and our allegiance to come in out of the chaos of our culture. For me and my family, part of this radical step was to move from the independent evangelical world into the CEC with its kingdom values and structures. Although it is possible to assert one's individualism and autonomy in any church, we have found the CEC to be a place where we could commit ourselves. We are part of something bigger than ourselves. We are a branch of the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, and are connected and bonded to one another and to the spiritual realm, forever. We belong to an eternal kingdom whose earthly structures and liturgies reflect the structure and movements of the heavenlies. We have found that if we cannot submit ourselves to our ecclesiastical authorities as God has ordained in the structure of His Church, it is highly unlikely that we can submit ourselves to Christ the King.
   There are many Christians yearning for a truly holy experience of the Church who want to come in from the cold chaos of Western individualism and self-centeredness, yet who are warmed with the glowing coals of evangelical fervor. It is not my intention here to tell such Christians where to worship or to tell them that their journey must be like mine. I would like to encourage you, however, not to give up on the journey, and not to settle for something less than what God is urging you to find. Keep searching for a home, an identity, a place of order, beauty, mystery, and worship. Push on to the attainment of true freedom, not as the world defines freedom, but as our Lord has promised: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). By God's grace, my family and I have been journeying towards radical freedom. It has taken us not only to the CEC, but also to the Life in Jesus Community. Much of what we have shed, and are still shedding, are layers of cultural baggage that weighed us down without our knowing it. We have Jesus, not only as our Savior, but as our King, and we are gaining a deepening understanding of His Kingdom in heaven and on earth and of our participation in it. As we go along we catch glimpses of the morning for which we all long: the morning of the just King and His rule, a morning without clouds, with the silvery dew on the grass shining in the rays of uncreated light (see II Samuel 23:3b-4).