Looking for a new church home here has been…an experience. We’ve look at three churches over the past three Sundays. The first two were standard middle-of-the-road broad church parishes. The bonus was that we knew folks at both and our friends preached both weeks, giving good, strong, biblically and theologically grounded sermons. It’s just–the liturgy wasn’t quite what we prefer. Nothing *wrong* with it, it just didn’t fit with who we are.

So last Sunday we explored the self-proclaimed Anglo-Catholic parish in the area.

Oh my.

My first sign that we might be in for a time was when I spotted a guitar on a stand next to the priest’s seat. I was afraid it would get picked up and utilized in a kitschy St. Louis Jesuits type number during the offertory or communion.

It didn’t.

No—it got used during the sermon.

And the congregation was made to sing along as the priest strummed a southern gospel song. And the sermon was best described as “here are some things I thought were interesting that I encountered last week”. While a few of them weren’t bad not only did they not cohere—this went on for over a half hour…

It went down-hill from there.

Confession and other bits from Rite III. Uninformed liturgical cherry-picking of liturgical gestures during the Eucharist. The feared St Louis Jesuit numbers during the communing of the faithful. Etc.

There was earnest discussion in the car on the way home of attending at the convent…

Given child-care and children’s education concerns, though, we’ll probably head to one of the broad church parishes for now.