Confessing Evangelical

I keep meaning to hunt out and blog this Garrison Keillor quotation which was printed in Modern Reformation a couple of years ago. And then the latest issue arrived yesterday, and they'd printed it again. I know Keillor is E"L"CA but it's still cracking stuff:

Sunday feels odd without church in the morning. It's the time in the week when we take our bearings, and if we miss it, we're just following our noses. Of course, there's a lot about church that can be aggravating -- empty sermons and smarmy people and a certain comfy, complacent feeling. And then you have that organist in your face, destroying quietness wherever he can and then cranking up during hymns and assaulting you with the trumpet stops so you can't hear yourself sing. But believing Christians are the people I want to be among. And every word of the Creed is true. And the organist shuts up during the prayers at least. And you think about your considerable sins. And you go forward to partake of the Savior's death and resurrection, and that's the whole thing. Isn't it?

The first time I read this, I was still Reformed - but I found it moving and compelling, particularly the second half of the paragraph, from the word "But..." through to the glorious final sentence. Just another of the many threads God used to tug me towards Lutheranism.

In the original interview from which the above quotation is taken, from The Lutheran, Keillor (while coming out with some slightly dodgy stuff about God giving different gifts and revelations to different churches) comments on ecumenism, particularly the ELCA union with ECUSA:

I'm wary of ecumenism. I see nothing wrong with having six or 10 or 15 different churches of Christ in town and people trouping to each one. If the alternative is some nondenominational New Agey all-purpose homogenized feel-good exercise, then give me schism.

Amen to that.