As I’ve been growing and learning more about the Catholic church and the liturgy, one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that every action taken and item present in the service is a direct reminder of some aspect of the Gospel. It’s as though, over time, we’ve come to realize that us humans need to be continually pounded in the brain and heart with the facts about how and why we are saved.

In contrast, the evangelical church is all about teaching. People want a message, they want it to be compelling and entertaining and they don’t want it to be something they’ve heard before. It’s no wonder evangelical churches have had to become business-savvy marketers.

And you know what’s funny? Just like marketing ploys and advertising are losing steam (or, as Seth Godin says, the “half-price sale on attention is now over”), I’m starting to see evangelical churches bottom out when it comes to our generation. They can’t keep our attention and we’re left disillusioned and unsatisfied.

Perhaps it’s because the marketing is getting in the way of the constant reminder of sacrifice and forgiveness, of the fact that going through motions is sometimes what we need to do to remember. Maybe we were trained to look for a “good church” only to find the ones we go to are never good enough — rather than taught that the Church is still a collective of imperfect humans. And rather than stick around unsatisfied, we peace out before we get tied down. And many of us will never go back.

There is something that, in the evangelical world, I was completely unaware of, but in the Anglican (and presumably the greater Catholic church) seems to have known for quite some time.

When talking to my good friend Mark, who works in the Anglican church I’ve begun to explore, he half-jokingly commented that his church is “seeker-hostile,” poking a little fun at the “seeker-friendly” philosophy that the evangelical church often touts. But what he means is that, yes, the traditional church is a difficult thing to jump right into with no background in the Christian faith.

Mark then goes on to point out that many people come to the traditional church when they feel as though the evangelical church has nothing left for them, as though it got them so far but once they’ve reached a certain maturity in their faith, they often feel as though there’s “something more” that the evangelical tradition can’t provide so that their spiritual growth can continue. This is, indeed, the main reason why I personally felt the need to abandon evangelicalism.

I just realized that this has something in common with my idea about a spectrum of belief. Maybe it’s time to revise that idea to say this:

It appears as though the evangelical church is good at getting people in the door, at population growth, but in a lot of cases it isn’t so hot at the continual spiritual growth at a certain point. It also appears that, though “seeker-hostile,” the Anglican church is not so hot at the population growth, but really good at the continual spiritual growth.

Here we see where a spectrum of belief — as there are disagreements between these two sections of the Church — is keeping many people, myself included, from falling off the map. I can’t discount the fact that the evangelical church built a certain foundation of faith in me for many years, but when it came time to continue to explore my faith, Anglicanism and the liturgical tradition has become the logical next step.

Mark says he thinks there needs to be a reconciliation of the two churches, and that these two points in the spectrum need to have a line drawn in between them so that the greater Church can do everything it was originally intended to do. If there were no Anglican or Catholic or evangelical, this spectrum might still exist, but as a means of growth in faith rather than a split in the church as is the present case.