The Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota held its convention this past weekend in Duluth. I decided it would be fun to tag along with the delegates from my church.

The Right Rev. Steven Charleston served as guest speaker for the convention. The Episcopal Church in the U.S. has undergone difficulties in recent months, partly as a result of their recent appointing a gay bishop. Charleston didn’t waste any time getting to meat of his message.

According to Charleston — President and Dean of Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts and former Bishop of Alaska — decision-makers and parishioners must “go together.” He explained that there is room to disagree, and that this disagreeing is a significant part of what makes Episcopalians unique. Not marching like automatons or robots, who all say and believe exactly the same thing, is essential to the life of the Episcopal Church, he argued.

Between stretches of his speech, he laughed and told the crowd how he no longer took himself as seriously as he once did. His black pony tail turned behind him as he walked back and forth.

Charleston joked about how people think they’d have a much purer understanding of Jesus’ teaching if they were alive and walking on the earth with him. In reality, explained Charleston, Jesus’ disciples were just as clueless as any of us.

Just imagine, said Charleston, what it would’ve been like for the disciples who waited anxiously to do what Jesus commanded and all told them is that they ought to love one another.

Perhaps one of the most memorable segments in Charleston’s speech was when he talked about how conservatives will be stuck in Heaven with Hillary Clinton and liberals will be stuck in Heaven with Rush Limbaugh.

Like any great speaker, it is not as much what he said, but how he said it; and how he connected with his audience. By the end of his speech, convention goers were on their feet repeating after him, “Hallelujah!” …many with their hands in the air. These are Episcopalians, mind you.

And I was left feeling like I was ready for a change from thinking like a Lutheran, to thinking like an Episcopalian. Any church that does not equate being faithful with being a robot or an automaton, is my kind of church. Indoctrination is antithetical to faith. And if we do not have the courage to respond to both the authenticity of our convictions and the authenticity of our doubts, our relationship with God is cut short.

So many church-goers fear authenticity because they fear eternal condemnation. But this is not a life lived by faith. Rather, it is a life lived by fear. Only God’s love can free us from condemnation of ourselves, and the perpetual, stagnant condemnation of others.