My name is Nathan Braden and this is the story of how my sister and brother-in-law, Kathy and Al Killebrew and I came to attend Lake Avenue Church. Although Al and I already gave verbal testimonies several months ago at the Saturday night service, I wanted to share it in written form in hopes of offering encouragement to a wider audience.
We have attended LAC on Saturday nights for roughly a year and a half. Al and I serve as musicians on the Saturday night worship teams and sometimes in the Sunday morning services.
My wife and I and Kathy and Al, all grew up involved in a legalistic sect. They had a private college campus in Los Angeles, but also one in East Texas, where my sister Kathy and I grew up. We attended this church throughout our childhoods. It kept many Jewish commandments and observances: Feast of Tabernacles, Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and Days of Unleavened Bread. We were commanded to save two tithes (ten percent each) and every third year, a third tithe. The “Sabbath” was Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, and those who observed Sunday Sabbaths were “socalled” Christians.
We basically considered ourselves the one true Church. When we took new jobs we had to tell our employer up front that we would need certain religious days off each year and that we could not work on the Sabbath. Kids in school had to miss sports events that were on Friday night or Saturday. They had to be pulled out of school on the annual “Holy Days” and had to make up the homework.
Though some would deny it, we worked hard to “earn” our salvation in a sense. It was as though Christ’s sacrifice was not sufficient. We had good intentions, just couldn’t acknowledge that Christ had done the work for us already. Christ was de-emphasized. God the Father was the main figure, with Christ his Son, and there was no Holy Spirit as an entity. The Holy Spirit was simply their “power.” There was no belief in the Trinity. We did not observe “pagan” holidays like Christmas, Easter or even birthdays. All of these customs were foreign to us until later in life. Although we did not know it at
the time, we lived with a legalistic “veil” over our eyes. In the late 80s and early 90s, the veil slowly started to lift, thanks to the courage of some church leaders who gradually began re-examining our beliefs in light of the Bible.
But freedom is never free and often comes at great cost. The controversies that were revealed reverberated for years to come and resulted in the church losing at least half its worldwide membership. One doctrine after another was re-examined and tweaked. Churches split and re-split into many new groups calling themselves by different names, all trying to preserve “the faith once delivered.” Families were divided, marriages broken, friendships split in two.
To be fair and balance the picture, we did not lead miserable childhoods. Our childhoods were pleasant enough; we have fond memories of traveling across country to the sites of these annual “Festivals.” Our church taught us to love the Bible and to respect God our Creator. We were better people for it. But we looked with suspicion and perhaps even condescension on the rest of Christianity and didn’t realize our own brokenness and need for humility. We were also missing out on so many great relationships with our wider Church brotherhood of denominations.
Al, a keyboardist, and I, a drummer, had played together in many bands playing secular music within the church for years. In the early 90s our denomination began gradually introducing more contemporary music and instruments into their services and annual Festivals. Of course, this also was a painful and controversial process with which many did not agree. Our musician friends and we made the transition into all Christian music. For many years, we had a prolific worship team that even traveled to different places in the country to play for pastoral conventions and other events in our church.
During those formative years, we would occasionally visit LAC and its Saturday night contemporary service, enjoying the style. We would model ourselves after them and borrow song ideas from them. So we felt a musical affinity for LAC and even struck up friendships with some of the musicians there and “borrowed” them on occasion to round out our own team for special events. One year, we borrowed two vocalists and a guitarist and took them to Vail, Colorado with us for a week-long religious “Festival” of ours.
The four of us attended a smaller, more contemporary daughter church of our denomination that split off and met in Altadena for many years. It gradually shrank until those of us left decided it best to disband and move on to other church homes. I explored many different churches in the San Gabriel area, but when I visited LAC on a Saturday night, the past affinity came back to me and I felt at home. The members were very inclusive and welcoming and let me be involved in the worship team. Soon my sister and brother-in-law started attending and also became musically involved.
My wife still attends one of my old denomination’s churches, which has totally reformed and is not legalistic any more at all. She thinks of that community as her family and I completely understand. We are at peace with one another on this. I think I can speak for my sister Kathy and my brother-in-law Al when I say that we have been humbled and have felt so blessed to be so welcomed and to have made so many friends at LAC. We are in awe that we get to serve and play music alongside some of those that we admired from afar so many years earlier. We learned later that some at LAC had prayed for our denomination over the years - that the veil would be lifted - and it was. We love the inclusiveness and multi-cultural face of LAC. It is indeed, good to be home. Thanks and praise be to God for His grace and mercy.