1A COMMON STORY
My story is a common story. If it is at all exceptional it is only because it is becoming more and more common by the day. Thousands upon thousands just like me and my family have left Protestantism for the Eastern Orthodox Church in recent years. The pace of conversion is growing. People are reconnecting with the ancient Christian faith, somewhat to the puzzled confusion of the leaders of evangelical protestantism. I’m guessing that since you are reading this book you may also be looking for the ancient way.
My story begins with a Christian home. I was raised by Protestant parents. My father is a Protestant pastor. My mom a Christian educator. My grandparents were church planters. My uncle is also a pastor. My oldest sister and her husband were full time music ministers at large churches in Seattle and Washington, D.C. They are now also church planters in the Seattle region. I have two cousins who are full time missionaries (as were my parents at one time), and many of my extended family go on frequent missions trips around the world. My family is deeply involved in Christianity. All of my aunts and uncles, and their children, are committed Christians. My parents raised myself and two sisters to love God and pursue a relationship with Him. This is my heritage. And yet after 35 years of committed evangelical Protestant Christianity I suddenly found myself leaving my roots and becoming Eastern Orthodox. What happened?
Here are some things that didn’t happen. I didn’t have a crisis of faith. I didn’t get mad or angry at someone at church. I didn’t decide that what I really needed was more incense. I didn’t get a hard apologetic sell from a non-Protestant.
What did happen is that I began to search for the early church. I asked a bunch of questions that led me on a journey of discovery that led me through a very difficult path, and eventually on to discover that my entire understanding of the Church was wrong; tragically wrong. Everything I thought I knew about what the early Church was like, what they believed, and how they practiced their faith, was just flat out wrong.
My journey took years to complete. The formal phase of searching lasted about two and a half years, but really began informally almost a decade prior when I first began asking the question, “Where did the Bible come from?” That alone is a very dangerous question to ask yourself. I’d guess that if you are reading this book either you or someone else close to you has asked a similarly “dangerous” question. That has made you wonder if there’s more to this Christianity thing than you originally thought. Maybe there’s another side to this story.
Certainly that was the case for me. Beginning to look into the history of the formation of the New Testament is enough to make you start wondering what’s going on in Protestant thinking. It didn’t stop there though. I began to study Church history. I read early Church writings. The more I looked, the less and less I could identify my Protestant Christianity with the Christianity of the first centuries. Eventually I found myself with lots of questions, and a pressing need to find the answers. What was the Church, and what did they believe?
I learned about the early church by reading the early church. It wasn’t just the apostles that wrote letters, and Christians didn’t stop writing with the death of the apostle John around 100 AD. There are many excellent writings from the early Church that remain. Some even date from the time of the apostles themselves, and others are from shortly after their time. They are not Scripture, but don’t discount them for that reason. They are invaluable for understanding what Christians believed and practiced, and how they maintained unity. There are a lot of lessons to be found there. You may find them challenging to read, not because of difficult prose or high minded concepts, but because the Christianity they portray is not the one that you would expect.
My idea of the early church was almost pathetically wrong. Envisioning them as a bunch of proto-Protestants meeting in a house and swapping songs, instead I found bishops, the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, infant baptism, confession, icons, incense, councils, and a salvation that wasn’t by faith alone. One notable missing element was a Bible (something that wouldn’t exist in a form we would recognize for many centuries). Also totally missing was the individualistic approach to Christianity I was used to. It was almost exactly the opposite of what I grew up doing. Needless to say this was quite confusing, and trying both mentally and emotionally. My wife and I worked through the tension this raised, and began to find answers to our many questions.
At the end of my years of searching myself, my wife, and my three children (now four) were received into the ancient Eastern Orthodox Church. For many of my friends and family this was a puzzling event. Like myself, many of them had never even heard of the Orthodox Church, much less had any idea what it was. A few accepted the change easily. For others it was more difficult. For my wife and I it was the confluence of many individual questions and years of searching, leading into a final, resolute answer. The ancient Church was still here! It remains open and waiting.
I’ll examine in this book the questions and topics that most converts work through on their way to the ancient Church. Hopefully you will finish this book with more answers than you had going into it. This book is not an introduction to Orthodoxy. You can read other books that describe Orthodoxy as best they can, but all those books will not in reality be able to tell you what Orthodoxy is. Orthodoxy must be experienced to be understood, just like any person must be experienced to be understood. All the explanations in the world cannot give you a relationship with another person. You must spend time with them. You must share experiences and life with them. The ancient Church is the same, and I am not even remotely qualified to try to tell you about it. Having been through the process of converting from Protestantism to the Orthodox Church, however, I do have experience with the obstacles to understanding you will experience. So while I can’t give you an understanding of Orthodoxy, I can help you to tear down the walls and blinders that keep you from experiencing it.
If you are a person who is radically committed to the truth, read on. Remember as you go through the following chapters that God deeply cares about your journey of salvation, and wants you to walk on that path with the highest confidence in the truth of what you believe. Jesus told us that He is the truth, that we would be led into truth, and that the truth would set us free. If you are always pointed toward the truth, then no matter what you read here, or the consequences of it, you can be assured that you are moving toward Him, and that will make all the difference.
0 comments:
Post a Comment