[Dean's World] Dean: Becoming Orthodox

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Posted by Dean:
Becoming Orthodox
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1187960051.shtml


   Aside from its utterly embarrassing series of bullcrap by Scott
   Beauchamp, it remains that The New Republic is still a magazine with
   great writers. I was particularly moved by this story of a Wheaton,
   Illinois Evangelical minister's spiritual journey, which isn't all
   that far from my own:

     Ellsworth began reading more and more about Orthodox
     Christianity--eventually spending close to $10,000 on Orthodox
     books. By 2005, he was regularly visiting an Antiochian Orthodox
     Church in Chicago (the Antiochian Orthodox Church is Middle Eastern
     in background and the seat of its patriarchate is in Damascus). By
     late 2006, Ellsworth realized that he wanted to be Orthodox
     himself. On the first Sunday of the following February, an Orthodox
     priest in Chicago anointed him with holy oil and he was
     chrismated--or formally received--into the Orthodox Church. A month
     later, at the age of 62, he was ordained as an Orthodox priest
     himself.

     Ellsworth's story is hardly unique. Most of the approximately 150
     members of the Orthodox parish he now leads are former evangelicals
     themselves. Even Ellsworth's transition from evangelical minister
     to Orthodox priest is not uncommon. Of the more than 250 parishes
     of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America,
     some 60 percent are led by convert priests, most of whom are from
     evangelical backgrounds. And, according to Bradley Nassif, a
     professor at North Park University and the leading academic expert
     on Evangelical- Orthodox dialogue, the Antiochian Archdiocese has
     seen over 150 percent church growth in the last 20 years,
     approximately 75 percent of which is attributable to converts.

   Most Evangelicals know little to nothing about church history prior to
   the Reformation, and falsly believe that the Roman Catholic Church
   invented all by itself a bunch of things that it did not. Mistake #1
   comes from thinking you can just read the Bible and figure it all out
   for yourself, and just shop around until you find a church that agrees
   with your own prejudices. The spiritual emptiness that so many
   evangelicals eventually come to feel is expressed powerfully here in
   the same article:

     Indeed, as she continued to talk, it became clear that, as an
     evangelical, she had felt very small and alone. It was a surprising
     sentiment to hear from someone about the evangelical movement.
     After all, ever since the rise of the Moral Majority, American
     evangelicals have arguably been the most politically powerful
     religious group in the country. But perhaps the most telling
     revelation of the Orthodox conversion trend is that this political
     power has not translated into a sense of spiritual power--or
     belonging. For these converts, it seems, the Orthodox Church has
     solved the unbearable lightness of being evangelical. "When I was
     in [an evangelical church], I was thinking, This is great, I love
     this,'" DeRenzo said. "But I thought, and I don't mean to be
     morbid, but eventually some day this pastor is going to die or I'm
     going to move away, so if this is the only place in the world where
     the truth is, that's tragic." DeRenzo paused and looked around the
     sanctuary at the icons and the candles. She went on, "Coming to the
     Orthodox Church means that I am in communion with that church no
     matter where I am in the world, that I can go into that church
     wherever I am and have the same liturgy and celebrate the same way.
     I'll be in communion with other people. And that is so huge. That
     hugeness is so exciting."

   2,000 years of unbroken tradition (oral and written) in direct descent
   from the 12 apostles is an awfully different experience from the
   "let's just read our favorite translation of the Bible and talk about
   what it means with people we agree with" folks.