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From Evangelical to Orthodox
Introduction
by Fr. Gregory Rogers
"Perhaps
I have always been spiritually hungry. Growing up in a
devoted Christian home, I do not remember ever not believing
in Christ, or not wanting in my heart of hearts to follow
Him and do His will. Not that I was always able to fulfil
that desire moment by moment, but the desire was certainly
there.
I did all the things that good Christian boys are
supposed to do. Baptised by profession of faith shortly
before my ninth birthday, I attended services, youth
meetings, Sunday school, went to Church camp each summer,
participated in youth rallies, service projects, read the
Scriptures and nearly anything else I could get my hands on.
By the time I was in junior high school there was no doubt
in my mind that I would enter the ministry in some way,
shape, or form. I preached my first sermon (on prayer) in
the ninth grade, taught Sunday School, and even taught the
"Know What You Believe" series of classes at the lake Region
Christian Assembly the summer after my junior year of high
school.
After graduation, I entered Lincoln Christian College in
Lincoln, Illinois, to prepare myself for ministry in the
Christian Churches/Churches of Christ (a conservative
evangelical Protestant sect, historically rooted in the
Restoration Movement begun by Alexander Campbell and others
on the American frontier in the early nineteenth
century).
Always restless, as college stu-dents often are, and
desiring to apply the things I was learning in a practical
way, I took a posi-tion as Youth Minister at the deep River
Church of Christ in Merrillville, Indiana, at the tender age
of 18, while still a freshman.
Perhaps the best word to describe my approach to ministry
at that point was serious. I was not interested in building
a youth programme that was founded purely upon social events
and gimmicks designed to draw people into the Church on a
superficial level. The most important aspect of life was a
relationship with Christ that touched the very centre of
one's being. So I worked to build a strong core of committed
young people, seeking to make Jesus Lord over every aspect
of life. [Back to top]
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Going Deeper
In this period, two themes dominated much of my thinking
and effort spiritually and Church. One morning during my
prayers, in all sincerity, but without a due as to what I
was really saying, I told the Lord, "More that anything
else, Lord, I want to be a spiritual man. I am willing to
pay any price or bear any burden to become one. I don't
really know what that is or means, but that is what I want".
In may respects, much of the subsequent history of my life
can be seen as an answer, or at least a developing answer,
to that prayer. I wanted to know God, not just know about
Him. I wanted to experience the sense of His presence, to
grow in faith, hope and love. And I wanted to see His power
worked in others through me, to see healing and repentance,
growth and conversion in the lives of the people among whom
I ministered.
My spiritual search led me in several different
directions. I tried the teachings of Watchman Nee. I read
C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jaques
Ellul, and others. I read the works of charismatic leaders
and sought to experience the reality of the Spirit of God
that they seemed to touch. I worked on cultivating a life of
prayer, with mixed results. I seemed to be unable to satisfy
the longing that was within me for the experience of God,
and powerless to overcome "the sin that so easily beset"
me.
At the same time, I was struggling with the whole idea of
what the Church of Jesus Christ was really called to be. The
scriptural descriptions of the Church were certainly not
true to what I was experiencing in my life. Saint Paul
called the Church "[Christ's] body, the fullness of
Him Who fills all in all" (Ephesians 1:23). Where was this
fullness?
Worship in our tradition was weak at best. Our services
consisted of a couple of songs, a brief communion service
(conceived of as a meditative memorial on Christ's death),
and a sermon. The sermons were usually good, instructive,
inspiring, evangelical. But our services resembled good
motivational lectures more than worship. Where was God?
Where was the acknowledgment of His presence? Why were we
together?
I also longed to experience community in the Church. The
body of Christ is an image of interdependence, of
connectedness. In much of my Christian life I was
experiencing isolation. The Church community was not caring
for one another like it should. Our system of pastoral care
was inadequate to look after the needs of the people of
God. [Back to top]
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Starting from Scratch
For some time I worked on reforming and developing these
things in the Church where I served. But it became apparent
that the kinds of things for which I was longing could never
be found in the structure inherent in my situation. The
expressions of worship could only go as far as the tradition
of the Christian Churches would allow. And I believed God
was wanting to take me on a spiritual journey like that of
Abraham, to a land of which I knew not.
So in July of 1977, my wife, Pamela, and I left our
ministry and unknowingly began our pilgrimage to Orthodoxy.
A few friends gathered around us and we formed a small
congregation dedicated to our pilgrimage. Everything was up
for grabs, save the deity of Christ and the authority of the
Scriptures. We consciously decided to re-examine all our
beliefs in the light of the Scriptures and the experience of
God's people through the centuries. And we committed
ourselves to do the best we could to put into practice what
we learned.
Through the relationships we had with dear friends from
our days at Lincoln Christian College, we linked ourselves
to the group of Churches connected with what was then the
New Covenant - Apostolic Order (later than the Evangelical
Orthodox Church. Together with the brethren, we examined a
number of specific areas which we felt were of primary
significance to our developing movement. These areas
included:
1) Worship. I was partial to a loose, spontaneous,
charismatic kind of approach toward worship, and expected to
find that in the Scriptures and in history. To our surprise,
our spontaneity itself began to lead us to order in worship,
everything taking on a familiar pattern. Our study of the
writings of Justin Martyr (about 150 A.D.) showed us that
the Church has always had some kind of liturgical form to
its worship. Even the New Testament showed evidences of this
in the use of hymns and in the description of the meetings.
So we began using liturgical forms of worship.
2) Scriptural Interpretation. Our theological studies led
us to understand something that had never dawned on me
before, that the Scriptures needed to be interpreted in the
context of Tradition. In the Church in which I had been
raised, it was fashionable to say, "No creed but Christ, no
book but the Bible, no name but the Divine". Yet, on the
back of every Sunday bulletin was a statement saying, "We
believe..." and listing several items ranging from the
nature of salvation, who Christ is, and what constitutes a
valid Christian baptism. What else is this except a creed?
In fact, our three-part slogan above is creedal! And our
positions were derived within the context of tradition - the
Campbellite tradition.
We came to realise that the Bible does not exist in a
vacuum or stand on its own apart from interpretation. The
question was not "tradition or no tradition?", but, "which
tradition?" Are we to accept theological positions that are
derived only from our own limited experience, or are we to
examine and give authoritative weight to the consensual
teachings of the Church through her history? We began to ask
ourselves, then, how are we to interpret the teachings of
the Scripture, and on what basis are we to evaluate the
traditions we see?
We found at least the foundation of an answer in the
writings of Saint Vincent of Lerins, a Latin father of the
fifth century. In his Communitory, he cites three criteria
for determining whether a doctrine is in keeping with the
truth of the gospel. They are: a) universality: has this
doctrine been believed everywhere in the Christian world and
in every time by all, or almost all, of the recognised
teachers of the Church?; b) antiquity: can this doctrine be
found, at least in seed form, in the teachings of the
Apostles, and maintained by the Fathers of the Church?; and
c) consensus: has this doctrine been held by an ecumenical
council, or by the broad consensus of the Fathers of the
Church?
Using this hermeneutical structure, we began to examine
doctrines and practices of both the historic and
contemporary Churches. The results were revolutionary. We
discovered that the Church's worship had always been
liturgical, founded in the practices of the Jewish synagogue
and temple worship. So our worship became liturgical,
modelled after the same pattern used in the historic
Church.
3) The Sacraments. In our re-examination of the
sacraments of the Church, we discovered the Eucharist is
more than just a memorial of the cross of Christ; it is
partaking in a mystery of His glorified human nature, a
sharing in His body and blood, a tasting of the powers of
the age to come. Rather than being an addendum to worship,
it is the focal point of our worship, the moment at which we
supremely commune with God and experience His presence in
the deepest portion of our being of our being.
Baptism is a sacramental means by which we are joined
into union with Christ and share the likeness of His death
and the power of His Resurrection. Doctrines such as the
Trinity and the Incarnation were no longer obscure, but came
to be central in our understanding of God and we are in
relationship to Him. Our salvation was shown to be not
merely a mental assent to truth, but a living, sacramental
union with Him which transforms everything that we are into
His image and likeness.
4) The Church. Our studies also focused on the nature of
Church itself. We began to see that an independent
congregational form of government was alien both to the New
Testament and to the early Church. Of all things, we began
to see the Church needed leadership from all four orders:
bishops, priests, deacons and the laity. We were strongly
influenced by the writings of Saint Ignatius of Antioch in
devising the structure of our sphere of Churches. [Back to top]
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Protestant Orthodox
In 1979, it became apparent we were more than a loose
confederation of Churches: we were in fact a denomination
with a governing structure and a common set of beliefs. So
we organised the Evangelical Orthodox Church on February
15,1979, declaring ourselves to be, so far as we understood,
"A denomination within the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church".
Our studies and pilgrimage continued over the next few
years as we worked our way through the Seven Ecumenical
Councils of the undivided Church, and found ourselves
committed to the teachings of those councils. Realising that
our theological framework placed us in the same category of
thinking as the Orthodox Church, we actively began seeking a
way to enter into communion with Orthodoxy. At the same time
we continued to develop theologically, coming to a fuller
understanding of the Virgin Mary's role in our salvation,
and of the veneration of the saints and of icons.
In the fall of 1981, in an effort to draw upon the
expertise of others and to learn as much as possible about
the history of the Church, I entered into a programme at the
University of Chicago Divinity School in the History of
Christianity. In 1983, I finished a master of arts in
divinity degree, and at this writing have completed my
qualifying exams towards my PhD.
During this period of time, we began to discover some of
the riches of Orthodox spirituality. To this point, we were
experiencing the blessing of God in our corporate worship;
we began to find Him more and more in our personal worship.
For years I had struggled with consistency in my prayer
life, trying to have devotions morning and evening After
failing at that, I cultivated the practice of prayer
throughout the day, attempting what Saint Paul called prayer
without ceasing.
Orthodox spirituality showed me a way to consistently
approach God, one that would enable me to pray irrespective
of my mood, my creativity, my spontaneity. Orthodoxy's
emphasis on a rule of prayer, a consistent set of prayers to
pray regularly, set my prayer free from enslavement to
myself and my spiritual prowess. Further, the Jesus Prayer
became an enrichment in my effort to cultivate the presence
of God throughout the day. We eagerly read the works of
Orthodox spiritual writers such as Theophan the Recluse,
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, and of course, the writings of
the Fathers of the Church, particularly the Philokalia.
More and more, we were becoming Orthodox in our outlook,
our theology, our worship, our spirituality. The major issue
facing us now was our relationship to the historic Orthodox
Church. For some of us in the Evangelical Orthodox Church,
it seemed enough to continue to do our best to recapture
those things we saw in the ancient Church which needed to be
restored in our age. In a way we were really Protestant
Orthodox - Orthodox in may ways, but Protestant in our
ecclesiology. Just as many Protestants believe they can look
at the Scriptures, discern the proper blueprint for Church
life, put that into practice, and call themselves the
Church, so we thought we could recreate the practices of the
One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and by so doing we
could be such.
We began to see, however, that the Church is not built by
fol lowing a blueprint. The body of Christ is a living
organism, one that has had a continuous sacramental life
over twenty centuries.
If it were really "the fullness of Him who fills all in
all", it could not have died, only to be repeat-ed and
restored by us after all these years.
So the questions became not what is the Church, but where
is the Church? Once we came to see that the true Church is
in historic continuity with the Church of the Apostles, the
undivided One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the
first Christian millennium, we realised that we must become
sacramentally integrated into the Orthodox Church. It was
not enough to copy her structures doctrines and practices.
we must be integrated into her life, to participate in her
history, and to share in her heavenly life, experiencing the
life of Christ in communion with her. [Back to top]
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The Church of Jesus
By the grace of God, in 1987, we presented ourselves to
the Orthodox Church, not as reformers, nor as critics, but
as pilgrims who had been on a long journey in a far country
returning home to Mother. Metropolitan Philip Saliba of the
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America
opened the door to us with the simple words of a loving
father, "Welcome home". My parish was received into the
Church on March 21,1987, and I was ordained to the
priesthood the following day.
The pilgrimage had been a long and hard one. Some who
began the journey with us have cho-sen other paths. There
have been frustrations and disappointments, along with the
joys. There have been criticisms and misunderstandings;
relationships have been lost, and relationships have been
formed. If I were searching merely for a Church in which
there are no conflicts, no issues to discuss, no infallible
human beings, I certainly have not found it - and, I
suspect, I never will on this side of heaven itself. As
someone once said, "If I found the perfect Church I should
never join it, because if I did it would cease to be
perfect".
What I have found is the Pearl of Great Price, the
Kingdom of God. I have found the true Faith, the true Church
of Christ, the true sacraments, and true communion with God.
That is the measure of what God has given. And like the cost
of that pearl to the merchant, it has cost me my life. It is
exactly what I was looking for: a relationship with God, and
an experience of Him in the Church that could command my
fullest energies, my deepest sacrifice. Nothing phony,
nothing shallow. My purpose is to know Christ truly, and to
make Him known.
To be sure, our journey has really just begun. But
something immeasurable has changed. Instead of looking for
the house whose builder and maker is God, we are learning to
live within it, until that day when we no longer see in a
glass darkly, but face to face. And in that day we will
fully know what it means for the Church to be "the fullness
of Him who fills all in all," for "we shall be like Him, for
we shall see Him as He is" (1 John 3:2)."
from Voice of Orthodoxy
the official publication of the Greek Orthodox
Archbiocese of Australia
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