Becoming Orthodox by Peter E. Gillquist

  • Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian FaithOn Feb­ru­ary 15, 1987, I was chris­mated into the Ortho­dox Church at St. Nicholas Church in Los Ange­les. It was a small inti­mate affair. Met­ro­pol­i­tan Philip ordained 60 or so priests, then chris­mated and served me my first eucharist, as he did to a cou­ple hun­dred of my near­est and dear­est friends and fel­low trav­el­ers. In the space of a few weeks, almost 2,000 Amer­i­cans across the coun­try were brought into the Ortho­dox Church. It was the cul­mi­na­tion of a 15+-year jour­ney that started with a hand­ful of zeal­ous young men who began to think the work they were doing for Cam­pus Cru­sade for Christ was some­how miss­ing the mark.

    That was the Evan­gel­i­cal Ortho­dox Church (EOC) Move­ment that started when Peter Gillquist and oth­ers who had been explo­sively active in 60′s para­church orga­ni­za­tions like Cam­pus Cru­sade began to ques­tion the ethos and method­ol­ogy of that move­ment and look else­where for the “authen­tic” Church. “Becom­ing Ortho­dox: A Jour­ney to the Ancient Chris­t­ian Faith” is the story of their trek to Ortho­doxy, which ended up car­ry­ing me and the other 2000 souls in its pow­er­ful cur­rent. It’s a quick read, engag­ingly hon­est and forth­right about the joys and heartaches of find­ing out (in the words of Fire­sign The­atre) that every­thing you know is wrong.

    I won’t give away much of the plot, but it has its share of twists and turns. Suf­fice it to say, it has a happy end­ing. For those in the EOC move­ment, it is def­i­nitely a con­tact high to remem­ber the thrill of dis­cov­er­ing the Ortho­dox Church — some­thing I wish every cra­dle Ortho­dox got a chance to expe­ri­ence as I hope they would wish I could know the pro­found peace of hav­ing grown up with the Church.

    It also may be a very good ref­er­ence book for those who are try­ing to intro­duce the Church to Protes­tants. The mid­dle por­tion of the book is given over to the top­ics that they found the most trou­bling and the under­stand­ing that changed their perspective.


    Related posts:

    1. The Ortho­dox con­vert list
    2. St. Mary of Egypt

    October 18th, 2005 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Fr Joseph Huneycutt 10.18.2005

    That would be 1987, instead of 2007, no?

  • Michelle

    I’m think­ing 87 or 97?

    I’ve never read that book and I didn’t know you were part of that move­ment. Our dea­con and his wife were too.

    God grant you many, many years!

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