Going Forward (Part 2)

When I told my story recently about moving from Reformed to Orthodox Christianity, I said there's more to tell about how I came to be at home in the Orthodox Church. Here's the next chapter of those reflections, going back more than 20 years...

It seems appropriate, somehow, that the first time I attended the Divine Liturgy it was a complete and utter mystery. It was the summer of 2000, and I was teaching evangelistic English classes in Ukraine with a non-denominational American organization, when my student Dima took me on a visit to his church. The church was somewhere in Kyiv—I couldn't identify it now—and the language, style, and feel of it were all completely foreign, as far as I was concerned. Incense? Gold everywhere? And why was there no place to sit? ... Even Dima struggled to answer my questions (saying, "I can't talk about God in English"). He said simply that he had been baptized as an Orthodox Christian and he was trying his best to live this faith, even though there was so much about it that he didn't understand. 

The door that had opened just a crack in 2000 was pushed wider when I settled in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the fall of 2002. I walked all over the city under gray northern skies, often passing churches with the three-barred Russian Orthodox cross. Finally I began dropping in to services at several of these churches, marveling at the swell of voices. Whether the a capella church music rose from a bass-voiced deacon up front, or from a priest intoning prayers, or from the whole crowd of gathered worshipers, it was as if it was coming up from the heart of the earth. This was God's creation itself returning praise to Him through its human representatives.

The crown and summit of the whole year is Pascha, Easter, the great feast of our Lord Jesus Christ's glorious Resurrection from the dead. (In the Orthodox Church we will be celebrating it this coming Sunday in 2024; the Western and Eastern calendars don't usually align at this point, and this year they happen to be especially far apart.) So in the spring of 2003, after asking around: where might I best experience this spiritual festival in St. Petersburg?—I took the subway and walked as far as the Saint Alexander Nevsky Lavra (chief monastery).

I arrived at the main church there about 10 PM and found the service already in full swing, with a chanter reading from the Book of Acts while robed clergy and attendants milled around, doing I didn't know what. The rest of that night holds some very distinct memories that stand out from the blur of sometimes-overwhelming impressions. When the choir began chanting a particular hymn, suddenly hundreds and hundreds of voices joined in all around me and it seemed to go on forever—unhurried, confident, solemn and joyful all at the same time...

Voskreséniye Tvoyé, Khristé Spásse,
Ángeli poyút na nebesékh,
I nas na zemlí spodóbi
Chístym sérdtsem Tébe sláviti.

Thy Resurrection, O Christ Saviour,
The Angels in heaven sing,
Make us also worthy on earth
With a clean heart to glorify Thee.

It was as if the women disciples were gathered again at the entrance to the Tomb of Christ, just as they gathered on the first Easter morning: still with all of the same sadness that their Beloved Lord had died, but now having that sadness forever overlaid with the knowledge of His resurrection from the grave: a moment that transcended times and places. 

We all moved, a river of humanity, outside of the church and processed together around it, then assembled again at the doors as if to see what we might find inside a cold grave. But then the doors were opened and we all streamed inside again, to a church that was changed by that moment where the universe relives the return to life of its God. The Bishop appeared at the front of the church and called out: "Christ Is Risen!" And it was as if a long-smoldering fire suddenly burst into open flame. The lights were up, the thousands-strong congregation around me shouted out the acclamation in response, and the words of Psalms and hymns testifying to the Lord's victory over Death were proclaimed like banners unfurling in a fresh breeze, one after another after another.

And we sang, and the Gospel for Agape Vespers (the service of Christ's Love) was read out in ten different languages by a row of men in bright vestments. And then we went outside where a small sea of Pascha baskets, containing foods that the faithful had brought to celebrate the Feast, were blessed. Night was unimportant now: the Light had overcome darkness, and it seemed we could have gone on forever.

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Going Forward

I was recently asked to tell the story of how I went from Reformed to Orthodox Christianity. With a prayer for Christ's help, that's what I'll do briefly here. (For convenience, I'm posting this on my old blog that I last wrote on in 2009, when I'd just begun my formal ministry as a Reformed church planter in Hungary.)

My father is Jewish, my mother a cradle Catholic. I grew up in the awareness of a number of different ways of relating to God, just within my own extended family. And unlike billions of others in the world and throughout much of history, I also grew up intimately familiar with the reality of religious conversion. My father had converted from agnosticism to Christianity (in the Roman Catholic Church) not long before my birth. And when I was six years old, my parents made the change to a non-denominational Protestant church, which became my spiritual environment as I grew to adulthood.

I discovered Calvinism as a teenager in the 90's through the writings and sermons of Douglas Wilson. The thing I found initially compelling in Doug's writings was his postmillennialism, his conviction that this world that we know will eventually be transformed and made glorious by the spread of the Gospel of Christ. After that, I also came to agree with Doug's paedobaptist position, convinced by his quotations from church history (particularly the Protestant Reformers) that the continuity of the people of God from generation to generation properly includes the baptism of children born to Christian families. And finally I came around to Doug's Reformed soteriology, seeing salvation as something that God had eternally intended for those—and only for those—who ultimately would be saved, the "elect." Together with this predestinarian view of salvation came an especially hard (Doug would say "high") perspective on Divine sovereignty: that everything that happens—without exception—is ordained, willed, unchangeably predetermined by the eternal plan of God.

From 2002 until 2004 I was a missionary in Russia with Operation Mobilization. There I encountered a variety of Christian expressions, not only the Orthodox worship that has deep roots in the Russian people, but also Roman Catholicism (carried forward by missionaries from Spain and Poland) and the Russian Evangelical, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches that my missionary team worked closely with. Twice I walked to Orthodox churches in the twilight before Pascha (Orthodox Easter) to attend all-night services celebrating the Resurrection of Christ with unbounded joy: the first time at the great Lavra church in St. Petersburg with a thousand worshipers, the second time in the little parish church in Raychikhinsk, five thousand miles further east.

I moved in 2004 from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Moscow, Idaho, and started studying at Doug Wilson's school for training ministers, Greyfriars Hall. By then I had two assured convictions about the Christian faith which at that time I did not see as conflicting with each other: first, that true Christianity is found in a straight line that runs through the Bible, the Early Church, and the main stream of Christian history; and second, that the purest form of this historic Christianity is to be found today in the Reformed tradition, or more specifically the optimistic and culture-building form of that tradition that I had encountered in the Moscow church and educational enterprise where I was now planting myself.

I studied at Greyfriars Hall until my graduation in 2009 (as the fourth man ever to actually complete the Greyfriars course of study) and received a letter signed by Doug, on behalf of the elders of Christ Church, commending me to any church that might call me as their minister. I served within what is now called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (the denomination founded in 1998 with Christ Church Moscow as a charter member): first in Hungary, then in Oregon, and finally in Colville, Washington, where I was called in 2013 to serve as the pastor of a young and growing congregation. There I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament.

In Colville I had the privilege of shepherding a devoted group of Christians who looked forward to gathering every Sunday to sing, pray, hear the reading of Scripture and my sermons, and celebrate the Lord's Supper together. But as the pastor, I was also confronted as never before with the harsh reality of human sin: some of it defiant and unrepentant, some acknowledged as sin and more or less repented of, but still devastating in its ongoing consequences for those affected by it. The question that now tormented me was a theological one: How can the terrible ugliness of sin be the intention (or will) of the good God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and made Himself known in Scripture?

In the summer of 2014 I read a book of ancient Christian theology, Saint John of Damascus's On the Orthodox Faith, and found a different answer than the one I'd assumed to be true for the past decade and more. St. John says that God has created human beings with such freedom of will that the choices we make, whether good or bad or indifferent, are truly ours and not predetermined or constrained by God: 

We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that there should be wickedness nor does He choose to compel virtue.... Bear in mind, too, that virtue is a gift from God implanted in our nature, and that He Himself is the source and cause of all good, and without His co-operation and help we cannot will or do any good thing. But we have it in our power either to abide in virtue and follow God, Who calls us into ways of virtue, or to stray from paths of virtue, which is to dwell in wickedness.... For wickedness is nothing else than the withdrawal of goodness, just as darkness is nothing else than the withdrawal of light.

I struggled with myself over this difference during the following months, but in the end St. John's teaching won out over the Calvinist answer that I no longer could accept as consistent with the goodness of God. How could God be the One we see in the face of Jesus, the One who according to the Bible "is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5), and still desire (at any level!) or predetermine the horrors of human sin—genocide, betrayal, the abuse of the innocence of precious children?!

In January 2015, I expressed this conclusion to the church elders that I served with. The quick and forceful responses I received were disheartening. One CREC pastor told me that God had to unchangeably and eternally predetermine Judas's betrayal of Jesus to death, because otherwise God would not be able to save people from our sins. Another angrily said that if I do not believe God sovereignly ordained the death of every man, woman, and child killed in Hitler's Holocaust, then my God is not the God of the Bible. Another elder of a CREC church said that even though the Westminster Confession of Faith denies it, God is in fact the author of evil, because all things (good, bad, and indifferent) must come from Him—or else He would not be God. All of these church leaders were old friends of mine, but it was clear that I did not have a future as a colleague in ministry in their denomination. When I was asked to resign my pastorate of the Colville church, I agreed to do so. (However, my ordination in the CREC has never been revoked.)

During the following two years, I went with my family to a conservative Presbyterian church (OPC) and then settled into an ACNA church where I was even being prepared for Anglican ordination—until finally committing to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition that St. John of Damascus (who was, after all, a monk of the Church of Jerusalem) most directly represented. I was convinced not only by St. John's account of providence and free will, but also by his Biblical arguments for the veneration of holy icons, his devotion to the Virgin Mary as the Mother of our God, and everything else that the Orthodox Church held to in the 8th century AD (St. John's time) and still holds to in the 21st. But that further development, how I came to be at home in the Orthodox Church, is a story for another time.

Glory to God who loves all that He created with an everlasting love, who desires the salvation of not only some but all people (1 Timothy 2:4), who wills always good and never evil, and who has even planned from eternity to take hold of the ugliness of sin that we commit against Him and work through it to bring about unimaginable beauty!

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