Eastern Orthodox Christianity

Note:This page has been receiving much more traffic than I anticipated. The text on here, while still just as true as it was when I wrote it several years ago, strikes me as little more than a rather bland factual account of my family’s journey to Orthodoxy. I will be revising this page with improved/expanded content Real Soon Now. You might want to subscribe to my e-mail list if you’d like to be notified of such things.

Sometime in my early teens, my family left Church of the Open Door (a huge CMA church, which was then meeting at Robbinsdale High School), and began attending the tiny Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in St. Paul. Naturally, this paradigm shift was part of a long journey, which had begun a year or two earlier.

My family’s exploration of the Eastern Orthodox faith began when my mother and I went on a homeschool field trip with a number of other families, to look at some of the ways in which people have used architecture to glorify God. Our trip took us to Temple Israel, the Basilica of St. Mary, the Lakewood Cemetery chapel, and St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church.

While we were at St. Mary’s, my mother picked up a copy of The Christian Activist, an Orthodox newspaper edited by Francis Schaeffer‘s somewhat controversial son, Frank Schaeffer. Frank had joined the Orthodox Church some years earlier, and had become a very outspoken advocate for it. My mother was intrigued by Frank’s conversion to Orthodoxy, and began researching the subject.

Unfortunately, I found Frank’s written manner quite harsh and abrasive. For quite some time, he was the largest factor in my early rejection of Orthodoxy. His attitude toward the Protestant Christianity I had grown up with seemed utterly antagonistic. Thankfully, after months of frustration with him, I listened to a tape of a lecture he’d given. For whatever reason, this tape actually proved to be the turning point in my attitudes toward Orthodoxy. Later that year, my entire family was received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation on Saint Nicholas day.

Since that time, the Orthodox Church has become a vital part of my life. In addition to attendance at local church services, I’ve spent a fair amount of time visiting the wonderful community at St. Isaac of Syria Skete near Boscobel, Wisconsin. I’ve also been involved with the Orthodox Christian Fellowship group at the University of Minnesota.