A Visit to an Eastern Orthodox Church

Coming into the community of believers at worship should be disconcerting. It should leave the visitor with several impressions: whatever this is these people take it very seriously; I don't understand it; if I join I might have to change.

— Frederica Mathewes-Green in At the Corner of East and Now

Our first visit to St. Anne's Orthodox Church was the first Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2012. In my (Andrea's) previous posts I've explained why we walked in the doors in the first place. Here I will describe (as best as words can) what happened that first visit. For the sake of fluidity (and length) I will do as little explaining as I can in this post. As questions pop up ask in a comment below and those will be topics of future posts!

Why Randy's Going East - Part 3

In which I take an aside to briefly discuss my delay in writing, and where I finally explain how we came to attend St. Anne's. I must make the disclaimer that this is really long, and I've struggled to finish it for lack of memory on some of the details. I know I'm probably missing important details, expounding too much on trivial ones, and just generally not explaining myself very well. Please bear with me (or don't--you can stop reading at any time!).

Also, here are links to the previous articles:
| Part 1 | Part 2 |

Why Randy's Going East - Part 2

Previously, in Part 1, I shared that the EFCA seemed like a good home for us, denomination-wise, and that the particular church we were attending seemed like a very good one. To fill that out just a bit—talk about a family-friendly church. Our girls were very well-loved by the nursery workers and Sunday School teachers and it was hard to have to tell them we were leaving when the time finally came to do so. We were in a supportive adult Sunday School class of parents of young children, and enjoyed their company and sharing a little bit of our lives together. I say all this to emphasize that it was not because of the people at our last church that we left it. Quite to the contrary.

Getting back to the “Christian Libertarianism™” (I'm going to trademark that phrase and make MILLIONS!) thing... Looking back on our experience in the EFCA, in my opinion, if you're in a church that does leave a lot of doctrinal specifics up to the parishioner, the church ends up somewhere on this spectrum:

1. No one in the church will be able to agree on much of anything, because of all the differences in doctrinal opinion, and there will be chaos.
2. Everyone in the church will ”get along“ without really agreeing on deeper theological matters, and therefore just have a weak sort of surface unity.
3. There will (mostly) be a unity of doctrinal belief—it just won't be codified.

A sneak-preview of my thoughts on Thirsting for God in a Land of Shallow Wells

Note: All scripture quotations herein are from the New King James Version (NKJV).

I definitely need to and want to do a full commentary on the book, Thirsting For God in a Land of Shallow Wells, by Matthew Gallatin. However, For now I want to just share a few little bits that have really blown me away.

Why Randy's Going East - Part 1

So, following Andrea's series on her backstory of why we're attending St. Anne and are seriously considering becoming Orthodox, I felt it was time to present my perspective. If I don't get around to it now I don't know when I will! Plus I don't think I'll feel like I can write on other subjects until this has been written. So, without further ado...

Where to begin? It is indeed hard to pick a point of beginning. My whole life, in a sense, has brought me to this point. For now, I'll try to stick to what's happened since we've been in Oregon.

OK, so for pretty much all of 2012 (through November, that is) we had been attending an EFCA church. We chose this church for a number of reasons, but a big one was their acceptance of members with a wide variety of positions on what they called “non-essentials”. I have to almost chuckle a bit because the EFCA, in attempting not to make doctrinal statements about certain issues, does so anyway by calling them “non-essentials”! But to be fair, they essentially hold to generally Reformed Evangelical theology.

Why was this “Christian Libertarianism” so attractive to me, you might ask?

Reevaluating Our Beliefs - Part 4

In Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 I (Andrea) have explained three of four streams that have flowed together causing us to explore Eastern Orthodoxy. This will be my final post on how we've gotten here; Randy may give his perspective in other posts. We will certainly have other posts on various theological and practical issues that we hope challenge you, you can learn from and will comment on.

In Part 3 I talked about several ways in which my role as a mother was causing me to doubt our current choice of church. This post will detail one more aspect of childrearing that was making me look elsewhere.

Reevaluating Our Beliefs - Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 I (Andrea) discussed the first two of four main threads that have led me (and Randy by extension) to discover and explore the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In choosing where to attend church once we moved to Oregon we found one we thought was perfect. No, we didn't really think it was "without issue" or "without problems." We just thought it fit the bill of:

• On the conservative end, theologically and socially.
• We would not be required to be re-bapatized.
• We could both commune.
• It was not too far to drive.

Other things that seemed like positives included a good balance of contemporary and traditional music in the worship service, established children's programming (i.e. nursery and preschool Sunday School available so we could be free of the girls during both adult Sunday School and the worship service), established community groups/Bible studies we could join (especially important for Randy to make friends in this part of the world).

In researching the theology of the Evangelical Free church we found it very appealing that they espoused "Unity in essentials," allowed for "diversity in nonessentials," and "charity in all." For our Protestant minds, frustrated by the division in the church, this was quite refreshing. God, however, had other ideas.