Converting from one faith to another is a serious matter, and it seems to me that the only legitimate reason to do so is for the sake of Truth. Through a process of several years, God, by His grace, has opened my eyes to see the fullness of the Truth, which is the Person Jesus Christ, contained in the Orthodox Church, His Body. Union with Christ in His Church now appears to me as that Pearl of Great Price for which one must sell all that he possesses in order to acquire it. Holy Orthodoxy is the Light of Christ shining in the darkness, enabling us to see our dark world and our polluted selves for what they really are and the only path by which we can be healed.

As Jesus said, it is the Truth that sets us free. Without it, we cannot escape bondage to sin, death, and the kingdom of this world. The Truth is a precious and rare commodity in a world that denies Ultimate Truth. It is, then, for good reason that King Solomon urges us to “buy the truth and sell it not.” Seeking to do just that, I found the Orthodox Church.

Someone may well ask: “How do you know that Orthodoxy is true? I may justly reply, “How do you know that your flashlight is giving light on a dark, stormy night in a strange house when the power has gone out?” When you try to use it, you quickly discover whether it is giving light: if it is, you can walk amidst the darkness without bumping into hidden obstacles. If it is not working, a stubbed toe, a bruised nose, or a fall down the stairs should eventually suggest that you are not seeing things as they are.

Orthodoxy illumines this world and our own lives, enabling us to see ourselves and our world for what they really are. It radiates the true Light of Christ, who is the standard and criterion by which all things are evaluated and seen in their true relation to each other and to God who created them. In this Light, we can understand that a life of stubbed toes, bruised noses, and tumbles down the stairs is not normal life, the life for which we were created. In fact, this Light reveals to us that we are created for a purpose higher than this life. It reveals the life God created us to experience and enables us to see how far sort we fall of attaining it. This bright Light also illuminates the only path by which we can ascend from our broken lives to the fullness and abundance of life in Christ. No other religion, Christian confession, philosophy, or even science provides the full Light that Orthodoxy provides. At best, they provide dim, partial light and with it, the danger of thinking that we have fully seen and understood when, in reality, we have seen nothing as it truly is.

For years I wandered and stumbled about the half-lit world of Protestantism, constantly stubbing my toes and bumping my head on obstacles that I could never clearly see in the gloom, and taking occasional tumbles down unseen stairways. I desired to live a holy life, and sometimes seemed to make progress, but then I would hit an obstacle and fall—sometimes into worse sin than ever before. Yet the light that Scripture gave me indicated that this was not the standard of normal Christian life. I was no longer to be the slave of sin if I was in Christ. I was to grow in love and holiness. Why then was I not making progress, and why did so few of those around me seem to be making progress beyond a very basic level? And where were the examples of saintly, holy lives for me to follow?

From earliest childhood, I was raised as a Protestant. Though I knew a great deal about God from church, my parents, and my Christian school, I did not begin to pursue God actively until I was fifteen. Then I read through the Bible for the first time and began memorizing chapters of Scripture. Through this God showed me that Christian life was much more than passive head knowledge or habitual church attendance, but required active submission to Christ Jesus as Lord and King. The act of submission and obedience that God commanded me then through Scripture and the gentle, persistent prompting of the Holy Spirit was Baptism. In my pride, I feared that people in our new town and church would think I had just become a Christian and would not credit me for my lifelong Christian faith. I resisted the call to submit to baptism, but eventually the choice became clear to me: my will, bondage to sin, and separation from God, or God’s will, freedom, and communion with Christ. I wanted God, so I submitted on Palm Sunday of 1981 when I was sixteen, and I began to experience a new measure of God’s grace.

Over the next few years, I read and memorized the Bible voraciously. I worked to develop a life of prayer. I tried to incorporate fasting into my life. At the time of my Baptism, my family became involved in the Charismatic movement where I learned the importance of prayer and singing in worship, as well as the need to be filled with the Spirit. But the anti-mind attitude of the movement distressed me. After a bad experience in college, I ceased attending church regularly for two years and questioned everything I had learned. But the skeptics and philosophers, for all their cleverness, had no answers to the fundamental problems of life, so I went back to church when I returned to Seattle from Texas in 1988 for graduate school. There I became an active member of a large, non-denominational, evangelical Protestant church. I left graduate school after a year to pursue the ministry through a three-year training program at my church. My main goal was to go to Russia one day as a missionary.

God used that time for good, teaching me many things and developing my abilities. Though I had many joys, I also had many frustrations with the lack of teaching of deeper truth and true discipleship, and our pep-rally style of worship. (“Let’s give the Lord a clap offering! You scream and cheer at sporting events; doesn’t Jesus deserve more?”) There was little reverence, little humility, and little awareness of God’s unapproachable, consuming holiness in our “worship.” The songs we sang were written at what must have been a second grade level, and they often contained bad theology and even bad grammar! The services were immense technical productions, complete with theater lighting, microphones, and a large orchestra. Every other Sunday we had communion, but it meant little to me. How could it, when unblessed grape juice and little wafers were passed out hurriedly to 1500 people in the middle of the service, and the whole “remembrance” took only five minutes? The focus of the service was a thirty-minute sermon which explained and applied a passage of Scripture and ended with an altar call. There was very little prayer in the service. More often than not, I left church frustrated, troubled by critical thoughts about the service, the songs, or something said in the sermon.

I have had a fascination with Russia since I was in high school. One day in 1982 or 1983, a couple of men came to our charismatic church in a small town in the Panhandle of Texas to talk about their underground missionary activities in Russia. By the end of their talk, I knew that one day, I too would go to Russia with the Gospel. This knowledge motivated me to study Russian in college and has since taken me on nine trips to Russia.

It was my trips to Russia that forced me to grapple with Orthodoxy. I began to investigate it, realizing that I needed to know something about it if I were to minister there. Protestantism seemed so alien to Russia, and the Russian mind struggled to comprehend how Christ’s one Church could be found amidst a multitude of disagreeing denominations. Perhaps it made more sense for a missionary to contextualize the message by working to revitalize the Russian Orthodox Church than to try to make Russians Protestant. The more I travelled in Russia and the more I thought about the issue, the more my questions multiplied.

When I finished my program at church, I applied to be ordained, even though I questioned by what authority my independent, non-denominational church, which was accountable to no one (except supposedly Christ through their own understanding of Scripture) could ordain ministers and start new churches. The church would have ordained me without any seminary training, but I felt a growing need to know Greek, Church History, and Theology if I were to preach. People’s eternal destinies hung in the balance, and I knew that it would be too easy to lead people astray with my ignorance and self-chosen delusions if I had no knowledge of or accountability to what Christ’s Church had taught and believed over two millennia. Thus I ended up at Princeton Theological Seminary in the fall of 1993.

I arrived in Princeton as a committed Protestant seeking Truth and a church to which to commit myself. Not in my wildest thoughts did I ever imagine that I would find the Truth in Orthodoxy or that I myself would become Orthodox. I took advantage of being in a new town to visit various churches and settled on a fairly conservative Episcopal church. Attending the service each week, I quickly became convinced of the importance of liturgy, written prayers, and well-written hymns. For the first time in my life, the Eucharist began to mean something to me. After two years of seminary, I was confirmed as an Episcopalian. I had reservations about the theological chaos that reigned in that church, but I thought God might use me to help set things straight.

My time at seminary eventually laid bare the inner contradictions of Protestantism. I was blessed to have no denominational affiliation, for it allowed me to read Church History without trying to justify the existence of a particular denomination. From my first semester, I began questioning the Reformation as I saw its divisive fruit. Rather than the unity Christ prayed for, it brought ever increasing disunity and confusions as competing confessions multiplied. Praying Anglican prayers for the unity of the Church, I became distressed by the lack of unity among professing Christians. I also began to see the inevitable chaos produced by the Protestant assertion of the right of private interpretation of Scripture and rejection of Tradition. Each person interpreted Scripture for himself and was free to reject disagreeable parts as uninspired. Seminary was a theological free-for-all in which there was no ultimate Truth to be found. No one could say he had found the Truth, and anyone who did was considered arrogant and intolerant. Cut free from the anchor of Holy Tradition, seminarians were blown hither and thither by the changing winds of fashionable doctrine. Holiness of life was not expected, and to pursue it as an option was considered to be “works-righteousness.” Christianity was reduced to social action, tolerance, and “love” for others, which amounted no more than to warm feelings and being nice. Insisting upon Truth, Holiness, and sound doctrine was viewed as divisive. Rather, we were urged to accept all, regardless of their lifestyles and doctrines, even when their lives were wholly unsanctified and their doctrines were blasphemous. I discovered that even among orthodox Protestants there was a diversity of contradictory opinions. Where was the unity of the Church? Where was the Truth? Why were we all so egregiously disobedient to Paul’s admonition to Christians to have the same mind and be united in love? How could we have unity and Christian community if no one agreed on the most basic aspects of the Faith?

As I considered these questions, I explored the teachings of both the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. I discovered that my supposed knowledge of the Roman Church was entirely derived from biased Protestant sources. Many misconceptions I had were straightened out as I read Catholic sources. To my shame, I realized that as a Protestant I had not applied the Scriptural principle of hearing the other man's side from his own lips ('one man's case seems just until another comes and examines him' Proverbs), but had readily accepted distortions and false reports of Roman doctrine and practice as true. Nevertheless, the legalism and institutionalism that I perceived there, the retreat from fasting, confession, and Christian ascetical practices in general, the claims of the papacy and other departures from the Faith and practice of the one Church of the first eight centuries or so remained as serious barriers to embracing Roman Catholicism.

Increasingly, I found in the Orthodox Church answers that no other “church” provided. In my last year of seminary, praying Orthodox prayers, reading Orthodox theology, and attending Orthodox services, I became convinced that Orthodoxy was true and that both Protestantism and official Roman Catholicism had departed from the fullness and purity of the Christian Faith proclaimed by Christ's apostles. The Orthodox alone agreed on the content of the Faith and preserved it. I also began to understand how all my diligent and sincere attempts to live the Christian life had been marked by repeated failure. The light I possessed was inadequate and failed to disclose many snares and the safe path around them. But many Orthodox saints and ascetics had gone before me, charting the course of the spiritual life with its pitfalls. They had answers to my struggles with sin and the passions. Regular fasting, regular confession to a spiritual father, the Holy Mysteries, Holy Tradition, regular liturgical worship, a rule of prayer, almsgiving, and the communion of Saints, were necessities for spiritual progress, not options, and all of them are taught and practiced to this day in the Orthodox Church.

I remain deeply grateful to my family for teaching me about Christ, for encouraging me to study Scripture, and for inculcating me with a love for the Truth. I am grateful to the Protestant church and school of my youth that taught me the Bible. I am grateful to the Charismatic groups of which I was a part for making me aware of spiritual warfare, the importance of being filled with the Holy Spirit, of prayer, and of the Spirit’s power to work miracles. I am grateful for my evangelical church’s commitment to winning lost souls to Christ, for training me, and for sending me so many times to Russia. I am grateful to the Episcopal church for being a bridge to Orthodoxy by acquainting me with the need for liturgy, the Eucharist, good music, and roots in the historical Church. And I am even grateful to my largely apostate seminary for affording me the opportunity to study the language and history of the Church and to see the consequences of Protestant errors carried to their logical extreme. God has used all of these to bring me to Orthodoxy, where the fullness of the Christian Faith and life in Christ is preserved and practiced.
Our Savior has now brought me to the starting line from which I must run the spiritual race, for which I give thanks to God.