Another Journey to Orthodoxy
by David Hudson
Not long after I arrived in Romania as an evangelical missionary in 1993, a
Baptist pastor with whom I was working said to me, "You think you came to
Romania to do something for God, but perhaps He wants to do something for
you".
It was true that I was on a pilgrimage that had started when I was a child
with an unusual thirst for spiritual things, but I really did not expect my
searching to come to an end in Romania.
I was raised in the conservative Wesleyan movement, and baptized at the age
of 8. Even as a child I was willing to stand alone for my religious
convictions, and I strove to live a consistent Christian life. I learned to
play the piano while in Junior High, and soon my whole identity was wrapped
up in music ministry.
There was a very great emphasis on both inward and outward holiness in the
churches of my youth, but I became disillusioned as a Bible College student,
when I realized (1) that the "entire sanctification" we expected to receive
instantaneously wasn’t working, not only in me, but even in church leaders I
admired, and (2) that I was in a religious ghetto and needed to find the
true Church. I found my way into the Reformed faith, which seemed to be the
answer. No shortcuts, no superficial claims of sinlessness, lots of
"Christian liberty", and whatever couldn’t be explained otherwise was swept
up into the mighty and mysterious sovereignty of God. The fact that it was a
more intellectual faith also appealed to me at the time, as I was in the
process of "upward mobilization".
Through marriage, however, I became part of the leadership of an independent
evangelical congregation where "my" theology was tolerated, as long as it
didn’t get in the way of the mission of our growing church. Everything was
subservient to evangelism, everything was user-friendly, the visitor was
king, and our still conservative Christianity was effectively marketed to
the upwardly mobile that we considered our "target group". My music ministry
took a secondary place as I took on more administrative responsibility,
eventually serving as Executive Pastor.
All the activity and success with its unending pressure took a toll on our
souls, and we felt that something was missing in all this. Going into
midlife, we decided to break with this high paced, all-consuming ministry
enterprise and to go for a second career in missions. I had dreamed of music
ministry in Europe for a long time, and we decided this was the time. After
a period of re-training and support raising, we were off to the university
city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Mary and I, and our three daughters, Heidi,
Heather, and Hannah.
Despite some difficult challenges, we adapted well and were thriving after a
few years. We learned the language, the girls were in public schools, and we
even bought an apartment with the intention of staying long term. We were
working with Baptist churches in worship renewal, especially in the area of
music, and even beginning to compose some well-received songs in Romanian.
Then our whole life was turned upside down by Orthodoxy, as devastating as
any tornado that ever hit Kansas.
I had nothing against Orthodoxy when I came as an evangelical missionary to
a mostly Orthodox country. I didn’t see myself as a threat or competition to
the majority faith. I did believe that the Orthodox Church, like older
churches in general, was mostly dead, but I wanted to believe that there was
some life and renewal in it. With pluralistic open-mindedness, I set about
to find out what there was in Orthodoxy that was good, assuming that the
roots of Romanian evangelicalism must be in Romanian Orthodoxy.
By coincidence, I had read "Becoming Orthodox" while in missionary training,
and was impressed by what I read. But I didn’t see much in Romania that
resembled Peter Gilquist’s glowing presentation. Orthodoxy seemed tired,
stale, superficial, superstitious, frightfully formal, or, as one person
commented, "feudal". Compromise and corruption, and a museum-like fixation
with the past, were the impressions I got from the non-Orthodox people I
talked with. The services in the Cathedral were like an opera without a
plot, and it didn’t seem to matter whether you could follow what was going
on. It was light years from the overhead projectors and didactic emphasis of
churches I had been involved in! In another downtown church, where I would
duck in to pray occasionally, people just seemed to come and go all through
the service -- if you could call it that -- much in the way that the priest
appeared and disappeared all the time behind the curtain in the iconostasis.
The chanter seemed somewhere between bored and distracted; it was routine to
him. Why didn’t anyone seem to be interested in communicating anything to
the visitor?
As one Romanian duhovnic recently said to me, it is truly a miracle that we
became Orthodox in Romania. Absolutely no one did anything whatever to
convert us.
Convinced that there had to be more to Orthodoxy, I kept wanting to get to
the bottom of this mystery, even though I was too busy to give it a lot of
time. The opportunity came at last to get to know a priest who was
"evangelical", just what I was looking for. He was young, still finishing
seminary, and in his fourth year of pastoring way out in a tumble-down
village. Fr. Iustinian had been raised in a pious Orthodox home and had
taken a stand for his faith under communism as a teenager, and now was in
the priesthood. Not nominal or superficial in his faith, he was convinced of
the claims that I had read about in Gilquist (and now others). After some
discussion, I asked him to celebrate a Divine Liturgy in such a way that I
could understand it. He took me into the Holy Altar, explained as much as
necessary, allowing me to watch every action and hear every prayer. That
day, in early May of 1995, I was "smitten" with Orthodoxy. I knew I had come
into contact with a grace and a power and a holiness that I had never
experienced before. It was unexpected. It was compelling.
What to do? Our missionary career was just taking off, and our family was
just feeling settled after the traumas of uprooting, relocating,
enculturation, etc. We were fulfilled and excited about the future. I didn’t
even dare to speak to my wife about it, as I knew this would mean an
upheaval in our lives — one too many. Just at that time, we were scheduled
for a summer furlough in the U.S. As we came back, I was haunted by
Orthodoxy, and felt compelled to take steps to pursue it. And yet,
everything we had worked for and suffered for as a family was on the line.
When my wife started to catch on, she warned me that she didn’t think the
girls could take this. But as she began to study and pray about it, she,
too, began to see the reality of Orthodoxy.
After discussion with our mission society leadership, we decided that we
must resign in order to pursue our newfound (and fragile) discovery. By
mid-summer of 1995, we were embroiled in a heartrending conflict with loved
ones, who felt betrayed and cheated. By the end of the summer, our
"missionary career" was over and we were sidelined and stranded. Although at
that time we came to the conclusion that we had been mistaken about
Orthodoxy, trust had been destroyed and we were not able to resume our
ministry.
We went into a year of "exile", working low paying jobs to survive and
trying to get our wits about us. What had happened? What went wrong? How
could we have been derailed so easily after a lifetime of Christian teaching
and active ministry? Orthodoxy had seemed so beautiful, so right. It had put
a new perspective on the unresolved questions and unsatisfied hungers in our
spiritual lives. It was a new paradigm in which, suddenly, everything fit
into place with nothing left over and pushed out of the doctrinal grid, as
is the case with the doctrinal systems we were familiar with. It had seemed
so true, so real, so much more spiritual than anything we had known. Could
it really be a fantasy, as some said, or an abomination, as others said?
We tried to pick up the pieces and get on with our lives. The girls were
devastated, and their trust in us and others was deeply shaken. We felt
paralyzed and lost. We had seen too much new light to go back to our former
way of being Christians. We could not really be evangelicals anymore, and
since we could not be Orthodox either, we tried to forge our own way,
combining the best of both. It was a desperate attempt to make sense of
things and to satisfy our frustrated thirst for Orthodoxy.
In that state of mind, we returned to Romania on our own after our "year in
exile". It seemed we had to, for several reasons. We had left our apartment,
car, and belongings in limbo. We had left our friends and colleagues without
good-byes or explanations. Our oldest daughter, Heidi, was going to enter
the University of Cluj, and so we pulled ourselves together and mustered our
fragile faith and headed back. Of course the main dangling question was
Orthodoxy. We had to "return to the scene of the crime", to convince
ourselves one way or another. We were graciously accepted back into our
former Baptist music ministry, and we tried to make a go of working in a
Protestant environment with Orthodox ideals. Outwardly it was fairly
successful, but inwardly it was not satisfying. We knew that we had to give
Orthodoxy another chance, this time a real chance.
So in the summer of 1997, we took the plunge and started going to the Divine
Liturgy on Sunday mornings. Through Fr. Gordon Walker of St. Ignatius Church
in Franklin, Tennesee (whom we had met in 1995), we became friends with
American converts who had also come to Cluj as missionaries. Craig and
Victoria Goodwin introduced us to an Orthodox daily devotional publication,
DYNAMIS, a ministry of their home church, St. George Cathedral in Wichita
(see the web site at http://dynamis.cjb.net). Using DYNAMIS for our
discipline of daily Bible study, things began to fall into place; questions
began to be answered. We also began to overcome our intimidation and to meet
more priests and lay people who impressed us with their truly Christian
hearts and lives. The Archbishop of Cluj, BARTOLOMEU, granted us his
blessing to begin translating DYNAMIS into Romanian and publishing it as a
supplement to the Archdiocesan monthly. Through all this, no one made any
effort to pressure us to convert, and even when we eventually requested to
be received into the Church through Chrismation, no one was in a hurry. By
that time, it was we who were impatient!
Mary, Heidi, and I were chrismated on Pascha, 1998, in the village where Fr.
Iustinian now serves. What a peace settled over us when we finally got out
of the stormy seas of pluralistic, idiosyncratic, and eclectic Christianity
and into the ark of the historic, original, continuing life of the Church!
Heather chose to remain active in the Baptist high school and church, and
having faced such trauma together over our conversion, we felt she needed
the freedom to come to Orthodoxy if and when she is ready herself. Hannah
was baptized a few weeks after Pascha of this year, 1999, just before
turning twelve. It was a beautiful service, and a wonderful testimony to
share with many who had taken their baptism for granted. With this
milestone, we feel we have come a step deeper into the peace of the Church
and closed another chapter in our pilgrimage.
Conversion is not easy, either before or after Chrismation. There is so much
to learn, and it is hard to go back to grammar school after a lifetime of
leadership. In a way, it is like emigrating to a new country. You get your
ticket and go; that is like being catechumens. Eventually you get your new
citizenship; that is like Chrismation. But you still have to adapt to the
new culture and find your place in it; that is like the ongoing process of
working out your salvation once you are in the Church. Pat answers and
instant solutions are not part of true Christianity. But there is a real
opportunity for everyone who "strives for the prize" to attain the riches
that our new Motherland offers us.
Does it mean that there are not stumbling blocks and snares in the Orthodox
Church? No. There are obviously many citizens in this new land who languish
in spiritual poverty and disease, who, while they have the citizenship, do
not cultivate the characteristics and privileges it offers. But there are
towering examples of "success" to point the way for us. Dying to everything
that is false and unworthy, first of all in ourselves, we find ourselves
reborn as more human, more real, more peaceful, more settled, more healed,
more loving and forgiving, even while we remain sinners. This is what
Orthodoxy is about. It offers us real holiness, regaining the lost likeness
of God; and we are not just given theories, but also the wherewithal.
Fr. Rafail Noica, an eminent Romanian duhovnic and himself a convert to
Orthodoxy, says that Orthodoxy is the true nature of man, "red, yellow,
black, or white". When we come home to Orthodoxy, we "come to" our senses,
we become our true selves. Lord, where else could we go?
Now we know why the Lord brought us to Romania. Our mission was to work out
our own salvation with fear and trembling, and in so doing, to become a few
more candles shining in the Church for those who, even in an Orthodox
country, do not yet understand what their faith is all about. And perhaps
for others who, like we were, are searching for something but don’t expect
to find it in Orthodoxy.
