My Journey to Orthodoxy
by Philip Pughe-Morgan
I first
encountered Orthodoxy about the time I left university in 1967. I
spotted a copy of Timothy (now Metropolitan Kallistos) Ware’s little
Penguin pocket book ‘The Orthodox Church’ on a shelf in a local
bookshop, bought it in a mixed mood of guilt and excitement, and
smuggled it home to read.
Why the mixed
emotions? Well, I was Anglican through and through. My father’s Welsh
family had produced a virtually continuous succession of Anglican
clergymen for nearly 200 years, including in the direct line my father,
grandfather and both great grandfathers, and there was an underlying,
though unspoken and ultimately unrealised, hope that I would follow in
the family footsteps. When I was later doing some work on family
history, I used to joke that, as a son of the vicarage, I count myself
among the sinners rather than the saints, but it is good to know that so
many of God’s warriors are on my side! In that context Orthodoxy seemed
indeed, in Alexis Khomiakov’s famous words, ‘an apostasy from the past,
a rushing into a new and unknown world.’
Anyway, let’s go
back to the beginning. I was born just as the last war was ending, and
grew up in a draughty old vicarage on the Lancashire Pennines. My
childhood was stable and secure, both at home and in church. I can never
remember a time when I did not instinctively believe in God, and that
Jesus is his Son, was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, died on a cross in
Jerusalem, and was gloriously raised from the dead on that first Easter
Day! Life was strongly regulated by the Christian calendar, and the
liturgical seasons progressed each year in traditional order.
My father’s churchmanship was middling Anglican, but
conservative rather than liberal. He had met my mother while working as
a missionary in Southern Rhodesia in the 1930s with the SPG, a High
Anglican missionary society, so he could celebrate with the liturgically
highest of them; however, surplices and stoles sufficed at the
Eucharist, good choral singing was the order of the day, no candles but
with changing altar frontals for each season. Stained glass saints
filled the windows, old friends whom I grew to know and whose company I
enjoyed.
The cycle of Matins, Evensong and Holy Communion was
engraved on my mind, as were the creeds, the Litany and the historic
prayers. Being the North Country, there was also a strong tradition of
congregational hymn singing, and I shall always be grateful for the
great musical tradition I inherited from both the Anglican and (later)
Methodist Churches. Tradition prevailed in all things, and Christian
life was secure and good.
One clear memory I have is of our famous Lancashire
‘Whit Walks’ at Pentecost each year. In the case of my cotton mill town,
the walks took place on Whit Monday (each town had its own traditional
day), and the various churches would meet up on the central market
ground to process through the town with bands playing and banners
flying. What a peculiar, though thoroughly enjoyable, occasion this
seemed to be. As well as my own tribe of Anglicans, I could gaze at
folks from other churches – Methodists, Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, Baptists and even Roman Catholics. This was the
beginning of post-war ecumenism, but these were still strange and alien
creatures to a young boy from a protected church background, although I
could recognise school friends among them. Naturally enough, of course,
for that period, the Orthodox Church did not feature among the dark
satanic mills, and so I was totally oblivious to their absence.
That all changed abruptly when I was sent off to
boarding school in 1956. Here I came across a new set of traditions. My
school in Lancaster was one of the oldest state public schools in the
country, founded during the Wars of the Roses, and the whole emphasis
was on the pursuit of excellence in order to be of service to the world.
‘Praesis ut prosis’ was the school motto, ‘Lead that you may serve,’ and
Christian worship was a hearty and manly religion, inextricably linked
with the fortunes of the late British Empire and the wider
English-speaking world. I remember that in my first term in autumn 1956,
we prayed earnestly for the brave Hungarians fighting off the evil
Russian hordes in the streets of Budapest, but somehow we never showed
the same spiritual concern for the Egyptians we were shooting up and
bombing in the ill-fated Suez invasion!
So life continued for the next eight years. The
school day was punctuated by morning assembly with hymns, prayers and a
bible reading, and reading and prayers in the boarding house before
bedtime. On Sundays we had worship in the main assembly hall in the
morning (the day boys escaped all that palaver), then crocodiled up the
road to the parish church in the evening. I remember one occasion when
we had a visiting Episcopalian priest from the USA. We had been brought
up in the strict English tradition of keeping to the straight and
narrow, so were very surprised to be urged in strong Yankee accents to
‘curve right, boys, curve right.’ We were extremely puzzled by this
new-fangled approach to the Bible’s teaching, and could only attribute
it to the strictures of the Cold War!
While I was enduring this prolonged cultural winter,
as I regarded it, I learned to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself,
including any religious beliefs and sentiment. I wanted to avoid the
reputation among my peers of being labelled as the ‘goody two-shoes’
from the vicarage, so I kept my head down and went with the crowd. Not
something I’m particularly proud of, but a teenager’s method of survival
in a hostile environment in the 1950s.
After my wintertime in Lancaster, my move to York in
1964 was my Prague spring as I later called it (this was a period that
coincided with the short-lived regime of Alexander Dubcek in
Czechoslovakia, with its tentative appearance of new shoots from the
tundra of Soviet Communism.) The new university was in its second year,
and I was thrilled to come across a group of young people of both sexes
(what a change from my single sex boarding school), who were proud to
stand up publicly as professing Christians. The first year students had
set out to create one Christian student group, and to avoid a rash of
denominational societies, and this seemed initially very attractive to
me. However, I quickly came to feel that we spent all our time in
intellectual discussion of denominational differences, and very little
time in worship and prayer.
Two great things happened in my life during my first
year. One was that I met and fell head over heels in love with the most
wonderful girl in the world. She was the daughter of an Anglican
clergyman and his wife who had also been missionaries in Africa,
although this time with the CMS in Nigeria (the CMS comes from the
evangelical tradition of the Anglican Church, so that was an interesting
contrast with my father’s SPG background). After a few months of heady
romance, we agreed to marry in due course, and our plan was to go abroad
in missionary service, possibly to South America. I remember a meeting
with Cyril Tucker, the then Bishop of South America (now the Province of
the Southern Cone – an evangelical citadel within the present Anglican
Communion).
The other event, however, was much more important.
After a long conversation with an evangelical student friend, I put my
intellectual arrogance to one side and took the simple but vital step of
committing my life to Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour. My
world turned upside down! I was full of the joys of spring (filled with
the Holy Spirit is probably a better way of describing this), and wanted
to share my new-found faith with the whole world. This was followed by a
visit to the annual IVF student Easter conference at Swanwick in
Derbyshire, where I listened to great evangelical Anglican preachers
such as John Stott from All Souls’, Langham Place, and David McInnes
from the Round Church in Cambridge, and a decision by a small group of
us in York to establish a Christian Union, in a deep desire to create
the simple and biblically-based fellowship and service of the Early
Church.
Christian Union activities absorbed much of my time
and energies thereafter. At the beginning of my second year, David
Watson arrived from a curacy at the Round Church to take over the
ministry of St Cuthbert’s, a small church within the city walls facing
closure. This marked the beginning of a period of evangelical renewal in
York, and soon the church was filled to overflowing with a hall
extension to accommodate the eager worshippers, and eventually had to
relocate to St Michael le Belfrey, a large city church just across the
road from York Minster.
Many Christian students soon began worshipping
regularly at St Cuthbert’s, but it took me some time to join them for
the main evening preaching service. I found the enthusiasm infectious,
but the tendency among my friends to define and separate the ‘saved’
from the ‘great unwashed’ rather unnerving (not from David himself,
though). I was still drawn to my mainstream Anglican inheritance, and
York was an ideal place to follow this commitment.
The history department was based in The King’s Manor,
Henry VIII’s royal manor house in the centre of York, and it was
possible on occasion to slip out at 3.45pm and make my way down High
Petergate to the Minster for choral evensong. Many converts to Orthodoxy
have described giving up their Anglican liturgical inheritance as one of
their greatest challenges. Sitting in the cosy comfort of the choir
stalls, while the treble voices soared into the great vault of the
Minster in Allegri’s ‘Miserere’ and sent tingles down the spine, is one
of the great religious experiences of the world, and I’d challenge
anyone to remain unmoved by it!
We had our great festival services as well, and I
particularly remember Epiphany when all the lights would be switched off
at 6.30pm and the choir would then process the length of the nave by
candlelight through the crowded Minster. Daytime festival services would
bring together crowds of pilgrims from all over the world to this
fortress of northern Christianity in worship and celebration.
During my time in York there were three episcopal
consecrations, and the majesty of the various clergy and civic
processions, followed by the dean and chapter and the bishops of the
Northern Province in their scarlet cassocks, then finally by the grand
cross of the Province and the Archbishop in his cope and mitre, carrying
his shepherd’s crook, was overwhelming. So also were the beauty of
worship, the great hymn singing, and the solemn invocation of the Holy
Spirit at the moment of consecration in the ancient words and melody of
the ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus,’ ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire.’
This was St Ignatius incarnate in his cathedral with his flock gathered
around him. Donald Coggan was archbishop at the time, and this great
evangelical preacher and pastor was a mighty inspiration, providing a
perfect foil and counterpart to Michael Ramsay at Canterbury. I met him
once at his home at Bishopthorpe, his official residence outside York,
and was deeply moved by his graciousness and Christian love, as well as
by his deep learning and scholarship. He later succeeded Dr Ramsay as
the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury.
So, as I’ve said, this was my Prague spring, and
heady days they were too. However, as they say, all good things came to
an end, and the time came to bid farewell to York. I was facing a number
of crises in my life at the time. My father had died the previous year
after a short illness and, by Anglican custom, the family was required
to vacate the vicarage, and my mother had decided to emigrate to
Australia with my sister. My fiancée had previously gone out to Nigeria
for a year’s teaching work, as she had graduated the year before me, and
then had been totally cut off by the outbreak of the civil war, as she
was living at the time on the ‘wrong’ side of the lines in rebel Biafra.
When she was smuggled out several months later through French West
Africa and returned to England at the time of my graduation, the
experience had led her to reconsider her future and decide to pursue a
single life somewhere in the mission field. (She was tragically killed
in a road accident in Uganda three years later.)
So my life was in turmoil, and my immediate
commitment and responsibility was to support my mother, who had decided
to return from Australia, and to help her settle into a new home and way
of life as a clergy widow (a real challenge, as other widows will know,
within the social culture of the Anglican Church). I got a temporary
clerical job in the local hospital and looked around for a church to
worship, but the predominant tradition in the area of the Midlands where
my mother was living seemed to be Anglo-Catholic, so I didn’t feel at
home there, and other parishes seemed to be preoccupied with all the
inducements of the new liberal social church and were a total
switch-off.
I decided that I needed a fresh ‘steer’ from God, and
literally ‘threw my bread upon the waters.’ The choice lay between
applying for theological training and ordination in the Anglican Church,
or following up my current job as an outpatient clerk in the NHS and
applying for their graduate training scheme in hospital administration.
I prayed earnestly to God to show me the way.
In the event, the Church offered me a potential
training place, provided I continued to gain further experience of
working and living for an indefinite period ‘outside the academic
hothouse,’ (by which they meant school and university – a typical case
of ‘have your cake and eat it!’) The NHS was prepared to take me on,
provided I was prepared to give them a reasonable time commitment in
return for their investment in me. ‘Praesis ut prosis,’ remember? I told
them I would give them ten good years of my life, and I’ve never
regretted it. They ended up with 33 years of my life and service.
Hospital administration, or management as it’s now called, has been my
life long Christian vocation, so I’ve never regretted not pursuing
ordination.
Fast forward some
30 years. During that time I had married and raised two children, and
had pursued my career in NHS management. Although my underlying faith
had never weakened, I was rather like the seed being corrupted by the
cares and pressures of this world, and I had drifted out of active
church membership altogether. I had been aware of the storm created by
Bishop John Robinson’s ‘Honest to God’ while I was at university, and I
noticed some of the other events as they were reported at the time, such
as the Jenkins affair and the lightning strike on York Minster. However,
the other upheavals generally passed me by, although I found myself
increasingly dissatisfied with the way in which the Anglican Church
seemed determined to rewrite every service book it could get its hands
on.
The crunch came
when my marriage ended in divorce, and I finally decided that I had to
get a grip on myself, and return as the prodigal son to my Heavenly
Father. I needed to return to regular fellowship in a Christian
community, and recognised belatedly that we are not meant generally to
live a Christian life in splendid isolation. I made a deal with my
recently widowed elderly neighbour – I would provide regular transport
to church if she would introduce me to her local church fellowship. In
this case, it was the main Baptist Church in Bath, and I enjoyed two
wonderful years of Christian fellowship and spiritual growth before
moving down to Devon in 2001.
My move to Devon
coincided with yet another major reorganisation of the NHS, the seventh
in my career, and my decision to retire from hospital management to
devote my life to God’s purposes on a more ‘full time’ basis through
voluntary work and other activities. It also coincided with my
remarriage. When we arrived down here in Devon, I remember asking a
local about the churches in town, and he replied that there were the
‘usual culprits,’ including ‘that lively bunch up the hill.’ ‘Nuff said,
I made a beeline up there and found myself a member of the local
Methodist Church.
I have been an
active member here for the past seven years, and have recently begun
formal study and training to become a Local Preacher, one of the
distinctive orders of the Methodist Church. Life could have continued in
this way indefinitely. However, I have always been conscious that my
decision to worship with the Baptist and Methodist Churches has been a
holding arrangement to seek a temporary spiritual ‘lifeboat’ in the face
of the growing heterodoxy and apostasy of my beloved Anglican Church,
and couldn’t continue indefinitely. Somewhere down the line I would have
to resume my pilgrimage through this ‘barren land’ (shades of ‘Guide me,
O Thou Great Redeemer’ to Cwm Rhondda - part of my Welsh inheritance).
Also, I grew up in the same mill town as the bandmaster on the Titanic,
so I’ve always had a deep awareness of sinking ships and the relevance
of lifeboats.
The flash point
came last summer when I was trawling the internet. When I had originally
read Metropolitan Kallistos’ book some 40 years ago, I had been struck
so forcibly by the truth of what he was saying. Clearly the original
Church had been quite right in decrying the heresy of the ‘filioque’ and
resisting the Papal claims of the time. I had no difficulty in accepting
the claim of the Orthodox Church to hold the fullness of the faith.
However, my knowledge of the activity of the Church at that time,
particularly in Western Europe, was so limited that I could see no
purpose in seeking any link with a church which seemed to be restricted
to Eastern Europe and Russia. Also, given its emphasis on a ‘rich’
liturgy, it seemed to me as a Protestant to be somewhere in the same
league as the Roman Catholic Church with its ‘bells and smells,’ which
was something of a switch-off.
However, I now
came across the name of Michael Harper, someone I’d known and read as an
Anglican evangelical clergyman and charismatic when I was a student, but
who now appeared to be an Orthodox priest and the dean of the new
Antiochian Orthodox deanery in Britain and Ireland. Could this possibly
be the same person? How could someone so strongly and demonstrably a
child of the Protestant Reformation have crossed the ecclesiastical
spectrum and emerged as a priest of the original Catholic Church? The
mind boggled. However, when I searched further, it became quite clear
that this was indeed the same person.
The experience
was like being plugged into the mains; I shot up in excitement, my
spiritual nerve ends were tingling, and life has never been the same
since. I trawled further and discovered the story of the great and
wonderful movement of thousands of North American evangelicals to the
Orthodox Church in the 1980s, and the subsequent similar move by many
Anglicans and others in this country in the 1990s. Life is now a
feverish round of learning, and my laptop is filling up rapidly with the
constant downloading of Orthodox material from any source I can find it.
Quite honestly, I
have been completely knocked out by the sheer deep spirituality of all I
have been reading, and the Antiochian Archdiocese’s ‘Ancient Faith
Radio’ is my constant daily companion as well. Thank God for the
internet. Peter Gillquist, Thomas Hopko, Bradley Nassif, Bill & Dianna
Olnhausen and the Mathewes-Greens are my American teachers, as are
Bishop Kallistos, Michael Harper, Gregory Hallam, Chrysostom MacDonnell,
John Marks and Andrew Phillips in this country. Tom Soroka, Steve
Robinson & Bill Gould, Pat Rearden, Kevin Allen and Lawrence Farley,
among others, fill my study with the sweetness of their radio discourse,
and I can rejoice with the whole communion of saints in the wonderful
radio worship offered unceasingly to God through the voices of the
heavenly choirs who presently are limited to their earthly incarnations.
And what have I
discovered from all these new friends? That the Orthodox Church is
indeed the True Church that has preserved the Body of Christ since the
time of Christ and the Apostles, has maintained the fullness of the
faith and has continued to worship God with reverence and glory. As
Father Michael Harper has said in his book, ‘A Faith Fulfilled,’ the
Orthodox Church is deeply evangelical, impeccably catholic, and is
filled with the power and movement of the Holy Spirit of God. What more
need I seek?
I have recently
approached my local parish in North Devon, which belongs to the Western
European Archdiocese of Churches of Russian Tradition, an Exarchate of
the Ecumenical Patriarch, through the Episcopal Vicariate in this
country. Father John Marks and his people have been very warm and
welcoming, and I am looking forward to joining them regularly in Divine
Worship. Through this branch of the Church I have also come across the
ministry of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh, and I am immersing
myself in his teaching and deep spirituality.
So, all praise
and thanks to God for lighting my path and showing me the way forward. I
am so grateful to my Anglican Church for starting me off on the path of
faith and giving me such a deep rooted trust in the grace and love of
our Heavenly Father and his Beloved Son. The historian’s part of my
brain suggests to me that the rise of the Orthodox Church in the West
and in this country is no mere coincidence, as the traditional churches
sink into decline and apostasy, but part of God’s wonderful plan for the
continuing redemption of the world, his world.
Now I believe that God is calling me home to his church, his Body here on earth as well as in heaven. I am looking forward to becoming a catechumen and, in God’s good time, being received into the Holy Orthodox Church. What a privilege and joy it will be to share in his missionary endeavour to his people in the West, and to contribute to the reconversion of England. To him be all praise, honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
