Dear Theresa,
My own history is deeply involved with the Serbian Orthodox Church and I became a monk in Serbia at the monastery of Zica in the late 1970s. I have spent 20 years as a monk and parish priest in the Serbian Church (but I am now in the Russian Orthodox Church.)
So, tell your nephew that we are starting to pray for him and for his companions who will be in Serbia. I am going to spread the word around the Serbian monasteries and ask the monks and nuns to pray
In the meantime you could print this article off and give it to him. There is a great d-a-n-g-e-r for Campus Crusade people who come into contact with Orthodoxy LOL! Some of them convert!!
Chapter 9:
THE STRANGE CASE OF HOW 2,000 PROTESTANT EVANGELICALS ENDED UP JOINING THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
In early 1987, some 2,000 members of the now-dissolved Evangelical Orthodox Church were received into full communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church—the largest ever mass conversion to Orthodoxy in North American history. Even more remarkable was the fact that the leaders and clergy of the erstwhile E.O.C. group were former evangelical Protestants, with
backgrounds in Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth for Christ, and Young Life, and degrees from institutions like Wheaton College, Dallas Seminary, Fuller Seminary, Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Seattle Pacific University, Oral Roberts University, Lincoln Christian College, and Biola University.
As one of former E.O.C. priests, Peter Gillquist, a former regional
director of Campus Crusade and now an archpriest of the Antiochan Orthodox Christian Diocese of North America, asks rhetorically in his book “Becoming Orthodox,” “whatever would possess two thousand Bible-believing, blood-bought, Gospel-preaching, Christ-centred, life-long evangelical Protestants to
embrace this Orthodox faith so enthusiastically… [to] end up embracing historic ecclesiology, liturgical worship, and sacrament?”
What indeed?
Fr. Gillquist relates how he became increasingly disillusioned with what he was accomplishing as a Protestant “parachurch” evangelist. He recalls seeing a button on someone’s shirt that read: “God isn’t dead–Church is.” “Amen,” Gillquist said to himself, “Not only are converts falling by the wayside, but the churches are so pathetic that they can’t handle the ones who do
come. The Church is in captivity to an invisible, present-day Babylon!” In 1973, Peter Gillquist joined a core group of six other burned-out campus evangelists in a quest to discover what had happened to the New Testament Church. “Not too far into our investigation,” writes Jon Braun, one of the seven, “we were shocked to discover that there were whole chapters, as it were, of Church history with which we were totally unfamiliar. And in our
quest to get to the bottom of what was missing, we made a monumental discovery… the historic Orthodox Church. [Up until then] we didn’t even know it still existed.”
“As Protestants,” observed Jack Sparks [also now an Orthodox priest], another member of the group, “we know our way back to A.D. 1517 and the Reformation. As evangelicals—Bible people—we know our way up to A.D. 95 or so, when the Apostle John
finished writing the Revelation. It’s time we fill the gap in between!” The problem, Sparks allowed, is that “everybody claims to be the New Testament Church. The Catholics say they are; the Baptists say they are; the Church of Christ says it is—and nobody else is. We need to find out ‘who’s right?’”
The group of seven decided to research and study every aspect of Christian history they could uncover until they discovered “who’s right.” They agreed going into this project that wherever their “phantom search for the perfect Church” led, they would resolve to do and be whatever the New Testament Church did and was. “If we found we were wrong, we would change,” says
Gillquist. What the seven seekers discovered indeed revolutionized their vision of what the true Church should be. They discovered that Christian worship was liturgical from the earliest recorded times. The original Greek text of Acts 13:2 refers to “leitourgounton”—“liturgy.”
They discovered that the Fathers of the ancient Apostolic Church perceived the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist as the actual body and blood of Christ, as He Himself affirmed at the last Supper, and that from the earliest times the Sacrament of Holy Communion was the centrepiece of Christian worship.
continued in next message…
