A new study of Orthodox Christians in America has found a larger-than-expected number of converts, mostly from Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant backgrounds.
The report, released by the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, Calif., surveyed 1,000 members of Greek Orthodox or Orthodox Church in America congregations, which represent about 60% of America’s estimated 1.2 million Orthodox Christians.
Although Orthodox churches were historically immigrant communities, the study found that nine out of 10 parishioners are now American-born. Thousands of members had converted to the faith as adults: 29% of Greek Orthodox are converts, as are 51% of the OCA.
OCA and formerly Roman Catholic here. These numbers do not surprise me. There seem to be three main groups of converts (I am painting with a broad brush here, so yes there are many exceptions).
The Roman Catholics are more often those who have become on some level disenchanted with the silliness that has swept the Roman Church over the last 40+ years and who start looking at what is out there while rejecting Protestantism as theologically bankrupt.. The occasional similarities between Orthodoxy and Protestantism is often a challenge for inquirers.
The Protestants are divided into two groups. The fundamentalists and the mainline types. The mainline types often come to Orthodoxy after coming to terms with how far most of the their denominations have drifted from the ancient faith in their embrace of the modern world and its culture of anything goes. TEC is an extreme example of this. (My Godfather is a former Episcopalian and later continuing Anglican before he swam the Bosporous.)
The fundies generally come to Orthodoxy when they start discovering church history. By which I mean the part between the end of the New Testament and Martin Luther / John Calvin. To read the Fathers is to end forever the weird ideas that so called “Bible Christians” have about things like sola scriptura etc. I have yet to meet a fundamentalist Protestant who was well read in the Fathers and early Church history. It is absolutely impossible to square Protestantism with the faith of the first millennium.
Of course those are mainly theological points. But many converts are also seeking a spirituality that is sometimes seen as lacking in Western Christianity.
The above observations are of course mostly anecdotal. But when discussing this with others I have not gotten much disagreement.
ICXC NIKA
[url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/]John[/url]
Thanks John/Ad Orientem (#1). It’s good to get an insider’s perspective on this.
Let me just point out that this survey involved only 1,000 people, which is a fairly small sample, but more importantly that it only examined the two largest Orthodox groups, the Greek Orthodox Church and the (Russian) OCA. If it had included the Antiochan Orthodox, I’m pretty sure it would have almost certainly showed an even higher percentage of converts. That’s the group that seems to have attracted the bulk of former evangelical Protestants who have sought to affiliate with the ancient eastern Christian tradition (Peter Gilquest, Frankie Schaeffer, lots of former Campus Crusade for Christ staffers, and so on).
I think there may be a significant generational factor involved here. We Boomers (I was born in 1955) weren’t much into respecting traditions of any sort, ancient church traditions or otherwise. As a generation, we were into change and often revolutionary change at that. But later generations have been more positively inclined toward recovering a sense of connection with the past. I see many Gen Xers, and even more Millenials, who long for a form of spirituality that goes back more than one or two generations, or has roots that go back more than one or two centuries.
Alas, Evangelicalism is notoriously ahistorical. Many evangelical Protestants know little about Luther and Calvin, or even John Wesley or Jonathan Edwards (and they care even less). Anything before Dwight Moody (if not Billy Graham) or Azusa Street (where American Pentecostalism was born) often just hasn’t been taught or celebrated in their churches. And as for anything before the Reformation, well, just forget it.
I think the apparent timelessness of Eastern Orthodoxy often appeals strongly to people, especially again of the younger generations, who feel that we live in a cut-flower culture that has no deep roots. And the sumptuous beauty of many Orthodox churches with all their icons, and the fragrant wafts of incense, is often inviting after the barrenness (and frankly, all too often the sheer ugliness) of many conservative Protestant churches in the revivalist or free church tradition.
I’m fascinated by how many evangelical CLERGY (or other fulltime Christian workers) have converted to some form of eastern Orthodoxy. I note that an incredible 56% of the OCA clergy surveyed were converts. That’s unbeilievable, over half!
But this survey leaves me wondering if a similar phenomenon is taking place among the Eastern Rite Catholics, such as the Ukrainians, the Ruthenians, or Maronites. Does anyone know if the Byzantine Catholics are similarly attracting remarkable numbers of converts?
David Handy+
(And yes, AO, Christ does indeed conquer!)
FYI, I believe the study behind the article is this one:
http://orthodoxinstitute.org/files/Brochuretogether.pdf
I concur with the observations of the previous two comments, as well. However, in regard to the high percentage of converts among OCA clergy, one could see that glass as half empty: one could say that the OCA has done a terrible job of hanging on to the children of Russian immigrants. That seems to be the perspective of Fr. Thomas Hopko among others.
The Antiochian Orthodox Church is also growing. Last night my parish hosted a pan-Orthodox service using the Liturgy of St. James. The church was full of young families visiting from the OCA church and the Greek Orthodox church. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many young parents, infants, children and people of every ethnic background worshipping together. Certainly not in ECUSA, even it that organization’s best days!
Amen to the comments by Alice Linsley. It is a blessing to see the young children at a Divine Liturgy in an Orthodox church. To those that object to children receiving the Divine Mysteries, I can only say that I know that they are more worthy than an old man like me. To argue that the chilldren don’t understand their meaning is almost comic as neither do I. After all, they are Mysteries. Statmann