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This blog contains articles documenting my spiritual journey as a Confessional Calvinism and my eventual surprising departure from it into Eastern Orthodoxy. Since I posted many articles with which I now disagree, I have a choice: 1) delete them or 2) leave them. Deleting them destroys my history, which I am loathe to do. But I if I leave them and continue posting on it, I feel like I am giving tacit support to views I no longer hold. The solution on which I have decided is to retire this blog and start a new one. For all future posts, please visit http://journeyintodivineintimacy.blogspot.com/

A Monastery As the Best Of All Worlds

A phenomenon I noticed as a Protestant is that there were good things available but they were seldom all together. For example, this church had good preaching, that church had good music, this denomination had liturgy, that denomination was welcoming to the Holy Spirit, this ministry work with the poor, this ministry emphasized personal accountability, etc. One attractive feature about the Orthodox Church is that you don't need to keep looking or hopping churches. Unlike Protestant churches that need to discover forgotten treasures of the authentic, ancient faith, the Orthodox Church never lost them.

When people ask me why I would consider entering a monastery, there is no simple answer. But I have thought of an illustration to make it a little bit more accessible: A monastery is a place where many of the best aspects of Protestantism have been organically coming together for the last 1,700 years:

Feature	Example in Protestantism
Full-time, residential discipleship program like those under Elisha (2 Kings 2, 4 - 6, 9) or Jesus.	YWAM's DTS (http://www.ywam.org/Training)
Communal life like in Acts 4:32 – 37	Jesus People USA (http://www.jpusa.org/)
Retreat Center	http://www.bethanyministries.com/personalretreats.htm
Hospitality. Monasteries provide 3 days free lodging. Before the development of commercial hotels, this was the main way that people traveled.	http://www.christianhospitalitynetwork.com/
24/7 Prayer	IHOP (http://www.ihop.org/prayerroom/history/)
Servant-leadership Residential leadership development program (all bishops in the Orthodox church are selected from monasteries)	Willow Creek conferences (http://www.willowcreek.com/events/leadership)
Self-sufficient communities	Amish (http://www.amish.net/faq.asp)
Hospital for the soul	Leanne Payne (http://www.leannepayne.org/); Mario Bergner (http://www.redeemedlives.org/)
Personal Accountability	http://www.promisekeepers.org/

My Journey To Orthodoxy

My journey that finally brought me home to Eastern Orthodoxy started many years ago started in 1992 when I was at Moody Bible Institute. It was then that I first visited an Orthodox Church. As for any first time visitor coming from a Protestant background, it would be hard to capture the experience in any one word except different.

Even at that time I could articulate that Protestants had thrown out too many babies with the Reformation bathwater. What bothered me the most was the Protestant abolition of the the sacrament of confession. James 5:16 was so clearly missing. Some groups, realizing the loss, started incorporating a form of it into men's groups, but the fact is that it could never take off because it ran contrary to individualistic Protestant values. Knowing nothing about Orthodoxy at the time, I remember going to Roman Catholic priests and begging them to receive my confession, but they refused because I lacked sacramental communion with them.

In 1996 I converted to Calvinism, and I won't deny the emotional stability that it brought to me. At last I had a relatively old document (The Canons of Dortrech) that could give me a sense of rootedness. But I still did not how to pray, much less how to live. Around this time through the ministry of Leanne Payne, I was introduced to the Anglican Communion and liturgical prayer. I began praying the Book of Common Prayer. It was very meaningful to me, but I only could practice in isolation. The fellowship I kept did not generally value liturgy.

I would run across articles or patristic writings that would remind me that there was something more than Protestantism, but I was too entrenched to ponder it deeply. In 2001 an interest in Orthodoxy flared again, and I read a couple books introducing Orthodoxy. I also visited a couple Orthodox churches, but there were none near where I lived and besides the non-English liturgy was not accessible to me, so I again put it aside. Eventually, I moved to China, where the spiritual desert compelled to me keep digging wells deeper than Protestantism. I took a 5 day retreat at a Roman Catholic monastery in Taiwan. God spoke to me while there, but I did not feel a leading toward Rome.

When I went back to the mainland, I decided to retrench in the Reformation since I could find no better alternative. A friend introduced me to the free online courses at Reformed Theological Seminary. I started eating at the table of Westminster. I read, memorized, and meditated on the Westminster Standards, looking for a sense of rootedness. It was good while it lasted, but I needed something deeper. I went back to the Book of Common Prayer, but that well had already dried up too.

About this time I was taking a course on Church history at RTS. The professor's goal was to get to Rome as soon possible so that he could turn toward Wittenberg, but he could not just completely ignore 1,000 years of history, so we visited Byzantium. And that it where I came face to face with the early church. And I no longer could deny that the early church had little resemblance to Protestant Christianity. This was not necessarily welcome information because all my friends and family and everything I had known was Protestant. But I had to face the discrepancy. I began researching Eastern Orthodoxy with desperation.

I discovered the Horologion, which provides a structure for the ancient Christian practice of praying at fixed times of the day and began praying it as best as I could with no guidance. I devoured these podcasts:   

• http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/eastwest
• http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/ourlife
• http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/orthodoxyheterodoxy
• http://ancientfaith.com/specials/lutheran_colloquium.

I wrote many emails seeking guidance but kept getting refused because of my physical location. Finally, one Father Dionisy in Hong Kong responded favorably. He put me in contact with another Orthodox believer named Christos in Xiamen. Christos and I started meeting every Sunday morning to pray matins, and he began to catechize me. I continued to read voraciously, but these were the really important reading materials at this point:

• The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware, and
• The truly devastating Sola Scriptura: In the Vanity of their Minds by Fr. John Whiteford

At this point I took a trip to Hong Kong to meet Fr. Dionisy and to inquire how to proceed toward conversion since I lived in a country where this faith was illegal, and it cost $300 to take an international flight to the nearest Orthodox Church. He said that he would accept my time as a Protestant as my catechumenate, and that I could convert whenever I felt that I was ready. He alerted me to the fact that I would have to publicly renounce Calvinism, which gave me significant pause, and lent me two books both by Fr. Peter E. Gillquist:

• Coming Home: Why Protestant Clergy are Becoming Orthodox and
• The captivating Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Faith

I went home and searched my soul for the courage to publicly renounce that thing that had given me identity for 16 years: Calvinism. I read everything I could find here: http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/inq_reformed.aspx and just could not make the leap. Finally, The Original Gospel by Fr. James Bernstein got me over the hurdle. I realized that the primary attribute of the God I had been worshiping was wrath, not love. And so that is the reason I had reduced the glorious Gospel from a Christlikeness-creating love relationship with God to a wrath eliminating juridical transaction. I was ready, so I contacted Fr. Dionisy again, and he invited me to be christmated on January 6, 2012 (Christmas Eve on the Julian calendar).

I began to prepare for chrismation by participating in the Nativity Fast. I typed my life confession since Fr. Dionisy's first language is Russian, and he was concerned that he would not be able to understand me if I confessed orally. I was sad that I would be chrismated with no friend to witness it, so I asked Christos to accompany me to Hong Kong, and he agreed. So we went to Hong Kong together. Around 6 p.m. on January 6, 2012, I received the sacrament of confession for the first time. Then around 8 p.m. I received was chrismated. Shortly after midnight, I received the sacrament of Eucharist for the first time. And then at 1:30 a.m. January 7, 2012, the feast began and went on until 3:30 a.m.

Although my chrismation was the culmination of a long journey in itself, I realize that it was just the beginning of another journey. But the prospect of this continuing journey no longer scares me because now I know that the God whom I worship is love, and I know that He has lovingly provided me with the Holy Tradition of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church to support me along the way.