This has been a long time coming.

I was raised in a Freewill Baptist church. Around 1990, when I was 12, I was baptized in a pond by a Baptist preacher. I don’t think I should have been. I remember that I had no idea what anything meant. I couldn’t tell you what salvation, sanctification, justification, or anything actually pertinent to the Christian faith meant. More conservative high-church denominations would require confirmation or catechesis. All I had was Sunday School songs like “The B-I-B-L-E” and “Jesus Loves the Little Children”.

By high school, I was functionally an agnostic. I wasn’t opposed to religion, but it had no real meaning for me personally. Part of that was not wanting to completely deny what I believed growing up. I didn’t want to embarrass or hurt my parents.

In college, it became real to me that believing would be a hindrance to my career. I was studying anthropology with a desire to become an archaeologist. College was also tougher in other ways. I had my first real experience with deep depression. After dropping out and a breakup, I felt suicidal and told God to take my life before I took it myself.

I spent a couple of years after that in real zeal. I attended a Pentecostal church and refound my beliefs, but I was still untaught. I had no spiritual father, no direction, and no discipline. What kind of books did I pick up? Demonology, spiritual warfare, fringe stuff. A lot of questionable things, and in hindsight a lot of it was inappropriate. At least one of those questionable books pointed me toward Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life. That was the first book I picked up that really set any kind of reasonable groundwork for faith. With that said, Nee’s movement, which began in China, moved to the US after his death in 1972 and was headed by Witness Lee. It leans far too much into the realm of a cult, and I would not suggest anyone going in that direction. As for me, Nee’s book, although flawed in some pretty significant ways, got the Gospel right, and I needed that backbone to my faith.

That doesn’t mean I immediately got into a good church. I knew from reading that I didn’t want to be a “Calvinist”. I didn’t want to be a Catholic who worshipped Mary and idols. I didn’t want to be a “liberal”. I also didn’t want to be in a Pentecostal church that only sang and danced all the time but didn’t do any kind of real teaching. This left me in generic evangelicalism.

In 2000, I moved from my small town in the Midwest to Raleigh, NC, far away, for a girl and to start a career in IT. Even though I’ve had bigger and stranger moves in my life, this was the one where I had the most culture shock. I visited my first mainline church because my girlfriend attended there. That was my first taste of liturgical worship, and in all honesty, I was a jerk about it. I was such a pain. I felt like I was a crusader standing in the gates of hell. They had pre-written prayers. They had a form of a liturgy (they were pretty low-church). I had no use for any of those “dead” religious things. I just thought it was terrible.

I started attending another Pentecostal church after hopping around a bit. But at the same time, I kept reading. Now it was C.S. Lewis, the pietists like Zinzendorf and Spener, and John Wesley. A year later, we got married and started attending a Wesleyan church, which was a little more mainline while also one of the most conservative branches of Wesleyan/Methodism. It had a worship band. It wasn’t really home, but it was good enough. I thought the pastor was kind of a joke, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt as much as I could. We stayed there around two years. I kept reading. I listened to the White Horse Inn and other evangelical podcasts and radio shows.

Soon after, we found ourselves in a high-church Reformed Baptist church. This one was Reformed (i.e. Calvinist). They had organ and choir music and also praise and worship. They had an incredibly strong focus on teaching. That was a first for me. For the first time, I listened to every sermon, Bible study, and Wednesday night service attentively. The pastor of that church in Durham, NC knew how to teach and how to make theology accessible. It was also somewhat “high church” compared to everything else I had been in. They used the Nicene Creed and had readings from their confessions.

My wife wasn’t happy there, and shortly after, we started attending an LCMS (Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod) church. The flip-flopping between churches ended around 2003. I joined the LCMS, the largest conservative Lutheran denomination in the US and one of the largest in the world. To get to this point, I needed to deal with some hard theological truths that contradicted much of what I had been taught since I was young.

  1. Infant baptism
  2. The real presence of Christ in the sacrament (consubstantiation)
  3. Non-extemporaneous prayer
  4. Saying creeds and confessions
  5. Predestination (the Lutheran view)
  6. The eternal virginity of Mary
  7. Mary as the mother of God
  8. The separation of the clergy from the laity (not everybody is a preacher)

There are more that I’m not remembering at the moment, but that’s a lot. Of those, 7 out of 8 I was able to come to terms with over time. I was in the LCMS for over 20 years. That gave me a lot of time to read, study, and listen to a lot of genuinely good teachers.

After nine years, my wife and I split up and eventually divorced.

At this point, I have to say that I am a true introvert. I don’t make friends easily. At the Lutheran churches I’ve attended, I’ve only been real friends with a few of the pastors and not many of the other worshippers. I don’t know how to small talk well, and I feel that I am too weird to really fit in. Most of the other people who work in IT are atheists or agnostics. It was really rare for me to befriend people I saw as my peers. Not that I was better than anyone. I was just too weird for them.

Five years after splitting up with my ex-wife, I met my current wife and moved to Europe to be with her. In 2015, I moved to Prague, Czechia, and lived there for nearly ten years. During that time, I attended an English-speaking LCMS mission church, but everything wasn’t just hunky-dory. For more than five years of that time, I was not attending church very regularly. I would attend in spurts, but it wasn’t often. It was a tiny church. There were times during COVID when there would be two people in the congregation on a Sunday. Other times, we would get a huge number of tourists visiting. We had some wonderful pastors and at least one very mediocre one. Fortunately, the mediocre one left after a brief time. I loved the pastor who was there for the longest time, but it was more of a burden to go than to stay at home. I felt like I wasn’t a part of the community. I was an outsider. That is a fault in me, not in the pastor. I was not a good churchman. Slowly, my faith began to fade more and more.

Over two summers, I read two of Rod Dreher’s books: The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies. This was extremely pertinent as an American with strongly held anti-communist views. Around me were remnants of that terrible regime, and I was reading about how to stand up to totalitarianism while we still can. I really wanted to be part of a community where I could live The Benedict Option. I never expected it to be possible. Lutherans, even confessional Lutherans like in the LCMS, don’t have communities like that, and if they did, I would never be invited to join them. I was too weird. As for Live Not by Lies, I took its message to heart. I wanted to stand up for what’s right. I had been reading the works of anti-communist dissidents before that, and I wanted to be a part of that.

I also started attending an AA-adjacent 12-step meeting. While I don’t have a drug, alcohol, or other chemical addiction, I still have my issues that I wanted to work through, maybe with a sponsor. Let me quote a few of the AA 12 steps:

  1. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
  2. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
  3. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
  4. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

I struggled with the question: Do I really believe God can and will do this? My church attendance had been diminishing year after year. I didn’t struggle with unbelief so much as I struggled with being unhappy with where I was in life, in church, and with my lack of friends outside of my wife. This led me to doubting the miraculous more and more. Maybe God can do these things for people, but not for me. I never see God working in my life like this.

In his later book Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher wrote:

Maybe your faith has become dry, a thing held more in your head than in your heart—or felt in your bones.

This was me at that point in my life. Now, I had been very curious about Roman Catholicism, and to a lesser extent Orthodoxy, for some time. I bought a rosary to help me focus my nearly non-existent prayer life. It didn’t help. From time to time, I had the inkling that I would like to visit Mass at a Catholic church. I never did, due to the language barrier and the fear that I might stand out like a sore thumb. I couldn’t move toward Catholicism due to the child abuse scandals and the lack of any hard pronouncement against them or against gay non-celibate priests. Perhaps if we had another pope like Benedict, it would have been different, but the former and current popes seem far too liberal and willing to push the actual teachings of the church to the background.

After almost ten years in Europe, I moved back to my hometown in Illinois. That was early 2025. I attended the local LCMS church regularly and really didn’t get very attached. I am introverted, but not to the point of being unfriendly or standoffish. I just don’t do well with small talk if there’s not a good connection between me and someone else. I visited other local LCMS churches, but they weren’t much different.

I remember pulling out of my apartment’s parking lot and seeing the Catholic church next door and feeling a yearning and a longing to go there. This wasn’t just random curiosity. It was a physical sensation in my chest. It was an ache and a pressure. I couldn’t be Catholic, but it dawned on me that I could be Orthodox, and that fit. The idea fit better than anything else. This felt right.

Now, I’ll be the first person to tell you that along with being painfully introverted, I am also not an emotional person. I am naturally stoic. I try not to get blown about by every random thing I see. The older I get, the more stoic I’ve become. After doing some reading, watching quite a few videos, and praying more than I’ve prayed in years, I made the leap to attending the Divine Liturgy at an Orthodox church for the first time.

In October 2025, I visited an Orthodox church for the first time. Strangely enough, I felt at home. I didn’t feel the anxiety that I was afraid I would feel. The parish priest, Fr. John, had been away for several weeks after being sick. That Sunday was the festival of the Protection of the Virgin Mary, which was also the name of the church, so it was the church’s nameday, so to speak. What an amazing coincidence. Fr. John was very kind, and we spoke for a few minutes before we went inside. He showed me around the church and the icons. One of them was over 200 years old, from Russia. The stained glass icons were in English, and between them were large painted icons in Church Slavonic. The iconostasis has small icons of the apostles on the top row, icons of Mary and Jesus, and I think Paul, St. Michael, and a few others. The smell of decades of incense lingered in the air. Not necessarily fresh, but heavy from many years’ worth of services. I’ll never forget that he told me almost prophetically about when I become Orthodox, never if.

A little while later, I wrote to the LCMS pastor where I had been attending and told him that I would not be attending there anymore, at least for the time being. I didn’t think I was making a mistake, but at the same time, I didn’t want to burn any bridges. I didn’t want to give offense or to seem haughty or angry. I’m not.

In December 2025, I was officially made a catechumen.

Fr. John was not well. Many services he would skip or forget large parts of the Divine Liturgy. Being a diabetic, he let his blood sugar drop too low on Sundays. He always practiced the fast before communion, and so he was weak, and it wore on him. Our Friday night Bible studies were a little nonsensical because it was hard for him to keep his train of thought. I felt frustrated because I wanted to dig in and learn the things that I didn’t understand. I never said anything about it though. I was there to learn, not to judge. I even volunteered to send out weekly emails for him, but I felt like maybe this wasn’t the congregation for me. I listened, read, and asked questions when I could. And then he was gone. I came in one Sunday morning and I was told by a lady that I always chatted with that he reposed the Thursday night before. I had waited for him to join the Bible study class and assumed he forgot. I had no idea until Sunday morning.

That congregation is OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1970s. The other closest church is Antiochian. I visited there a few times and was there for Pascha. But I really wasn’t happy there either. Something about it wasn’t home the way the first congregation was. And even though we don’t have a full-time priest, this is where I am going.

I want to talk about some of the theological things that I have been dealing with since this slow move to Orthodoxy. Like the theological things I had to deal with when moving to Lutheranism from evangelicalism, these are important points that I am in the process of dealing with. This list is not all-inclusive. There are many things that I’m sure I’m leaving out.

  1. The nature of Mary, not as the Theotokos (God-bearer), but as the “Queen of Heaven”.
  2. Understanding the role the saints play in our lives and what to do about the really obscure ones. How can you ask an unknown saint to pray for you or to help you when there is only a single line written about them, but no one really understands who they were? How can we take the word of tradition about someone there is so little written about?
  3. Understanding the role Scripture actually plays. I’ve heard some use really bad liberal/modern critical arguments about Scripture as a sort of knee-jerk reaction against Sola Scriptura.
  4. Understanding what happens when church fathers contradict each other. Their writings are not at the same level as Scripture, but many are still considered to be saints.
  5. Understanding why monophysitism is considered such a grievous heresy. It seems to me that there should be an overwhelming desire from all sides to see this schism healed now and forever. I am not one to suggest ignoring theological differences for the sake of ecumenism, but it really seems like this is a “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” type of argument.
  6. Really understanding theosis, not in a literary way but personally also.
  7. Dealing with church politics. It seems really ugly concerning who gets to be over whom, in what manner, and in what location.
  8. The lack of assurance. How can you know if you’re on the right path?
  9. Rebaptism of Protestants.
  10. Corruption in the church among the clergy. This goes along with the point about politics.
  11. The Orthodox understanding of heaven and hell.
  12. The Orthodox understanding of eschatology and the day of judgement.

With that said, there are many things that make Orthodoxy seem the best to me.

  1. A real, honest focus on good works for the benefit of your neighbor. Faith without works is dead.
  2. The focus on true humility.
  3. The focus on anti-judgmentalism.
  4. Living in a world that is both physical and spiritual.
  5. Being a part of a church that is bigger than a local network of churches (both physically and temporally).
  6. Having a spiritual father to guide me.
  7. There is a seriousness about the faith that I haven’t seen in other churches.
  8. There is a real hierarchy in life. Both in church directly, but also spiritually.
  9. Being in communion with the saints.

My patron saint: Neomartyr Bishop Gorazd of Prague