Saturday, September 6, 1997

Discontented Protestants flock to Orthodox church

By YONAT SHIMRON

Raleigh News & Observer

A peace descends on Cheryl Traylor as she walks into the sanctuary of All Saints Orthodox Church in Raleigh, N.C. "Lay aside all earthly cares," the choir intones, and Traylor does - resting her eyes on gold-toned Byzantine icons, breathing in the woodsy smell of incense and singing along with the a cappella choir.

Traylor has grown to love the majesty and mystery of Orthodox liturgy. It wasn't always this way. A West Virginia native, she was reared in the Baptist church.

She converted to Orthodoxy when All Saints began all-English services in 1992. "Language was the final barrier," said Traylor, 29, who lives in nearby Cary. "I couldn't deny how beautiful the service was, but hearing it in English was like, 'Oh wow!' It was like learning it all over again."

Traylor is among a surge of converts to Orthodox Christianity, many of whom are drawn by English-only services and a desire to experience what they say is the authentic Christian church, free of the culture wars raging in many Protestant denominations.

With 5.5 million members, the Christian Orthodox Church is larger than the Episcopal and Presbyterian (USA) churches combined. New churches are being built at a rate of 50 a year. And there's every indication growth will continue - especially in the South, a region of the country traditionally dominated by Protestants.

In the past 10 years, the Antiochian Orthodox Church alone has built 50 churches, half of them in the South.

"It's not a question of us going out and looking for people," said the Rev. Michael Keiser, missions coordinator for the Eastern United States under the Antiochian archdiocese. "It's a question of responding to all the inquiries."

The Research Triangle area around Raleigh, for example, is home to half a dozen Orthodox churches. Two of those have English-only services catering primarily to converts such as Traylor: Americans with no roots in Greek, Slavic or Arabic tongues.

While some of the growth comes from Northerners moving South, bringing with them the faith of their immigrant parents, there's a more compelling reason. Many Protestants feel uneasy with modern churches and their efforts to reinvent rituals to meet the needs of the times. Others say even the Roman Catholic Church has allowed too much theological and liturgical diversity from one parish to another. These converts are looking for a Christian experience that is fixed and unchanging.

Stephen Parsons, who was reared in Baptist and Methodist churches, is one such person. He used to serve on the worship committee of a United Methodist church. Each month, the committee would gather to plan the weekly Sunday services. Everyone around the table would throw out ideas. How about a children's service, new processional banners, casual day, maybe slide shows?

"It didn't sit well with me," said Parsons, a test engineer at IBM. "I thought, 'We ought to do what we're supposed to do.' I preferred the traditional way."

Parsons, who converted to Orthodoxy in 1993, attends St. Gregory's Orthodox Church in Raleigh, where services follow a liturgy used since the fourth century.

Parsons' sentiment is shared by many, including a growing group of pastors. Ten years ago, 2,000 members of Campus Crusade for Christ converted to the Antiochian Orthodox Church. Since then, a steady trickle has abandoned Protestant denominations in favor of Orthodoxy.

"People are searching for roots," says the Rev. Nicholas Sorensen, pastor of All Saints Church and himself a convert from the Lutheran Church. "When they begin to be exposed to Orthodoxy, they see this church that stretches back to the apostles in an unbroken line, and it attracts them immediately."

The Orthodox Church was founded by Christ's apostles, who set out to spread the Christian faith in the lands marked today by Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Rome. Political and theological differences resulted in a divorce with Rome in 1054.

As the West saw the ascendancy of the Roman Catholic Church and the fracturing of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation, Orthodoxy continued in its age-old traditions, spreading to countries such as Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia.

Orthodoxy came to the North American continent in the mid-18th century. By 1794, eight Russian monks built the first Orthodox church in Alaska, then a Russian outpost. Greeks, who began immigrating to the United States in great numbers in the 19th century, built their own churches. Ukrainian, Rumanian and Syrian immigrants followed suit. To this day, Orthodox congregations in the United States are a mix of international faces and exotic customs.

To some Protestants, Sunday-morning services can be a culture shock. Orthodox believers light candles, cross themselves and bend down to kiss icons as they enter the church sanctuary. These symbolic gestures help make church teachings about the mystery of the divine and the incomprehensible essence of God more real, believers say. Once inside the sanctuary, the faithful face an icon screen - known as an iconostasis - with brilliant, gold-coated Byzantine paintings. An icon of Jesus hangs on the right and an icon of the Theotokos, or Mary, the mother of Jesus, hangs on the left. Smaller icons depict the saints and scenes in the life and resurrection of Jesus.

To Orthodox believers, the icons are a window to heaven - a visual representation of the next world. They also provide the faithful a way to meditate with God. "I look at them, and it feels like they're looking back at me," says the Rev. Andrew Davis, pastor of St. Gregory's. "It's a pretty powerful feeling."

Behind the iconostasis, a gold-robed priest stands in front of an altar. At different points during the service, he moves around, swinging a censer at the icons and the worshipers. Orthodox Christians see incense as a kind of a burnt offering or symbolic prayer sent up to the heavens.

The Sunday service is called the "Divine Liturgy," a nearly two-hour recitation of hymns and Scripture readings culminating in the feast of the bread and wine, or Holy Eucharist. The sermon, often the centerpiece of Protestant worship, plays only a small role in the Divine Liturgy, which was compiled in the fourth century.

That may be one reason some Orthodox churches don't have pews. Congregants are constantly moving in Orthodox services, crossing themselves, bowing, singing, shifting their weight from one foot to the other as they stand through the service.

"It's not a performance," says Ross Cooper, a member of St. Gregory's. "You're actively participating. There's a spontaneous informality. It's not regimented or stiff."

Observers say that as Orthodoxy begins to accommodate itself to U.S. church style it may also change. Some Orthodox churches, in a surrender to Western influence, have begun introducing pews. Others have installed organs.

But priests say that's where accommodation to a U.S. audience stops. In matters of theology, the Orthodox Church will not change. Issues such as biblical inerrancy, women's ordination or homosexuality would never be debated in an Orthodox church, says Sorensen, the pastor of All Saints. They don't need to be.

"Unlike Protestant churches, in Orthodoxy you don't vote on theology," says Sorensen. "That will never happen. This is a church that teaches humility and obedience."

In the Orthodox Church, obedience means adherence to the Bible, the creed, the decisions of church councils and the writings of the fathers. The church has no divinely ordained leader. That suits many converts just fine. Luke Bell, a former Methodist minister who converted to Orthodoxy and now works as a bricklayer, says he and other ministers are searching for permanence.

"We're tired of the shifting sands of opinion," Bell says. "We're tired of being relevant. We don't want to be worried about political correctness. We're looking for the rock."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)