NEWS FEATURE: Faith journey: one man’s conversion to Orthodoxy

c. 1998 Religion News Service MENTOR, Ohio _ The Orthodox priest spoke fervently about his beliefs, using language that testified to his evangelical background. “Brothers and sisters, `worship’ is a verb,” the Rev. Peter Gillquist told the audience at a recent seminar at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Mentor. “It’s something we do. The quickest […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

MENTOR, Ohio _ The Orthodox priest spoke fervently about his beliefs, using language that testified to his evangelical background.

“Brothers and sisters, `worship’ is a verb,” the Rev. Peter Gillquist told the audience at a recent seminar at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Mentor. “It’s something we do. The quickest way to get your kids on the road to hell is to not go to church. We only come this way once. If you miss Jesus Christ, you miss it all.”


While it may not be the language usually associated with the ancient and seemingly unchanging style of Eastern Orthodoxy, it is a language more and more Orthodox believers find comfortable, for they’ve taken faith journeys similar to that of Gillquist.

In his book, “Becoming Orthodox” (Conciliar Press, $10.95), Gillquist wrote about his journey from being a director of Campus Crusade for Christ to becoming an Orthodox priest and leader of a conversion of a number of evangelical Protestants to Orthodoxy. They embraced the Orthodox faith after becoming convinced Orthodoxy is the church of the apostles of the New Testament.

“We are the `Old Time Religion,”’ he said. “Real old time.”

Gillquist told the story of his evolution from a child growing up in a Lutheran church and Swedish household in Minnesota to born-again Christian to evangelist to chairman of the Department of Missions and Evangelism of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. The archdiocese is based in Englewood, N.J. Gillquist lives in Santa Barbara, Calif.

During his junior year at the University of Minnesota, Gillquist met “these guys who talked about their personal love for Christ,” he said. “I was sure (Christianity) wasn’t a hoax. Christ changed human history. But I had never been able to connect as an adult.”

At one of their Bible studies, they discussed repentance and Jesus’ words: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”

“There are three things you can do when someone knocks at your door,” Gillquist said. “You can wait for the person to go away. You can go to the door and ask them to go away. Or you can invite him to come in. That night, Jesus Christ came to live in my life in a way I never experienced before.”

He continued his studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary and Wheaton College Graduate School. In the 1960s, he was a regional director for Campus Crusade for Christ, an international evangelical organization.


By the mid-1960s, Gillquist began wondering why so many college students made commitments to Christ, then “we’d never hear from them again. Not only weren’t we making a dent in the culture, it was getting worse. The early church made a difference.”

Seeking to learn why the early church succeeded where his movement fell short, Gillquist and his colleagues tracked the history of the New Testament church through the Bible and historic records to modern times. They were looking for the perfect church.

“The Protestant view is that after the last apostle died, the church went downhill and that by the fourth century, the church was in the toilet,” Gillquist said. “We fell in love with not just the first-century church. We fell in love with the second-century church. When we got to 1054 A.D. in church history, we decided to go east.”

Gillquist explained that the church of Rome and the Eastern church parted ways in the 11th century. Perceiving the Eastern or Orthodox path to be the right way, he and his friends established the Evangelical Orthodox Church denomination in 1979. In 1987, they and their congregations were received into the Antiochian Orthodox Church fold.

Orthodoxy is attracting a growing number of converts from other Christian denominations who are drawn by the church’s “strict adherence to the Bible, preservation of apostolic doctrine and (the) beauty and scriptural foundation of worship,” Gillquist said.

There are some 5 million Orthodox Christians in the United States. The Antiochian branch of Orthodoxy has 500,000 members in 225 parishes in the United States and Canada. Thirty-five percent of them are converts, as are more than half the clergy, according to church officials.


Gillquist said that 80 percent of new converts in his diocese come from a charismatic or evangelical background. The rest are from a liturgical background such as Episcopal, Roman Catholic and Lutheran.

Those who convert usually make the decision after extensive study and getting over the culture shock, Gillquist said. When he first attended an Orthodox service, “I didn’t like the clothes the priest wore. I didn’t like that he sang the liturgy. All the incense. All the icons.”

As he learned the reasons for each ritual, he became more comfortable with the Orthodox form of worship.

But the heart of the evangelist continues to beat in Gillquist, who witnesses to strangers on airplanes.

“In every country the Orthodox faith has gone, it has become the faith of that country,” he said. “Maybe one day in America, Orthodoxy will become the faith of the country.”

DEA END BARANICK

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