Becoming Orthodox by Peter Gillquist

A review of Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith by Peter Gillquist (Chesterton, IN: Conciliar Press, 2009 [1989]).

During my pilgrimage to Orthodoxy, I came across several books by individuals tracing their own journeys to the Orthodox Church. As the title suggests, this volume falls into that genre. However, unlike most stories of this sort, it recounts not the journey of a single person but of an entire network of churches (about 2,000 individuals and their pastors).

Gillquist begins by outlining the history of the house church network to which he belonged, describing how it emerged out of Campus Crusade for Christ. Having become Christians in the hothouse environment of student evangelicalism, many of these people found it hard to settle into North American church culture after graduation. Responding to their dissatisfaction with the fragmentation, sectarianism, and worldliness of Protestant Christianity, Gillquist and several other Campus Crusade workers resigned their posts and began to set up house churches that would try to recapture the church life they read about in the New Testament.

As Gillquist presents the story, a crucial stage in this development was the decision of the network leaders to embark on a series of studies working forward from the New Testament exploring doctrine, worship, and church history in order to answer the question of what a church that was trying to be faithful to the New Testament should look like today. They spent a couple of years on these studies, eventually sharing their findings with each other at a retreat in 1975. The outcome was that this network of evangelical house churches metamorphosed into a denomination that was orthodox in doctrine (i.e. adhering to the ecumenical creeds), liturgical in worship, and conciliar and episcopal in structure. In early January 1979 the leaders of the network ordained themselves as bishops and renamed the network, the Evangelical Orthodox Church.

He picks up the story again in Part III, tracing their early contacts with Orthodoxy in the late 1970s. Alexander Schmemann is singled out as a particularly important influence on them at this time. By the mid 1980s they felt ready to approach the Ecumenical Patriarch and ‘seek his guidance as to how we should enter the Church’. This they did in June 1985 with the support of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America. What happened next, he describes as ‘Byzantine intrigue’. As they were en route to Istanbul, Archbishop Iakovos advised them to abandon their trip, and when they arrived the Ecumenical Patriarch refused to receive them. To be fair to Constantinople, Orthodox sources have pointed out that they were uneasy with the EOC’s strongly hierarchical approach to authority and were unwilling to allow the married leaders of the EOC to continue as bishops (episcopal celibacy is a longstanding tradition within Orthodoxy).

That could easily have been the end of the story. Certainly, some of those involved in the abortive trip to Istanbul wanted no more to do with Orthodoxy. However, the majority decided to go through with an already planned meeting with the Patriarch of Antioch who was visiting the United States that summer. That meeting couldn’t have been more different. The Patriarch greeted them with enthusiasm and encouraged them to explore becoming part of the Antiochian Church. This they did, and the upshot was that they were accepted into the Antiochian Church in early 1987 on condition that their ‘bishops’ accept the status of priests or archpriests and that they receive further instruction in the Orthodox faith.

Sandwiched between the two historical sections of the book is a part entitled ‘Orthodoxy and the Bible’, addressing the aspects of Orthodoxy which, according to Gillquist, they found particularly challenging. The five chapters of this section deal in turn with tradition, liturgical worship, the use of ‘father’ as a title, the role of Mary, and the sign of the cross. I have to confess that I find this selection rather idiosyncratic to say the least. Certainly, it is not quite the list of issues that I would expect evangelicals to have with Orthodox theology and spirituality. In my experience, such a list would include the place of icons in prayer and worship, praying for the dead, veneration of the saints, the Orthodox understanding of the Christian life as a process of gradual divinization, Orthodox insistence on the importance human freedom and personal askesis (often misinterpreted by evangelicals as a doctrine of salvation by works), the Orthodox understanding of the Eucharist, and (among more sophisticated evangelicals) the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity since Gregory Palamas. None of these issues are tackled here, which severely limits the value of this section for commending Orthodoxy to evangelicals. It would have been interesting (and historically valuable) to have the working papers from their 1975 retreat included in this volume (perhaps as appendices).

In spite of that disappointment, this remains a readable account of an event that has had a major impact on the life of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in North America.