Letter from the Editor:

Crossing Cultures

NICK TABOR

Sometime in the late-1930s, Robert Royster (whom we now remember as Archbishop Dmitri) and his older sister, Virginia, visited a Greek Orthodox parish for the first time. They were teenagers, raised as Baptists; and this was in Dallas, their hometown—a place where Eastern Christianity did not have a major presence. They had learned about the faith from a coffee-table book on world religions.

There’s no record of what that visit was like, but the pair must have gotten strange looks. At the time it was nearly unheard for Americans to join the Orthodox Church, except in the context of marriage. Even so, the siblings kept attending. They had to wait two years for a chance to speak with the bishop, when he visited from New York, and ask to be received into the Church. He probed them about why they wanted to join, but ultimately gave permission. They were received in 1941. 

In the 1950s, the siblings established a mission parish with services in English. Royster became a priest, then a bishop. And over the decades that followed, he played a key role in the OCA’s development, working with Rev. George Gladky and others to build up the Diocese of the South.

Now, almost a century after that first visit, the Orthodox situation in the US is unimaginably different. Not only is it fairly normal for Americans to convert, but during these last few years, parishes have been experiencing a growth spurt unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It has become normal to hear about communities receiving 20 or 30 new converts at a time. The available data is spotty, but one recent survey (conducted by the recently founded St. Constantine College, in Houston), involving 20 parishes and spanning half a dozen jurisdictions and 15 states, found that conversion numbers in 2022 were up 78% from 2019. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they haven’t gone down since then.

The mainstream press has taken notice. The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and NPR have all published or broadcast recent stories on this explosion of interest in our faith.

What we should make of all this growth, and how we ought to respond, are not necessarily simple questions. For this issue of Jacob’s Well, we invited our contributors to reflect on them from a range of perspectives.

For some of us, the obvious reaction is to celebrate. After all, if thousands of people are being received, by baptism or chrismation, it means they’re encountering Christ in the Eucharist and other sacraments. They’re also participating in the broader liturgical life of the Church, which has the ability to transform us, however slowly—to help us overcome our egos and our selfish instincts.

This growth we’re seeing also does honor to the Roysters and others from their generation. Here we could also mention clerics like Kallistos Ware, Anthony Bloom, and Alexander Schmemann, and lay scholars like Elisabeth Behr-Siegel, Olivier Clement, and Al Raboteau. Each devoted part of their careers to bringing Orthodoxy more fully into the world of the Christian West. This surge in conversions would be hard to imagine without the work they did together.

Moreover, growth in the church is sure to bring benefits to our existing Orthodox community. Already for the past decade or so, Orthodox liturgical music in the US has been flourishing in a new way, and many of our best composers, including Benedict Sheehan and nazo zakkak, are either converts or children of converts. For this issue, Mother Katherine Weston, who has written exquisite settings of many Orthodox hymns, imbuing them with the musical influence of African American spirituals, joined us for an interview, where she reflected on the state of American Orthodox music. Parishioners are “looking for authentic cultural roots here,” she said, “so we can make a cultural offering to Christ from the collective heritage He has given us.” We could point to similar examples in iconography, architecture, and scholarship. 

On the other hand, many of us who have been in this world for years can’t help but feel skeptical—if not a bit dour—when we hear about these mass conversions. Even if we were received as adults ourselves, we might harbor doubts about other newcomers. 

There are valid concerns, for instance, about the internet and how it affects new members as they learn about the faith. In an essay he wrote late in life, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware said he was glad his initial contact with the Orthodox Church—which for him, too, occurred in his teens, when he wandered into a vespers service in London—happened in the context of worship. “I encountered the Orthodox Church not as a theory or an ideology,” he wrote, “but as a concrete and specific fact, as a worshiping presence.” For better or worse, that experience is no longer the norm. Anecdotally, it seems most inquirers these days are learning about Orthodoxy online, and there’s a danger of them forming misguided ideas about the faith before they ever set foot in a parish—ideas that can be hard to shake later. Priests can find themselves competing with YouTube personalities during the catechism process.

In a penetrating essay in this issue, Steve Christoforou demonstrates that the internet has upended norms of church life in ways even more radical than we might realize. “For what might be the first time in Church history,” he writes, “‘growth’ is being attributed not to the witness of the saints, nor to the grace-filled words of holy people transformed in Christ, but to the ability of certain people to attract attention on platforms that are designed to spread the vile and vainglorious.” (However, Christoforou ends on a hopeful note, acknowledging that the Lord can use the internet to draw people to Himself in an authentic way.)

But if some longtime parishioners feel wary about the newcomers, this unease might also be rooted in something broader and more vague: we sense that large-scale growth will inevitably change our internal culture, making it more American, in ways we might not prefer.

In a 2017 lecture on Orthodoxy in America, the writer David Bentley Hart suggested this was inevitable. “Every act of conversion,” he said, “involves a reciprocal transformation, a mutual act of appropriation.” In other words, converts always change the faith they’re converting to. The Orthodox Study Bible, for instance, was designed by former evangelicals, and was inspired by the “study Bibles” that have been a fixture in Protestant culture for decades. And Ancient Faith Radio was launched by John Maddex, an Orthodox convert who had previously worked as a broadcast manager at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Of course, many Orthodox Christians have found both of those resources immensely helpful. But the point is that they’re examples of converts refashioning elements of the faith in the image of what they’re used to.

If some of us feel uneasy about the prospect of cultural change, that shouldn’t be hard to understand. In a way, there’s nothing more Orthodox than wanting things to stay the same. However, we have to remember that the Church is not an exclusive club that exists only for the benefit of its current members. Hart’s lecture refers to the “original sin of Orthodox culture”: its repeated failures to “detach the universal mission of the church from the local allegiances and worldly concerns of nations and ethnic groups.” 

In this issue of Jacob’s Well, literary scholar Dn. Justin Jackson develops this point further, in an essay that centers on the book of Exodus (but has clear implications for our own time). American Orthodoxy began with “the marginalized, the immigrant, those bringing this foreign Christianity to these shores,” Jackson writes. “But also, after time, the immigrant Orthodox Church needed to understand fully what it was bringing to the Americas: the Church. Do we wish it to grow and to witness Christ’s love of this people? If so, then that’s going to take ‘outsiders.’” 

As Jackson is hinting here, it’s easy to feel snobbish toward outsiders, even for those of us who converted to the faith and have no ethnic Orthodox ties. His words are a helpful reminder to guard ourselves against it.

More broadly, even if it’s an Orthodox impulse to resist change on most fronts, change has nevertheless been a constant in ecclesial history. As Hart has argued elsewhere, the Nicene Creed itself represented a radical innovation when it was introduced in the fourth century. It was a bold interpretation of the scriptures and the earlier Christian tradition, though this is hard to see now, because we’re inclined to read everything that came before it through a Nicene lens. Building on this argument, Hart suggests that for a true, living tradition, “openness to an unanticipated future is no less necessary than fidelity to the past.”

But this is not to suggest we can’t take wrong turns. The influx we’re seeing of new members—particularly, it must be said, young men, who are sometimes driven to our parishes in part by confusion and alienation—puts a burden on us to make sure they’re properly catechized; and this is a process that requires entire communities, not only the priests. Steve Robinson speaks to this point in a beautiful essay in this issue, in which he also describes his own learning process during 26 years in the Church. 

Elsewhere in these pages, Joseph Kormos and Rev. Stephen Frase, co-chairs of the OCA’s Parish Development Forum, share results from a survey they conducted on parish growth, digging into some of the data and its implications. Rev. Paul Abernathy writes about the influx of Black converts at his parish in Pittsburgh, and considers the resonances between our faith and the African American spiritual tradition (a perennial theme in this journal). And the theology professor Rob Saler draws lessons from the Death to the World movement, which he calls an “influential vanguard for the ‘punks to monks’ aesthetic in Orthodoxy.” Saler treats Death to the World as a case study in how a secular subculture can be absorbed into ecclesial life, to galvanizing effect on the Church.

On one level, these essays add up to an argument for being cautiously optimistic, or even cheerful, about the current surge of newcomers (without being cavalier about the concerns it may raise). No doubt, Church growth is a messy process—but it’s not ours to contain or control. Our remit is more limited, as Robinson suggests in the kicker of his essay: “Now, go love some inquirers.”