Author: Jason Zahariades

As the last five years have passed, Debbie and I concluded that our family needed something more than our home church. While we love our home group and have no desire to end the friendships, fellowship and discussions, we needed some sort of time-tested faith-community that would train us to into the incarnational life we observe in the Bible. However, I simply don’t have the time, energy or intelligence to create something new only to discover in several years, especially at the cost of our children’s spirituality, that it didn’t work.

So while we currently remain committed to our home church, we knew we also needed to seek another Christian tradition for our family’s life and growth in Christ. The spectrum of choices seemed simple — Protestantism, Emerging Church, Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy. However, the only viable option for us was Eastern Orthodoxy. Why?

In a nutshell, the primary attraction I had to Eastern Orthodoxy was its soteriology. For most of my Christian life as a western Evangelical, I lived and operated under the judicial view of salvation that is common to western Christianity. In addition, I had fully embraced the reduced popular version that one hears in many witnessing opportunities. It goes something like this:

“God loves you and has created you for a wonderful purpose. However, humanity rebelled against God and therefore all people are born and live under the guilt of sin, compounded by their own disobedience. We are all guilty of breaking God’s Law and because the wages of sin is death, every human being is condemned to die. But because God loves you so much, he sent his son to die on your behalf. On the cross, Jesus took upon himself the wrath and judgment reserved for you. So if you accept Jesus’ gift simply by believing it in faith, you are forgiven of your of guilt and God now views you with Jesus’ righteousness.”

Or to reduce it further into how most western evangelicals think, salvation means we’re forgiven of all of our sins and as a result, we will go to heaven when we die. This viewpoint focuses primarily on the individual and treats salvation as an event and a commodity regardless of the actual state of one’s life.

After my episode of severe burnout several years ago and during my subsequent theological reconstruction, I abandoned the judicial metaphor as the primary understanding of sin and salvation. I realized that while God was lavish with his love and forgiveness, I really hadn’t been saved from much of anything. As a successful pastor who loved Jesus, I was virtually as broken and screwed up as a human being as I was when I first began following Christ. It was this very fact that forced me to realize that the biblical view of salvation was more organic, relational, and synergistic than legal.

Salvation is the process of restoration to what humans were created to be. Rather than sin being the breaking of God’s Law, the root of sin is the movement from being to non-being. Sin is the distortion of our humanity, of who we are supposed to be as God’s image on earth. This is the glory of which we all fall short. Rather than being truly human, sin makes us subhuman. So the problem of sin is much deadlier and sinister than mere guilt or disobedience. It is the warping, distortion and brokenness of who we are as human beings. It is the full corruption of my mind, heart, body, soul and relationships. In this light, I don’t just need to be forgiven. I need to be healed. I don’t just need assurance of admittance into heaven in the future. I need assurance that who I am in the present is being transformed out of my desperate and destructive subhuman existence and into the image and likeness of God as I was divinely intended to live.

So salvation isn’t primarily about guilt and forgiveness. It’s about brokenness and healing. It’s about delusion and illumination. It’s about distortion and transformation. It’s about death and life in the here-and-now. As a follower of Jesus, I truly cannot say, “I am saved.” I can only say, “I am being saved.”

Christ’s crucifixion has conquered evil, destroyed death, reconciled creation, redeemed the human nature, and released God’s forgiveness. In other words, Jesus has made God’s salvation completely available to all people. But as St Paul exhorts the Philippians, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Salvation is something that is worked out progressively with God.

So if salvation is a lifelong journey of healing transformation in God, then how am I actually being saved? I am being saved by participating in the life of God by communing with Jesus Christ within the life of his people. So not only is salvation an ongoing relationship with God by communing with and following Christ, but salvation is also an ongoing relationship with God’s people. There is no such thing as a private salvation. One can only experience “being saved” within a community of Christ’s followers.

It is very easy to read this and wonder, “Isn’t this works-righteousness?” or “Aren’t you now trying to earn salvation?” And the simple answer is “Not at all.” None of this is possible without God’s grace completely penetrating and affecting all of this. But while salvation is opposed to earning, it requires strenuous effort in synergy with God’s grace. Salvation must be worked out in cooperation with God. It is like going to physical therapy to recover from an accident or surgery. Healing requires effort on my part, not as an attempt to earn anything, but as the cooperative process with my doctors that moves me from my brokenness to my healing.

Or to switch metaphors, the process of salvation is like marriage. I am legally married. But that thought rarely enters my mind. Rather, the last 19 years of marriage have been learning to live in a cooperative relationship with Debbie so that she and I progressively become one. Again, it’s not about earning anything. It’s a relationship of becoming something other than what I was when I began, knowing that what I am becoming is far better than what I was.

What are we becoming? Our salvation is that we’re becoming God’s humanity as he intended. We’re not only being restored into the image of God but growing into the likeness of God. We are growing into the fullness and likeness of Jesus, who was true humanity as we were all intended to become. So we are becoming by grace what Christ is by nature — the very fullness of God in our humanity. And as we become this, the entire Creation is being sanctified. In other words, we are becoming the agents of God’s sanctification and renewal of creation. And this then moves the discussion to mission (but that will have to wait for another post).

So all of this discourse on salvation is simply to say that Eastern Orthodoxy is the only Christian tradition that has this beautiful soteriology built into its tradition, theology, ecclesiology and daily practice and life. We encounter it and live it in every formal service as a church and informal gathering as friends. It is woven into the very fabric of the Orthodox way of life.

While Mark and I have taught this soteriology and our families have tried to live in it all the way back to our time at the Vineyard, through our association with the Emerging Church, and within our experience as a home church, it has only been during the last five months in an Orthodox parish that we have found the natural environment in which this salvation can be fully lived and experienced.

As Mark mentioned in his post, we finally feel at home.

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So we left the evangelical church. Several of us began meeting at Mark and Barbara’s home. Mark and I, disillusioned by the consumerist model of church, desired to create a new kind of community. We wanted this community to be organic, not requiring a building or staff. We wanted this community to avoid becoming meeting-centric. Our hope was that our times together would supplement each member’s personal apprenticeship to Jesus. We didn’t want our members to rely on any structure, program, system or staff in their relationship with Christ. We wanted to purge ourselves from the contemporary Christian ethos of viewing the church as the organization that provides for my spiritual needs. It was out of this vision that I wrote the article “Detoxing from church.” In hindsight, I wished I had entitled it “Detoxing from Consumer church,” since I was actually critiquing the consumerist model of the evangelical church.

We also began acquainting ourselves with the fledgling Emerging Church. Through blogs and relational networks, we discovered others who were leaving the consumerist evangelical church with the hope of developing alternative forms of Christian community. We were encouraged by people with similar stories, who were paving the ecclesiological path into the future. 

Our group developed three simple values — the inward journey, the outward journey and the corporate journey. We hoped to become a community that focused on being formational, missional, and communal. We wanted to be apprentices, becoming like Jesus from the inside-out. We wanted to become ambassadors, living like Jesus in the world. And we wanted to become apprentices and ambassadors by how we lived and worshipped together. One of the statements we adopted was “To embody, demonstrate and announce the fullness of Christ.” Simply put, we wanted to be incarnational. We hoped to learn how to be Jesus’ actual body, the continuing incarnation on earth. Just as Jesus embodied Yahweh, we desired to be sent as Jesus was sent (John 20:21). In fact, we embraced an Orthodox saying, “Becoming by grace what Christ is by nature.”

So our group met, lived, and loved together. We read books together, studied Scripture together, and ate together. At this time, our home church is five years old. I am forever grateful for the experience. After fourteen years of professional ministry, I relearned how to have substantial friendships completely free from any pastoral role. I was also free to engage in theological exploration and discovery that I could not have done on staff at my previous church. And most importantly, our group has shown my family love in very rich and meaningful ways. 

Yet, during these past five years, I have learned several lessons that ultimately turned my gaze toward Eastern Orthodoxy.

I quickly learned that while spiritual formation requires personal responsibility and effort, it is a communal endeavor. During our home church’s first couple of years, even though I knew spiritual formation requires community, I think I overemphasized the individual aspect. To our members, I continued to liken spiritual formation to individual athletic training — one needs to train as an individual in order to be like Jesus and live his kind of life just as one needs to train in order to be a great basketball player. 

However, I learned that just as very few people are capable of mastering a sport simply by training on their own, very few people are capable of mastering God’s life by training on their own. Spiritual formation is a team sport. The “one another” exhortations in the New Testament alone make that clear. Spiritual formation must be learned, practiced and lived at the corporate level. The community’s experience of formation is not supplemental, but foundational to each member’s formation.

This became especially evident as Debbie and I discussed our children’s formation. We obviously wouldn’t expect our kids to train into spiritual formation on their own. They needed guidance from us as parents, which we gladly accepted. But we also realized that they needed some sort of structure to help them experience formation within a community. They needed to worship, pray, study and fellowship in a community. We also felt that they needed formational moments like youth camp and service projects. So after a couple of years as a home church, Debbie and I decided that our family would also attend an evangelical church in order to provide community and structure for our kids. Unfortunately, it got to the point that once a week, we were driving our two younger kids to one church for their children’s program and our two older kids to a church in a different city for their youth program. That got old quick.

In our home church, we knew we needed some sort of structure during our community gatherings to help us be formational, missional and communal. Gathering only to eat, study and talk was meaningful, but also lacked something essential. Specifically, we needed worship and prayer. But I didn’t want us to fall back into singing contemporary worship songs that contained shallow, mishmash theology. Nor did I want us to digress into prayer meetings that were filled with extemporaneous and usually forced and shallow prayers. Communal worship and prayer needed to be deeper in order to be formational.

At first, this was difficult to admit. Because the consumerist structure that we had left was so destructive, I clung vehemently to the concept of a community with very limited structure. And we floundered. We needed structure to steer us as a community into formational worship and prayer. But I dreaded the idea of creating a system upon which we would develop an unhealthy dependence as we had done in the consumer model. Yet, we couldn’t continue without structure. We decided we needed some form of liturgy to guide us.

Since none of us came from any liturgical tradition, we began exploring liturgical components from a variety of Christian traditions. We used the Divine Hours. We used Lectio Divina. We used the Common Book of Prayers. We incorporated Eastern Orthodox prayers. We lit candles. We read from the Revised Common Lectionary. We even created our own prayers. 

And we discovered two things. First, creating liturgy requires a lot of energy and time, something we didn’t have.  Also, this kind of endeavor creates a liturgy that is discontinuous and jumbled. While sometimes meaningful at a personal level, our efforts failed to create a regular structure that supported a formational life. And, quite frankly, I’m simply not smart enough to create a cohesive liturgy every single week. Others in the Emerging Church were developing liturgy, but the results either seemed relevant only to the life of that local community or were pieced together from various sources like we had experienced. We needed something cohesive that was larger than our local context and had a time-proven record of supporting spiritual formation. 

Our liturgical exploration also made us aware to the need for sacraments. We knew Jesus’ Incarnation redeems all of creation and the entire world is filled with his presence. We realized that formation occurs by living one’s whole life with Jesus’ presence in the world. But learning to experience his presence in the world requires special moments of his presence as a community. One cannot experience the entire world as a sacrament without actual sacraments. One cannot view the entire world as holy and filled with Christ’s presence without having special moments that are holy and filled with Christ’s presence. The logical conclusion of Christ’s Incarnation is a sacramental life. But as Protestants, our only regular sacrament was communion. But was it only symbolic or something more? Unable to agree, we left it at “to each his or her own.”

Bottom-line, over the last five years, I have learned that an incarnational life — being formational, missional, and communal — must be supported within a community that has effectively practiced time-proven and life-giving liturgy and sacraments. My family and I need this kind of community, but where would we find it? Our simple non-Protestant choices were Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, or Eastern Orthodoxy. While certain aspects of Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism were attractive, their historical roots as well as contemporary issues dissuaded me from leading my family in either of those directions. Also, I had become very attracted to Eastern Orthodox theology over the last several years and had become convinced that they had preserved the biblical Gospel better than other traditions. I was surprised upon reflection that I agreed more with Orthodox theology than I did with Protestant theology. 

So through David’s encouragement, Debbie and I decided in late 2007 to give our family twelve months to explore Eastern Orthodoxy in a parish close to our home.

To be continued…

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve always been searching, even when I didn’t have words to express what I was looking for. Meeting Jesus and becoming his apprentice answered the deepest parts of my questing heart. And following God’s calling into professional ministry for over fourteen years provided wonderful opportunities to fulfill that search.

Yet through it all, I have always felt God calling me to journey deeper and to explore his kingdom. So here I am, standing on the threshold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Ironically, all of my adult education and professional experience have brought me to this place — a place where all of my adult education and professional experience are virtually obsolete and irrelevant. And while that prospect has its own issues to deal with, I have a substantial peace about the next steps. Simply put, I believe God has journeyed with me and shaped me so that I could be right here.

When I first committed to following Jesus, I told him I would go wherever he led me. And if that means following him into a place where everything I’ve learned and worked for must be laid aside, then it is a very simple price to pay in order to journey with him further into his life and likeness.

So how did I get here? 

As an associate pastor in a small Vineyard church, I had fully embraced the business model of running a church. Inspired by men like John Maxwell, Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, I strained to create an efficient and effective Christian organization. I spent most of my waking hours trying to design and implement systems for assimilating, training, mobilizing, and reaching people, especially leaders. And on a personal level, I was doing everything I counseled others to do in order to grow as Christians — Sunday worship attendance, small group attendance, tithing, evangelism, daily quiet time, teaching Sunday school, reading the Bible in a year, serving in ministries, praying for people, practicing spiritual gifts and more. 

And yet, something was terribly wrong. I was always stressed, frustrated, and angry. I was consuming caffeine non-stop and taking Tylenol like candy for my constant headaches. The worst thing was how I had learned to create a happy “ministry” exterior to cover up this internal mess. I could be smiling and joking with someone that I was fuming over and he would never know it.

And then I crashed. I had a burnout crisis that is still very vivid in my memory after all of these years. The despair and self-loathing I felt at that moment still haunts me.

I crawled away from that moment completely broken. I could do only one thing — cling to Jesus. I spent most mornings in a local coffee shop just resting in Jesus’ presence. I listened to worship music, prayed, read Scripture and journaled. But these were no longer activities I did to grow as a Christian. They became communion with Jesus. I quickly became aware that I had spent years amassing Bible knowledge, developing organizational skills, and engaging in Christian activities with very little, if any, inward transformation into Christ’s likeness.

I learned painfully that the system one uses is designed to produce the results one experiences. In other words, my broken inner life was the direct result of how I lived my life as a Christian and a pastor. It was because of how I lived my life, not despite it, that I was in such a mess. My theology and my practices were broken. And simply trying to “do better” or “try harder” would ultimately create the same results.

So my focus changed to following Jesus into his likeness and allowing his ministry to be the natural outflow of his character and life within me. I would still do my job as a pastor, but everything began changing. My theology began changing as I realized that virtually every aspect — christology, bibliology, soteriology, eschatology, missiology, cosmology — was distorted and therefore contributed to my ill health. This in turn changed my teaching and preaching. And it changed how I worked as a pastor. I could still do my job, but how I did it and why I did it had changed. Over time I began to sense health.

And over time I began to sense something else.

I was becoming a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I was no longer fitting in the church I helped build and pastor. The lasting changes I was experiencing on a personal level and trying to realize on a corporate level would require a hugely different church paradigm in order to see them reproduced within the congregation’s life. In the end, I probably created more disruption than was necessary.

Through a series of circumstances, God orchestrated my departure for the sake of my health as well as the church’s. Mark, who was also on staff with me at the Vineyard, left as well. We, and a few families close to us, received the leadership’s blessing to go and try to develop something new, a missional community.

To be continued…

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After my last post on Fr Stephen’s post, “An Orthodox Hermeneutic,” I had another thought regarding my pride and biblical interpretation. When I examine Orthodox interpretation of Scripture, not only must I hold my personal biblical interpretations in light of 2000 years of Living Tradition, but I must also hold it in light of Orthodoxy’s 2000-year ability to maintain the true Gospel.

As an evangelical Protestant and then in the last several years of association with the Emerging Church, we talked non-stop about recovering and redefining the Gospel. For various reasons offered by really smart people, it is clear that the Gospel in western Christianity has become overly-simplified, distorted or completely replaced with something else.

This isn’t true of Orthodoxy. I’ve noticed it in my reading of Orthodox theology and have now experienced it firsthand, especially during Lent and Holy Week. And these services, with their liturgy and prayers, are centuries old. They have been faithfully and unwaveringly helping Jesus’ followers enter and live in the Gospel for hundreds and hundreds of years. As much as I enjoy my theological musing and study, I cannot make that claim about my biblical interpretations. So when my doctrines rub up against Orthodox doctrines, I must learn to comply humbly.

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I awoke this morning and sat on the couch for a few moments, attempting to recollect my thoughts and feelings of the past week. Do you know that exhausted, almost numb feeling you have the day after a momentous event like a wedding, or birth, or funeral? You know, those events when your life is virtually consumed for days, if not weeks; where every waking moment and your entire schedule is completely altered in preparation for that event. And then you wake up the morning after the event and realize in the midst of your quiet fatigue that your life, as you knew it, has been changed forever.

That’s how I feel right now.

In over twenty years as a Christian, I have never been so completely immersed in Jesus’ journey to the cross and empty tomb. And I have tried. In the past, I’ve fasted for Lent. I’ve attended Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Services. I’ve used resources to help me understand the culture and theology around these historical events as well as reflect upon and pray through this pivotal moment in creation’s history. And many times I’ve had some wonderful and personally meaningful Easters. 

But nothing I have done over two decades can even compare to what our family experienced this week. In fact, until this week, I would never have known that such an experience was possible. Sitting here on this side of my first Pascha, I feel like we actually journeyed with Jesus from Bethany where he raised Lazarus from the dead. I feel like we walked through the gates of Jerusalem with him to the cries of “Hosanna.” I feel like we stumbled back out of the city walls to the horror of the cross and then to the despair of the sealed tomb. I feel like we were with the first women as they discovered the terrifying and miraculous truth that he had risen. Even as I write this, tears are welling up again. What has previously been words on a page or scenes in a movie has become very real.

I’m not sure if I can fully express it in words, but my entire being feels like the events of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection actually happened this week and I was a part of it. I was there at the cross hearing the nails being pounded. I was there at his sealed tomb grieving the loss of my friend. I was there in Hades witnessing the ultimate vanquishing of death. I was there at the empty tomb awestruck at the impossible reality that he was alive. And all of this resonating with the truth that Jesus has conquered death by death.

And I was there not by some Hollywood-like realistic re-creation of historical events or by somehow reading and thinking my way into what those events may have been like. I was there through the power of the Holy Spirit as God’s Church, invoking its two thousand years of Living Tradition, created a fully immersive environment of worship, prayer, Scripture, liturgy, symbol, theology, wisdom and community that made all of this Real to me and made me Real for it. I experienced powerfully how the Church’s Living Tradition is truly the life of Christ.

And now I sit. My heart is full. My mind is reeling. My body is exhausted. My eyes burn from both fatigue and tears. And my spirit is joyful at the prospect of living in and with a community whose very identity and life resounds with the cry, “Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!”

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On the first three evenings of Holy Week, we participate in the Bridegroom Matins. These services echo the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25:1-13. The celebrations of this past weekend — Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday — were foretastes of the joy that awaits us at Pascha. They were bright and joyful celebrations. But through Holy Week, we once again enter a somber time. The constant theme through this week flows right from Jesus’ mouth in Matthew 25:13, “Keep watch.” The Christ the Bridegroom is coming, so keep vigil.

Keeping a vigil can often be viewed as a passive activity. Yet, it is anything but passive. It is attentive repentance and watchfulness. It is actively preparing a place for Christ the Bridegroom in the internal bridal chamber of our hearts.

One of the things that has drawn me to Eastern Orthodoxy is their balanced understanding of “missional,” although they probably would never use that word. In my opinion, many of the discussions I’ve read regarding “missional” lean too far on what I would call “missional activity” rather than on what I would call “missional being.” As valid as most of this missional activity is, Jesus calls his followers to something much deeper than that. He calls them to keep vigil. 

In John 20:21, Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” Jesus fulfilled his part in the Father’s mission on earth. But the mission continues until Christ’s return. So Jesus passes the missional baton very carefully. We participate in our part of God’s mission just like Jesus participated in his — by being the embodied fullness, life and presence of God on earth. That means we must be formed into Christ’s likeness so that, like Christ, we too can be God’s fullness, life and presence on earth. In other words, missional activity must flow from missional being. We must be Christ’s likeness so that we may cooperate with Christ in God’s mission.

So mission is first and foremost formation into Christ’s likeness. While journeying into the formation into Christ’s likeness, the Orthodox Church emphasizes something even deeper than formation — repentance. Repentance is the very core of living in God’s kingdom. We see this in Jesus’ proclamation in Mark 1:14-15:

“After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!'”

These words are more than instruction about how to enter God’s kingdom. They reveal how one breathes and lives moment-by-moment in God’s kingdom. Repent and believe. Repent and believe. Repent and believe.

So to pull all the loose strings of this post together, keeping vigil — actively preparing our internal bridal chamber for Christ the Bridegroom through training into repentance and therefore being formed into Christ’s likeness — is mission. Keeping vigil is our mission. A life of continual “repent and believe” forms us into Christ’s likeness so we may truly be sent as he was sent. This is how we are saved and in turn become saving.

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Today, I experienced an interesting moment of convergence. Last night we spent time in our home group discussing the nature of sin. We had talked about how the Western Christian concept of sin as breaking a Law and thereby punishable by death was an incorrect perspective. Rather, the biblical idea of sin is that it is our failure to be truly human as God intended — to live in communion with God and then to be his image to the rest of creation. Sin is our failure to do this and the resulting death we experience is within the very fabric of our being, thus breaking and corrupting everything we touch.

Last night’s conversation was fresh in my mind this afternoon as I listened to a recent podcast by Frederica Mathewes-Green while driving home from work on the 605 Freeway. The title of the podcast was “Sin As Pollution.” In the podcast, Frederica was describing the effects of sin by reading part of a monologue by Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame.

The monologue was in the form of a letter written by Jim, a man who was waiting on his front yard to be picked up by a woman from work with whom he was going to attend a conference and with whom he was tempted to begin an affair.

As Jim is waiting to be picked up by this woman, he waxes reflective about the repercussion of his potential affair. As he looks down the street at his neighbors’ homes, Jim realizes that his infidelity will pollute many lives. He states, “Although I thought my sins would be secret, they would be no more secret than an earthquake.” His reflections climax with this powerful and moving image, “When my wife and I scream in senseless anger, blocks away, a little girl we do not know, spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth.”

And as I listened to Frederica read this line, on the other side of the freeway, a white Ford Expedition streaked by being pursued by a train of police cars with lights flashing and sirens screaming. I saw sin’s pollution firsthand. There were hundreds of drivers this afternoon on the southbound 605. And the driver, trying to escape the police and probably the consequences of his sin, was polluting everyone around him in potentially harmful and dangerous ways. I hoped and prayed that this high-speed pursuit would end safely and peacefully; hoping and praying that the driver’s sins would not intersect and destroy someone else’s life on that freeway.

Next week, we observe Holy Week for the Eastern Orthodox Church. The last several weeks have been a communal journey to the cross that has been filled with stories, Scriptures, songs, fasting and prayers with a common theme — “Lord, have mercy.”

May the Lord have mercy on my sins, on our sins, on the world’s sins. May he trample death through death. May he bring the life of God that we so desperately need. And may he fully fashion us into the image of God, as embodied in his own life, so that we will be ultimately free from sin.

 Listen to Frederica’s podcast, “Sin As Pollution.”

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Now that the migration of my blog from TypePad to WordPress is complete, I’m beginning to think through the content for a new series that will be called something like “Evangelical to Emerging Church to Eastern Orthodoxy.” I’m hoping to share in this series how a typical Evangelical pastor like myself could leave the local church, write an article called “Detoxing from church” (notice the small “c”), become affiliated with the Emerging Church and, within about five years, find himself on the threshold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In many ways, this series will be the sequel to “Detoxing from church” that I’ve been promising myself to write for the last couple of years called “Rehabbing to Church” (notice the capital “C”). I’m hoping to share how my search for a church that is missional, incarnational, communal, liturgical, sacramental and historical find its fullest, although not perfect, expression in Eastern Orthodoxy. I’m also hoping to share the issues that I’ve found difficult to embrace during this journey as well.

But in the meantime, I’d like to leave you with something our priest said tonight at Vespers. This past week, during the Great Confession of Repentance , we heard the amazing and moving story of Mary of Egypt. While Easter has come and gone for Western Christianity, Easter for Eastern Orthodoxy isn’t until April 27. So Fr Patrick encouraged us to look to the saints as we experience our frailty and even despair during the last couple of weeks of Lent. While sharing this, Fr Patrick said, “The saints are truly human. It is we who are subhuman.”

This is an absolutely encouraging reminder! Jesus is the model of true humanity. He shows us what Adam and Eve and all of their descendants were to become as the image of God. Jesus then conquered death through death, bringing about our salvation. As 2 Peter 1:3-4 says:

“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”

This is our salvation. Jesus has made available participation in the divine nature (theosis ) for everyone. The saints are those who have followed Christ in theosis to the transformation of their being into the fullness and likeness of Christ as the true human being. And this great cloud of witnesses surrounds us as heaven and earth meet and encourage us forward into our own transformation into Christ’s fullness and likeness.

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If anyone reading this blog is interested in reading some introductory essays to Eastern Orthodoxy, click HERE to go to a resource page of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese.

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I am truly a beginner to Eastern Orthodoxy, which quite frankly is very humbling. While I conceptually grasp some of the doctrines, Orthodoxy is much more than just a theological shift. In Orthodoxy, if I understand it correctly, the Church’s theology, worship and life all go together. So I probably won’t really get an adequate feel for Orthodoxy until my family and I join a parish.But since that won’t happen for about another month at least, I continue to learn through reading and listening. So I wanted to share an Orthodox resource that I have found helpful. It’s the blog and podcast by Father Stephen. You can read his blog HERE and you can listen to his podcast HERE. Also, if you click THIS LINK, it will subscribe you to his podcast via iTunes.Also, click HERE to hear a great conversation with Dr. Eve Tibbs from Fuller Seminary about the differences between the Christian East and West.Enjoy!

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