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Published by the
British
Antiochian Orthodox Deanery,
July 2004
Mission Accomplished
David Hudson
Not long after I arrived in Romania as an
evangelical missionary in 1993, a Baptist pastor
with whom I was working said to me, "You think you
came to Romania to do something for God, but
perhaps He wants to do something for you".
It was true that I was on a pilgrimage that had
started when I was a child with an unusual thirst
for spiritual things, but I really did not expect
my searching to come to an end in Romania.
I was raised in the conservative Wesleyan
movement, and baptized at the age of 8. Even as a
child I was willing to stand alone for my
religious convictions, and I strove to live a
consistent Christian life. I learned to play the
piano while in Junior High, and soon my whole
identity was wrapped up in music ministry.
There was a very great emphasis on both inward and
outward holiness in the churches of my youth, but
I became disillusioned as a Bible College student,
when I realized (1) that the "entire
sanctification" we expected to receive
instantaneously wasn’t working, not only in me,
but even in church leaders I admired, and (2) that
I was in a religious ghetto and needed to find the
true Church. I found my way into the Reformed
faith, which seemed to be the answer. No
shortcuts, no superficial claims of sinlessness,
lots of "Christian liberty", and whatever couldn’t
be explained otherwise was swept up into the
mighty and mysterious sovereignty of God. The fact
that it was a more intellectual faith also
appealed to me at the time, as I was in the
process of "upward mobilization".
Through marriage, however, I became part of the
leadership of an independent evangelical
congregation where "my" theology was tolerated, as
long as it didn’t get in the way of the mission of
our growing church. Everything was subservient to
evangelism, everything was user-friendly, the
visitor was king, and our still conservative
Christianity was effectively marketed to the
upwardly mobile that we considered our "target
group". My music ministry took a secondary place
as I took on more administrative responsibility,
eventually serving as Executive Pastor.
All the activity and success with its unending
pressure took a toll on our souls, and we felt
that something was missing in all this. Going into
midlife, we decided to break with this high paced,
all-consuming ministry enterprise and to go for a
second career in missions. I had dreamed of music
ministry in Europe for a long time, and we decided
this was the time. After a period of re-training
and support raising, we were off to the university
city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Mary and I, and our
three daughters, Heidi, Heather, and Hannah.
Despite some difficult challenges, we adapted well
and were thriving after a few years. We learned
the language, the girls were in public schools,
and we even bought an apartment with the intention
of staying long term. We were working with Baptist
churches in worship renewal, especially in the
area of music, and even beginning to compose some
well-received songs in Romanian.
Then our whole life was turned upside down by
Orthodoxy, as devastating as any tornado that ever
hit Kansas.
I had nothing against Orthodoxy when I came as an
evangelical missionary to a mostly Orthodox
country. I didn’t see myself as a threat or
competition to the majority faith. I did believe
that the Orthodox Church, like older churches in
general, was mostly dead, but I wanted to believe
that there was some life and renewal in it. With
pluralistic open-mindedness, I set about to find
out what there was in Orthodoxy that was good,
assuming that the roots of Romanian evangelicalism
must be in Romanian Orthodoxy.
By coincidence, I had read "Becoming Orthodox"
while in missionary training, and was impressed by
what I read. But I didn’t see much in Romania that
resembled Peter Gilquist’s glowing presentation.
Orthodoxy seemed tired, stale, superficial,
superstitious, frightfully formal, or, as one
person commented, "feudal". Compromise and
corruption, and a museum-like fixation with the
past, were the impressions I got from the
non-Orthodox people I talked with. The services in
the Cathedral were like an opera without a plot,
and it didn’t seem to matter whether you could
follow what was going on. It was light years from
the overhead projectors and didactic emphasis of
churches I had been involved in! In another
downtown church, where I would duck in to pray
occasionally, people just seemed to come and go
all through the service -- if you could call it
that -- much in the way that the priest appeared
and disappeared all the time behind the curtain in
the iconostasis. The chanter seemed somewhere
between bored and distracted; it was routine to
him. Why didn’t anyone seem to be interested in
communicating anything to the visitor?
As one Romanian duhovnic recently said to me, it
is truly a miracle that we became Orthodox in
Romania. Absolutely no one did anything whatever
to convert us.
Convinced that there had to be more to Orthodoxy,
I kept wanting to get to the bottom of this
mystery, even though I was too busy to give it a
lot of time. The opportunity came at last to get
to know a priest who was "evangelical", just what
I was looking for. He was young, still finishing
seminary, and in his fourth year of pastoring way
out in a tumble-down village. Fr. Iustinian had
been raised in a pious Orthodox home and had taken
a stand for his faith under communism as a
teenager, and now was in the priesthood. Not
nominal or superficial in his faith, he was
convinced of the claims that I had read about in
Gilquist (and now others). After some discussion,
I asked him to celebrate a Divine Liturgy in such
a way that I could understand it. He took me into
the Holy Altar, explained as much as necessary,
allowing me to watch every action and hear every
prayer. That day, in early May of 1995, I was
"smitten" with Orthodoxy. I knew I had come into
contact with a grace and a power and a holiness
that I had never experienced before. It was
unexpected. It was compelling.
What to do? Our missionary career was just taking
off, and our family was just feeling settled after
the traumas of uprooting, relocating,
enculturation, etc. We were fulfilled and excited
about the future. I didn’t even dare to speak to
my wife about it, as I knew this would mean an
upheaval in our lives — one too many. Just at that
time, we were scheduled for a summer furlough in
the U.S. As we came back, I was haunted by
Orthodoxy, and felt compelled to take steps to
pursue it. And yet, everything we had worked for
and suffered for as a family was on the line. When
my wife started to catch on, she warned me that
she didn’t think the girls could take this. But as
she began to study and pray about it, she, too,
began to see the reality of Orthodoxy.
After discussion with our mission society
leadership, we decided that we must resign in
order to pursue our newfound (and fragile)
discovery. By mid-summer of 1995, we were
embroiled in a heartrending conflict with loved
ones, who felt betrayed and cheated. By the end of
the summer, our "missionary career" was over and
we were sidelined and stranded. Although at that
time we came to the conclusion that we had been
mistaken about Orthodoxy, trust had been destroyed
and we were not able to resume our ministry.
We went into a year of "exile", working low paying
jobs to survive and trying to get our wits about
us. What had happened? What went wrong? How could
we have been derailed so easily after a lifetime
of Christian teaching and active ministry?
Orthodoxy had seemed so beautiful, so right. It
had put a new perspective on the unresolved
questions and unsatisfied hungers in our spiritual
lives. It was a new paradigm in which, suddenly,
everything fit into place with nothing left over
and pushed out of the doctrinal grid, as is the
case with the doctrinal systems we were familiar
with. It had seemed so true, so real, so much more
spiritual than anything we had known. Could it
really be a fantasy, as some said, or an
abomination, as others said?
We tried to pick up the pieces and get on with our
lives. The girls were devastated, and their trust
in us and others was deeply shaken. We felt
paralyzed and lost. We had seen too much new light
to go back to our former way of being Christians.
We could not really be evangelicals anymore, and
since we could not be Orthodox either, we tried to
forge our own way, combining the best of both. It
was a desperate attempt to make sense of things
and to satisfy our frustrated thirst for
Orthodoxy.
In that state of mind, we returned to Romania on
our own after our "year in exile". It seemed we
had to, for several reasons. We had left our
apartment, car, and belongings in limbo. We had
left our friends and colleagues without good-byes
or explanations. Our oldest daughter, Heidi, was
going to enter the University of Cluj, and so we
pulled ourselves together and mustered our fragile
faith and headed back. Of course the main dangling
question was Orthodoxy. We had to "return to the
scene of the crime", to convince ourselves one way
or another. We were graciously accepted back into
our former Baptist music ministry, and we tried to
make a go of working in a Protestant environment
with Orthodox ideals. Outwardly it was fairly
successful, but inwardly it was not satisfying. We
knew that we had to give Orthodoxy another chance,
this time a real chance.
So in the summer of 1997, we took the plunge and
started going to the Divine Liturgy on Sunday
mornings. Through Fr. Gordon Walker of St.
Ignatius Church in Franklin, Tennesee (whom we had
met in 1995), we became friends with American
converts who had also come to Cluj as
missionaries. Craig and Victoria Goodwin
introduced us to an Orthodox daily devotional
publication, DYNAMIS, a ministry of their home
church, St. George Cathedral in Wichita (see the
web site at http://dynamis.cjb.net). Using DYNAMIS
for our discipline of daily Bible study, things
began to fall into place; questions began to be
answered. We also began to overcome our
intimidation and to meet more priests and lay
people who impressed us with their truly Christian
hearts and lives. The Archbishop of Cluj,
BARTOLOMEU, granted us his blessing to begin
translating DYNAMIS into Romanian and publishing
it as a supplement to the Archdiocesan monthly.
Through all this, no one made any effort to
pressure us to convert, and even when we
eventually requested to be received into the
Church through Chrismation, no one was in a hurry.
By that time, it was we who were impatient!
Mary, Heidi, and I were chrismated on Pascha,
1998, in the village where Fr. Iustinian now
serves. What a peace settled over us when we
finally got out of the stormy seas of pluralistic,
idiosyncratic, and eclectic Christianity and into
the ark of the historic, original, continuing life
of the Church! Heather chose to remain active in
the Baptist high school and church, and having
faced such trauma together over our conversion, we
felt she needed the freedom to come to Orthodoxy
if and when she is ready herself. Hannah was
baptized a few weeks after Pascha of this year,
1999, just before turning twelve. It was a
beautiful service, and a wonderful testimony to
share with many who had taken their baptism for
granted. With this milestone, we feel we have come
a step deeper into the peace of the Church and
closed another chapter in our pilgrimage.
Conversion is not easy, either before or after
Chrismation. There is so much to learn, and it is
hard to go back to grammar school after a lifetime
of leadership. In a way, it is like emigrating to
a new country. You get your ticket and go; that is
like being catechumens. Eventually you get your
new citizenship; that is like Chrismation. But you
still have to adapt to the new culture and find
your place in it; that is like the ongoing process
of working out your salvation once you are in the
Church. Pat answers and instant solutions are not
part of true Christianity. But there is a real
opportunity for everyone who "strives for the
prize" to attain the riches that our new
Motherland offers us.
Does it mean that there are not stumbling blocks
and snares in the Orthodox Church? No. There are
obviously many citizens in this new land who
languish in spiritual poverty and disease, who,
while they have the citizenship, do not cultivate
the characteristics and privileges it offers. But
there are towering examples of "success" to point
the way for us. Dying to everything that is false
and unworthy, first of all in ourselves, we find
ourselves reborn as more human, more real, more
peaceful, more settled, more healed, more loving
and forgiving, even while we remain sinners. This
is what Orthodoxy is about. It offers us real
holiness, regaining the lost likeness of God; and
we are not just given theories, but also the
wherewithal.
Fr. Rafail Noica, an eminent Romanian duhovnic and
himself a convert to Orthodoxy, says that
Orthodoxy is the true nature of man, "red, yellow,
black, or white". When we come home to Orthodoxy,
we "come to" our senses, we become our true
selves. Lord, where else could we go?
Now we know why the Lord brought us to Romania.
Our mission was to work out our own salvation with
fear and trembling, and in so doing, to become a
few more candles shining in the Church for those
who, even in an Orthodox country, do not yet
understand what their faith is all about. And
perhaps for others who, like we were, are
searching for something but don’t expect to find
it in Orthodoxy.
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