The Path to Orthodox Christianity by Uncovering the Ancient Paths
The
Carpenter’s Company is in the process of becoming a part of the Orthodox
Church. This obviously means that we have had to withdraw from the
International Church of the Foursquare Gospel which we did in early May, 1996.
All this is actually the culmination of a journey which began for us in 1987
when the Holy Spirit commanded us to ask for the “ancient paths” (Jeremiah
6:16).
A Journey Begins
Our quest
for the ancient paths did not actually get underway until June 17, 1989 when we
began to meet every morning at six o’clock for prayer. We soon called it Vigil,
the name given to the night office of prayer for over fifteen hundred years. We
could not possibly have anticipated where this path would eventually lead us.
Nor could we have foreseen that Vigil would last so long or become what it has.
When we
began Vigil, the Lord’s Prayer was our prayer outline. About a month later, the
Holy Spirit led us to begin to celebrate the Eucharist. Later worship was
added. And as this process continued, now adding a certain element, now
eliminating another, Vigil gradually became a different kind of meeting.
Although its form was changing, one thing remained constant: the meeting began
on its first day and has continued to the present with a strong, abiding,
palpable sense of the Lord’s presence concerning which every visitor has
remarked. However, the longer we maintained our daily Vigil, the further our
path diverged from the path we had once traveled with Foursquare. Although we
recognized we were becoming somewhat unique among Foursquare churches, we have
always been confident that our conduct was well within the boundaries of
Foursquare’s tolerance for diversity. More recently, however, especially since
our encounter with Orthodoxy, we’ve become aware that we have been straining
those boundaries.
A Spiritual Focus
By the
time two years had passed, we had become a people with an intense spiritual
focus. I suppose that is to be expected of a people who meet every day for
prayer. We were beginning to give focused attention to issues to which we had
only given lip service before.
We had
all become faithful in maintaining a consistent, daily quiet time with the Lord.
This was the first time that any of us had experienced consistent, long-term
faithfulness in this regard.
We had
become the kind of community we had only dreamed of before. We were learning
what it really means to be “the family of God” as a matter of daily, practical
reality.
Meeting
daily as a prayer community meant that we could no longer tolerate in one
another the “little” sins and acts of disobedience we’d learned to ignore when
we used to meet weekly. Consequently we allowed the Holy Spirit to restore
church discipline among us.
We became
a people who gave themselves to the discipline of Scripture memorization. We
have memorized I John, Romans, John and are now memorizing Galatians.
A Liturgical Direction
Meeting
every day also made impossible the kind of innovative creativity a weekly
schedule allows. Consequently, our daily worship became patterned. To our
amazement, however, the more we repeated the prayers and songs we were using,
the more meaningful they became to us. The result was predictable: our daily
Vigil gradually became liturgical.
Enter, The Church Fathers
In 1992
on a personal retreat at St. Andrew’s Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery, I bought
a copy of The Rule of St. Benedict (sixth century). Upon returning home, the
leadership team began to read it together. What we discovered astonished us:
The Rule dealt with situations we were facing fight then, but for which we had
found little if any help from contemporary authors.
In the
Introduction and footnotes were references to many others of the Church
Fathers, most of whom we had never heard of before. Finding and reading these
Church Fathers, particularly the Apostolic, Desert and Monastic Fathers, has
perhaps been our most significant discovery. Their writings, though ancient,
were more relevant and immediately applicable to our experience than anything
we had ever heard or read. As a church which was becoming spiritual in focus,
we had found an ocean of resource.
The
Carpenter’s Company had become a church whose emphases had become prayer,
strong and joyful worship and a commitment to learn obedience to God’s Word.
Rather than “fulfillment” and “being affirmed” we put much more stress on
“putting to death the deeds of the flesh and its passions and desires,” a
consistent theme of the early Church Fathers.
A Growing Discomfort Results
When we
began keeping Vigil, people who heard about it seemed to be impressed and were
very complimentary. Without exception, they would say “If you keep this up for
a year, you are going to have revival!”
However,
as we did continue, they began to question why we were apparently neglecting
the programs one might find in most churches. We assured these detractors that
not having these programs didn’t mean we had neglected any of the areas of need
these program customarily addressed. On the contrary, we had begun to discover
that these things were more effectually dealt with by the things we were doing.
Nevertheless, by stressing the things we did, we found ourselves more and more
at variance with the prevailing Evangelical and Charismatic/Pentecostal
culture.
While
we’ve been walking on this increasingly spiritual pathway, we began to observe
one thing after another in what was our own Foursquare denomination that caused
us growing concern: Although we noticed these things with regard to the
denomination with which we were then affiliated, they were and are nonetheless
true of most Evangelical groups as well. Five examples follow:
1. The “Painless” Emphasis:
About a
year before the L.E.A.D. Seminars (a program promoted by Dr. John Holland, the
President of the Denomination, for the “enrichment” of Foursquare ministers)
began, the ICFG circulated a survey on “Fulfillment in Ministry” among all
Foursquare ministers in the United States. I was alarmed at its focus on
academic achievement and management style and its almost total neglect of more
directly spiritual/devotional matters. I wrote a letter to this effect to Dr.
John Holland. He didn’t like the letter. It was “disappointment” to him, and he
asked that we get together for lunch. We did. During our conversation, Dr.
Holland said, “Dennis, we don’t want to cause our people pain when they come to
church. They have enough pain in the world.”
I was
stunned. After pondering Dr. Holland’s response for quite a while, I could no
longer avoid concluding that Foursquare had embraced and now espoused the
“feel-good doctrine” of the 90’s. Is not pain the result of our sin? Although
confronting sin causes pain, will not such confrontation, in the long run, lead
to a more godly and joyful life? Therefore, aren’t ministers supposed to cause
pain by confronting sin? Didn’t Christ our God cause pain in His spiritual
directive to the rich young ruler? Did not Paul cause pain in his letters to
the Corinthians and the Galatians?
2. Self-Esteem:
Although
not Foursquare himself, Dr. James Dobson has most certainly had as significant
influence on the thinking of the contemporary Foursquare denomination as he has
had on any other Evangelical group. Several years ago he wrote that virtually
every human problem could be solved if we could build high self-esteem in both
ourselves and others.
According
to Romans 6-8, our problems emerge out of our sinful, flesh nature, not out of
our lack of self-esteem. Dr. Dobson’s opinion contradicts this. Yet nowhere in
the Foursquare movement or Evangelicalism at large, to my knowledge, was a
significant voice raised to oppose Dr. Dobson’s variance. On the contrary, as
far as our pastoral counseling practices are concerned, most Evangelicals have
embraced and adopted this teaching.
3. The Addiction Doctrine:
At the
L.E.A.D. Seminar two years ago Dr. Ted Roberts taught about “sexual addiction.”
We have but to assume that became of his role as a L.E.A.D. instructor
Foursquare thoroughly endorsed what he taught. According to the implications of
what Dr. Roberts was teaching, sexual misconduct is to be considered a kind of
disease to be dealt with therapeutically by some twelve-step type program.
Have we
not missed Paul’s clear message in Romans 6:16 – “Do you not know that to whom
you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey,
whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?”
What Ted Roberts and others call addiction, Paul calls slavery to s/n. Those
who give themselves to sexual sin, become slaves of sexual sin. Freedom isn’t
restored through therapy, but through confession and repentance. That is
clearly not what Ted Roberts was teaching.
Compounding
his error, Dr. Roberts said that King David was a “classic sexual addict.”
Though challenged from the floor, he defended and maintained his position. His
statement was blasphemous. David did sin sexually, once, with Bathsheba, but
ultimately repented (Psalm 51 – the Psalm most often quoted in the New
Testament). He has always been known as “a man after God’s own heart,” a type
of Jesus’ Kingly Ministry and Jesus Himself was called “Son of David.” Calling
David a “sexual addict” (pervert) reflects blasphemously on the Father who
endorsed him and the Son who came in fulfillment of his type, and on David who
turned from his sin.
4. Majoring on Theological Minors:
At one of
the panel discussions at last year’s Southwest District Pastors’ Conference, a recently
appointed pastor asked whether children should be allowed to take Communion if
they haven’t yet been baptized. I was aghast at our District Supervisor, John
Watson’s answer. “It’s not an issue? he said, “If you make it an issue, you’ll
end up pastoring a church of twenty people. Making those things an issue will
narrow your base and we are about broadening our base.” John’s meaning was
clear: such secondary, non-essential issues must not get in the way of making
our churches as big as we can.
Since
when is either Water-Baptism or Communion, a secondary, non-essential issue?
Has not, rather, church size always been considered of secondary importance, at
best, until the very recent Church Growth movement?
5. Capitulation to Feminism:
The more
recent turn taken by Foursquare Women International away from being an
auxiliary missionary service organization to being focused on the “affirmation”
of women in a role of leadership and ministry, we believe is a clear
capitulation to the subtleties of the spirit of feminism which is abroad in our
land, a surrender to the spirit of this present age. Certainly Foursquare is
not alone in this drift. Other Evangelical and Charismatic groups are years
ahead. Although the languages used are the various dialects of “Evangelese,”
the elements of the Feminist Agenda are clearly in place. It doesn’t take a
Ph.D. historian to recognize that in this regard Evangelicalism as a whole is
embracing a not too latent or embryonic feminism today just as mainline
Protestantism did just twenty years ago.
A Turning Point
It has
been a source of no little concern for us that although we have remained deeply
confident that what we have been doing has been right and pleasing to the Lord;
nevertheless, the more we pursued our course, the more estranged we became from
Foursquare in particular and from Evangelicalism in general.
Recently,
two things brought all of this to a head: Last year, we sent Robin and one of
the wives of our Church Council to the Foursquare Women International Conference
in Dallas. They returned with a video. I was stunned at the wholesale
endorsement that Foursquare leadership at that conference gave to the ‘Toronto
Blessing,” a movement so spurious that even John Wimber has disclaimed and
dissociated himself from it. Is our anxiety for renewal so undiscerning that
while we strain the gnats or by-law infractions, we are willing to swallow a
camel of such an obvious spiritual deception as the “Toronto Blessing?”
The
second thing happened about the same time. One of our members picked up a copy
of The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It1 by someone called Theophan
the Recluse. He wrote exactly the same thing as the Church Fathers. So we were
very surprised to learn that this man had lived in nineteenth century Russia.
We sent
to the publisher and received a catalogue of many more writers from this
tradition, all of whom wrote and taught like the Church Fathers. They were not
only Russians, but Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs and Egyptians as well.
Unbeknownst to us, we had discovered the spiritual writers of the Eastern
Orthodox Church.
Orthodoxy?
After
spending several months reading these writers we came across The Orthodox Study
Bible published in 1995 by Thomas Nelson. It’s not unusual to find an obscure
press publishing works like these. But a major publisher like Thomas Nelson
publishing a special Bible for the Orthodox is something else. Who are, these
Orthodox, anyway? Having this and several other questions, we wrote to
Conciliar Press2, the people behind its publication, for answers and to open
dialogue.
Five days
later I received a call from Father Peter Gillquist. I knew Peter Gillquist as
one of the regional directors of Campus Crusade for Christ who surrounded Bill
Bright when I was on part-time staff in 1963. Now he is an Orthodox priest.
Father Peter sent me a copy of his book Becoming Orthodox which tells the story
about how he (and other regional directors of Campus Crusade I had known) discovered
Orthodoxy and recounts their journey which resulted in their conversion to the
Orthodox Church.
Although
different in several of the particulars, our journeys were parallel. As we
spoke further with Father Peter and read his and Jon Braun’s book, Divine
Energy, we discovered that, although substantially different in liturgical
form, the spirit and faith and doctrine that had developed among the
Carpenter’s Company was in fact, Orthodox. As diverse from Foursquare as we had
become, we had become like the Orthodox.
Our
unanimous decision to become an Orthodox Church, therefore, is simply the
logical conclusion of the decision we made in June, 1989. Although our pursuit
of Orthodoxy is only less than five months old, we have been “becoming
Orthodox” for the past seven years. We just didn’t know it until now. In
finding Orthodoxy, we have found “the ancient path, where the good way is”
(Jeremiah 6:16). Metropolitan Philip, a hierarch of the Orthodox Church has
said that the Orthodox Church is the best kept secret in America. Our
conviction is that we haven’t found just another church, we’ve found the
Church, the one true Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of history. In the
words of a young man who recently found salvation through Orthodoxy:
… at last, I finally began to see how
everything did fit together, how Truth was not “scattered in a thousand
pieces,” but was preserved, intact and unchanging, in the One, Holy, Catholic,
and Apostolic Church … I had finally, through all my searching, found the key,
the ultimate source of Revealed Truth in pure, undistorted form. Something had
always kept me looking for the “hardcore,” no-compromising Christianity,
because I knew down inside that, if Jesus Christ is God, then Christianity had
to be the most radical belief in the world. And it’s not surprising that the
most hardcore, radical, all-or-nothing message I’ve ever heard comes not from
anything “modern, new and revolutionary,” but from the “original thing” – the
One Church, the only Church, the true Church the Orthodox Christian Church, the
mystical Body of Christ.
Indeed,
Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever!
By Dennis L. Corrigan
Source: http://silouanthompson.net/2008/05/recovering-the-ancient-paths/
