Finding Myself in Orthodoxy

I never thought I’d find myself in liturgy. I was raised in the Church of Christ in Texas in the 1990s. My father was raised Episcopalian in Texas in the 1960s, only because there happened to be an Episcopal church across the street from his house. My father’s father was raised Swiss Mennonite in Kansas in the 1920s. My mother’s mother was raised United Methodist in Texas in the 1930s. And my mother’s father was raised Disciples of Christ in Kentucky in the 1890s.

In high school, I attended both a Southern Baptist church and a Bible church near Austin. While attending college at Texas A&M University, I fluctuated between a Bible church and the Church of Christ where my father was baptized and which both of my parents attended while they were dating.

I further complicated things by marrying a Catholic whose mother was raised Catholic in New Jersey and whose father was raised Southern Baptist in Texas. You could say that our combined faith heritage is a bit of a Western European-American hodgepodge.

Reconciling my Protestant fundamentalism with my husband’s Catholic catechism was not an easy task during our engagement. We had many heated arguments, and I shed more than a few tears during those months.

We eventually tied the knot in a historic chapel outside of Austin. My family’s Church of Christ preacher officiated the ceremony. As newlyweds, we attended a large Bible church. Later, we joined a small Bible church close to our house. As young parents, I attended a MOPS group at a nearby Lutheran church, and we enrolled our young daughters in preschool at a Southern Baptist church down the road.

We found a rhythm of interdenominational faith inside our immediate geographic area and connected with families in our current life stage.

Yet, despite the friendships we had made, our discontentment within the nondenominational church we attended grew with each passing year. My husband began to crave the liturgy of his youth, and I grew frustrated with the enduring Calvinist doctrine and complementarianism of mine. We both longed for a change, for ourselves and for our children.

An eager student of church history, including the formation of the Anglican Church, the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and the First and Second Great Awakenings in America, I was familiar with the origins of mainline and evangelical Christian denominations.

I knew that the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches split off from the Roman Catholic Church back in the 1500s. The Baptist and Methodist churches split off from the Anglican Church in the 1600s. The Episcopalians in the newly independent American colonies branched off from the Anglican Church in the 1700s. The Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ split off from the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky in the 1800s. And finally, the Bible churches formed in Texas in the 1970s.

It doesn’t stop there, of course, because the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, and Methodist churches all have at least two conferences in America, as a result of further theological and political splits, and there are a few more denominations I haven’t even mentioned.

The body of believers continues to fracture and divide over differences in worship and theology today. We reinvent the wheel in each new era, enabled by an American culture that takes pride in individualism.

Every split moves Protestants farther away, not only from the papal power and works-based salvation theology they detest, but also from the ceremonial, Hebrew-derived worship that unified Jews and Greek and Roman Gentiles all over the proverbial “map” in the early church. I grew up believing that fundamentalists were returning to the early church in their dismissal of liturgy and iconography, but I now believe that the opposite is far closer to the truth.

I recently experienced the reverence of a “high church” Episcopal mass in Houston and began to understand my husband’s yearning for a more authentic tradition. I gained a new appreciation for the burning of incense, for the ornately carved altar protecting and decorating the front of the sanctuary, and for the kneelers tucked humbly beneath the wooden pews.

The late Presbyterian minister Eugene H. Peterson wrote,

The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God. Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of obeying and loving ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God.

I saw the value of spiritual order at the center of church community and knew that we were both craving the unity of the liturgy.

We found what we were looking for in Orthodoxy. The Eastern Orthodox Church formally broke with the Roman Catholic Church five hundred years before the Protestant Reformation, in the East-West Schism of 1054, over papal infallibility and doctrinal differences. Their masses remain nearly identical to this day, however.

The church responds and participates in worship as one body, held together by two millennia of time-tested tradition and repetition through Scripture reading, chanting, Communion, and prayer. The priest holds up the apostles and other saints, not as idols for worship, but rather as ideal examples of obedience for all believers to emulate in their corporate submission to Christ.

Children and babies are welcome participants in all parts of the religious ceremony, including Communion, where they are taught the value of communal worship through their immersion in it.

Like Catholicism, Anglicanism, and other “high church” traditions, the church’s unity is built upon the simplicity and stability of its liturgy:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:42 ESV)

There is no distraction of exciting new songs or fancy color-changing lights, no praise band, no appeal of autonomy or democracy through elected elders. There is no competition for purity or popularity. There is only the unchanging church, bowing in unison before an unchanging Savior. And we feel we have, at last, come home.

Lauren Flake writes about her journey as a wife, mom to two little girls and Alzheimer’s daughter in her native Austin, Texas, at For the Love of Dixie. Her first book, Where Did My Sweet Grandma Go? was published in 2016. She thrives on green tea, Tex-Mex, and all things turquoise.

Photograph © James Coleman, used with permission