I know this crisis rather well. My stepsister was going through a divorce down there when it happened (not related to the crisis, but it didn't help matters) and I have read some of the statements that the priests, both deposed and not deposed, have written. I also spoke with some survivors of the crisis when I lived in California back in 2012. I have not been to the Ben Lomond parish, but I have been to the one in Felton three miles down the road.
Firstly, I feel that this episode in American Orthodoxy does not get addressed enough. There is a lot to learn from it, but we don't talk about it because it is uncomfortable and therefore not a socially acceptable subject to bring up. One of the biggest factors that gets left out of the narrative is that the ex-EOC communities did not necessarily drop all of their non-Orthodox habits. For example, part of why the Antiochians today only use Antiochian music is because the ex-EOC communities would take Protestant songs, like Amazing Graze, then "Orthodox-ize" the lyrics and label it American Chant. Another thing that gets ignored is the fact that the EOC was a cult and as a cult they had many bad habits when it came to what we'd call parish life. They had many home tendencies that one would find in the old documentary "Jesus Camp" just with an Orthodox exterior.
It's always a bad idea to allow entire religious groups convert to a new one..
I agree. At the very least they should have integrated them parish by parish. It also didn't help that Metropolitan Philip broke a few canons by ordaining all the priests on the same altar at the same church on the same day. It really didn't help that almost none of the ones who became priests had spent any actual time at an Orthodox seminary or that Fr Gillquist was an egotistical maniac (my stepmother's words reflecting on her time in Eagle River where Gillquist demanded a 20-foot high throne when he was an EOC "bishop").
I was curious about what lasting legacy the Ben Lomond Crisis has had. I have some personal interest in that because that church was in my parents backyard so to speak. It was the first Orthodox (or Eastern Church of any kind) that I ever attended. I actually thought seriously about converting etc. but something didn't feel right so I didn't. A month or so after I stopped attending I got news about the schism. I didn't believe it at first and thought the person was confusing it with some other place but in a minute or so I realized what he was talking about made sense and it explained a few odd things that were unusual at the time (lots of priests and deacons for one church etc.).
I feel some of this could have been avoided if more of the clergy had been farmed out to other parishes. A few were. My old parish had their first deacon from Ben Lomond about a year before it all happened.
Even more of the crisis could have been avoided if Metropolitan Philip and Bishop Joseph didn't react with the diplomacy of Caligula.
There are many people on the West Coast who were effected by it directly and indirectly. I personally have yet to go to a convert-heavy parish in the West Coast that didn't have at least two families effected by the crisis. Many left Orthodoxy entirely because of it. I knew one gentleman in an OCA parish in California who was an EOC "bishop" before their conversion to Orthodoxy who was divorced because of the crisis (he turned down the offer of being a priest because he felt he needed actual time being Orthodox before he could tell others how to be Orthodox).
Pavel Mosko, if this thread gets shut down at some point, feel free to PM me. I'm always happy to talk about Ben Lomond. Sometimes we need to discuss the elephant in the room in order to learn how to avoid having more elephants in the room.
