Your Questions About Orthodoxy

[Ioustinos]

Hi Folks!

For those of you who converted to Orthodoxy, what questions led you to start your journey to the Church?

My wife and I are trying to put together a flyer to use for outreach in our community and our priest would like to use some poignant questions to get people to contact/visit us.

 

[~Anastasia~]

What did Paul mean when he talked about disciplining his body, and that he seemed to be worried about "being disqualified"? Can you maybe lose your salvation after all?

 

[~Anastasia~]

And "is this all there is?" ... when the Pentecostal groups gave recycled "prophecies" year after year after year, to the tune of increasingly frenetic "worship" music in which they no longer tried to hide the manipulation of trying to make folks think Jesus was really there in it.

But that may be too jaded to make use of. I hungered for something real, solid, and sacred.

 

[gzt]

Is this driven at a universal audience, or at disgruntled Christians? They have very different questions.

Universal:
Why is there suffering in the world? Where is God in the face of tragedy?
Why is there good in the world?
How should I live?

Disgruntled Christians:
Where did the Bible come from?
How is God relevant when it seems science is answering all the questions?
If I suddenly woke up and it was 1000 years ago, what kind of church would I be in?
Why do Christians believe in the Trinity? It's not in the Bible.

 

[Orthodoxjay1]

Is this driven at a universal audience, or at disgruntled Christians? They have very different questions.

Universal:
Why is there suffering in the world? Where is God in the face of tragedy?
Why is there good in the world?
How should I live?

Disgruntled Christians:
Where did the Bible come from?
How is God relevant when it seems science is answering all the questions?
If I suddenly woke up and it was 1000 years ago, what kind of church would I be in?
Why do Christians believe in the Trinity? It's not in the Bible.

Well I can't believe I'm agreeing with him, however, what gzt says is what a lot of inquirers ask about Orthodoxy.

 

[Lukaris]

I think what led me to Orthodoxy is the sense that I can have the faith in Christ's salvation in spirit and in truth. Although Orthodoxy can be complicated, it is also basic & focused in the sense that works are the expression of salvation by grace ( Ephesians 2:8-10 ), according to the 2 great commands ( Matthew 22:36-40 ), the golden rule ( Matthew 7:1-12 ), lived out in alms giving (charity), prayer, & fasting ( Matthew 6:1-18 ).

Personally, I actually feel better having a non assumption sense of truth without lording it over anyone else ( Romans 11:22 , Luke 14:11 ). I can also understand the Lord actually instructs to take notice of virtues whether among believers or non believers ( as in the Beatitudes Matthew 5:1-12 ) and that He will judge those He knows to be good or evil ( Daniel 12:1-4 , John 5:22-30 ).

It is from aspects such as these that I realize the need for the basic ongoing sacraments of confession and the Eucharist lived out with the proper sense of the fear of the Lord. I do not want to be hypocritical and sound so lofty in saying these points, I know I really need this faith because of my severe sins & faults.


Questions that led me to this were:

What is the basic Gospel message?

How is basic Christian life lived?

Do I assume I am saved by confessing Christ but a non believer is automatically not?

How can I assume salvation when the Lord's own prayer obviously forbids this?

Can one have a sense of the absolute truth in the Gospel and not lord it over another or be stingy with it?

Can I stick to the faith without mingling it with non Christian aspects or ( worse) acquiescing to worldly depravity (like some Christian groups have) ?

 

[ArmyMatt]

for the more liturgical Christians, what does Apostolic succession mean?

 

[E.C.]

For disgrunteled Christians:
What happened to those Christian communities Paul wrote to?
I like the formal worship of Catholicism, but can't be under the pope, so where do I go?
I like the formal worship of High Church Anglicanism. but can't tolerate their politics, so where do I go?

Or more importantly, where's a Christian community that is welcoming, has good food, but won't force a conversion out of me?
Is there a parish that will teach the same things when my kids are grown up as when they were newborns? (Referring to how a change in liberal/conservative pastors can devastate a church and preach two very different Christianities)

And since I finished watching "Cheers", sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.

 

[Petros2015]

It was less of the questions and more of the answers. I had always wondered about that other tree in the story of the Garden, the tree of Life. I found it, and more, in Holy Communion. I wondered about whatever happened to Adam, and then I would hear at Orthos, 'now is Adam rejoicing, now is Eve dancing'. And that told me, 'He who is faithful to the first will be faithful to the last'. The Roman Catholic I was dating tried to teach me to cross myself, and I would do it the wrong way, and she would say 'you cross like the Orthodox' ...and I wondered what that was? I knew I had found something deeply important and unexpected in Catholicism, but there were parts of it that sat badly with me. I asked God if RC was really the legacy of Christ they said it was, and I didn't get a Yes or No answer, but He simply said to me 'there is another legacy'. And so I went looking for it and found my home.

I loved the Liturgy, I took a book home with me and I read it often. It didn't bother me that 1/2 of the service was in Greek, it made me pay attention and try to learn. I love it when they call "The doors! The doors!" before the Creed. It is an amazing thing to be a part of a 2000 year old prayer. If you believe at all in the power of prayer, it is the biggest prayer ever prayed, I had never thought about it before. "...We who are mystically icons of the Cherubim". I realized and remembered that a visiting artist at my high school had guided us in the Byzantine style a long time ago to do a mural I designed. He was Greek. The mural in a sense had been my own icon, left behind before I went to college and walked away from God.

Before I found the Church, I had been in a desperate state and took some notecards and asked God to help me write what I needed. I then proceeded to write "Rule #1: a disciple needs discipline" followed by (much to my surprise) "Rule #2: You don't get to make the rules". So I suppose that's what I was looking for and what I needed and I found (among other things) in the Orthodox way. A disciplined spirituality, a path to growth. The legacy of Christ. And a lot of things I didn't even know I was looking for or had forgotten along the way.

 

[gzt]

Well I can't believe I'm agreeing with him, however, what gzt says is what a lot of inquirers ask about Orthodoxy.

I hate to derail, but I really don't know where this animus comes from on your part. I generally discuss the most white-bread Orthodoxy.

 

[Ioustinos]

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far!

It really is hard to boil down all of our thoughts which led us to the Orthodox faith into short questions - which is why it has been difficult for us to come up with these questions ourselves.

And just to answer some of your questions - the flyer is to be used universally. However, I live in the Bible belt so I am assuming that the majority of people who will see this flyer have some sort of religious background.

 

[Orthodoxjay1]

I hate to derail, but I really don't know where this animus comes from on your part. I generally discuss the most white-bread Orthodoxy.

It not animus, I'm just saying I can't believe we agree, those questions you provided were fantastic, and what a lot of inquirers ask I'm sorry if you took what I said the wrong way GZT