International Orthodox Christian News

In growing numbers, members of various Protestant denominations have decided they've had enough, and are converting. And more often than not, they're joining the Orthodox Church.

While it's unlikely that the Orthodox Church--which, according to the best estimate, has only 1.2 million American members--will ever pose any sort of existential threat to evangelical Christianity in the United States, it is significant nonetheless that a growing number of Southern Baptists and Presbyterians and Assemblies of God members have left the evangelical fold, turning to a religion that is not only not American, but not even Western. Their flight signals a growing dissatisfaction among some evangelicals with the state of their churches and their complicated relationship with the modern world.

Reasons for going Orthodox:

One of the principal attractions of the Orthodox Church...is its solidity--and lack of interest in integrating modern life. "There is, in the Orthodox Church, an enormous conservatism," (minister Wilbur Ellsworth) marvels. "There is not going to be a radical change in the worship life of the church nextweek. "This is an appealing idea, particularly to younger Orthodox converts who view evangelicalism as corrupted by the generation born right after World War II. "Baby boomers had an overweening confidence that our creativity and spontaneity was fascinating and rich," says Frederica Mathewes-Greene, a one-time charismatic Episcopalian who's now a prominent Orthodox speaker and author. "The following generation sees it as not all that rich. They find the decades of the rock band on stage performing songs kind of shallow. They're looking past their parents for something earlier."

They're also looking for something with more intellectual depth. The evangelical church has a long history of anti-intellectualism: As the early twentieth-century evangelist Billy Sunday proclaimed, "When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell." Some evangelicals who became Orthodox simply could no longer tolerate evangelicalism's anti-intellectualism. As Mark Noll, a professor of history at Notre Dame and the author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, explains, "After the Second World War, after the boom in education, there were a lot of sectarian evangelicals who became educated and started reading widely and had experience in urban areas--all of which undermined the form of the Christianity they'd been raised with, although not necessarily their Christianity. It seems almost inevitable that, as some evangelicals become more interested in history, culture, Europe, and the broader world events of the twentieth century, that, within that group, there are going to be some who are attracted to Orthodoxy."

http://deacbench.blogspot.com/2007/08/evangelicals-seeking-tradition-beat.html