For the last several years I have been engaged in a journey -- a spiritual journey, a journey of faith -- which has led me as an evangelical Protestant to a serious consideration of both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

This journey of the last several years is really part of the larger journey of spiritual growth and development which I have traveled all my life -- the journey which each of us as a Christian makes as we seek to know God more and more fully.  But I wish to restrict my comments here to the more recent journey which has led me to an investigation of the historical church, which we know today as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

I intend to write a series of monthly newsletters (I'm contemplating doing seven of them) chronicling my own journey and the issues which I have been wrestling with.

There are several reasons for which I have decided to begin writing this series of newsletters, but the primary reason is that I am contemplating a significant decision -- the decision to become part of the Eastern Orthodox Church -- and I wish to gain wisdom and insight from as many people as possible, particularly from those whose spiritual understanding and authority I have come to trust and respect over the years.

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways.  (Proverbs 14:8)

Wisdom is found in those who take advice.  (Proverbs 13:10)

Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.  (Proverbs 15:22)

I pray that you will choose to be one of those "advisers" who helps me to "give thought to my ways."

Well, they are intended, of course, for anyone who wishes to read them.  But I do have three groups of people in mind as my primary audience:

1. Those who have a particular interest in my own spiritual growth and development: my parents, Bufe Karraker (pastor of Northwest Church, Fresno, California), Wayne Carson (pastor of Clayton Community Church, St. Louis, Missouri), Gerry Chappeau (staff worker for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Washington University), and Father Bruce Foreman (pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, St. Louis).

Obey your leaders and submit to their authority.  They keep watch over you as men who must give an account.  Obey them so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no advantage to you.  (Hebrews 13:17)

Each of you mentioned above shares some degree of spiritual authority over me.  Therefore, I am giving you an opportunity to offer me your counsel "as men who must give an account."

2. Those whose backgrounds specially equip them to address questions that I am asking: Dr. David Scholer, Howard and Rhonda Webb, Fr. Anthony, Fr. Dimitrie, and others.  You have made a major investment in studying the Scriptures and serving the Church.  I would like to hear what you have to say.

3. Those who are to some degree "fellow travelers" along this same road: Sara Stone, Diane Pietrzak, Ginger Howlett, Carol Geake, Chris Donelson, and many others too numerous to mention.  You have expressed to me some interest in the historical church (Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox), in liturgical worship, in sacramental theology, etc.

There are some things which I am hoping that those of you who receive these letters will do for me:

1. Pray!  Pray that the Holy Spirit will lead me.  Pray that my decisions will be pleasing to the LORD.  Pray that God will reveal His Truth to me as I seek Him.

2. Read my newsletters.  In these letters I will discuss issues and questions that I am seeking answers to.  Sometimes I will refer to books or articles I have read.

3. Read the books and articles.  I know that this is a bigger commitment than many of you will be able to make.  However, these books have been significant for me personally and have had a major influence on the direction of this spiritual journey.  Therefore, I am hoping that some of you will take the time to read them, mark them up, and tell me your thoughts!

4. Give me feedback.  Write, call, send me books or articles that you have encountered.  I am seeking your input!

For this first installment I would like to give an overview of what has led me to this point.  I don't want to focus on myself but rather on the larger issues involved.  However, it is impossible to discuss abstract issues without talking about the specific people and events in my own life which caused me to consider these issues.  Thus, I present here a brief history of my journey up to the present time.

This journey started out as a quest for greater unity within the Body of Christ.

In my family and in the Protestant churches in which I grew up, it was emphasized that the important thing (as far as spiritual matters were concerned) was not which church you belonged to or which denomination you were a member of, but your personal relationship with God through faith in His Son Jesus Christ.

For most of the time that I lived in Fresno, Northwest Church (where my family attended on Sunday mornings) did not have a Sunday evening service.  Since my parents enjoyed attending Sunday services in the evening as well as in the morning, our family took the opportunity on Sunday nights to visit many different churches in Fresno.  We visited liturgical churches, charismatic churches, fundamentalist churches -- a wide spectrum. My dad frequently made the point that it was good to be able to see God working in all of these different churches.  Culturally they felt very different, but if the people put their faith in Christ Jesus, accepted the Bible as the Word of God, and sought the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then God could work through whatever cultural medium was comfortable for them.

This was an incredibly valuable and enjoyable experience for me growing up.  And that seemed to be the attitude among most of the Christians that I knew: denominations don't matter; Jesus is what matters.  However, I did sense a subtle exception.  I don't recall that it was ever stated explicitly, but it always seemed that the Catholic Church was, perhaps, an exception to the rule.  You could be Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or any other Protestant denomination and that was okay, but if you were Catholic, there was probably something wrong, or at least questionable.  I don't remember ever visiting a Catholic Church during our tour of the various churches in Fresno.  (Northwest did have its Christmas Candlelight service at a Catholic Church, but we simply used their building; it was not a Catholic liturgy.)

Now don't misunderstand me: this Catholic "exception" to the general interdenominational tolerance was mostly just a sense, a feeling that I got; I don't remember anyone saying anything precisely to that effect.  There certainly was not the level of hostility, suspicion, and animosity that was more common (I have been told) between Catholics and Protestants, say, 20 or 30 years ago.

In the back of my mind I wondered about why the Catholic Church would be viewed differently from Protestant churches if denominations didn't matter.  When I came to St. Louis to go to Washington University, I became very involved in the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on campus and met students from a wide variety of denominational backgrounds.  I made a low-key effort to get to know some of the Catholic students who came, and I visited a few Catholic churches.

I don't remember when it was (perhaps in high school, perhaps early in college) that John 17 became a significant passage for me.  In it, Jesus prays first for himself, then for his disciples, and finally for all of those believers who would come after them.

My prayer is not for them alone.  I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.  May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.  May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.  (John 17:20-23)

I began praying regularly for the unity of the Body of Christ.  I came to believe that the proliferation of Protestant denominations and the deep historical rift between the Catholic and Protestant churches could not be compatible with Jesus' prayer for the unity of the church.

I also began to see that the unity of the church is not optional for us as Christians, nor is it unconnected with the gospel message which we present to the world.  In fact, it is critical to the very success of all of our evangelistic and missionary efforts.  In John 17 and other passages, the Bible teaches that the world will know that God the Father has sent Jesus the Son by the unity of the church and by the love among believers.  If Jesus' own passionate prayer were not enough, this realization made me all the more concerned for the unity of the church.

As I got involved in the pro-life movement here in St. Louis, I met more and more Catholics who defied Protestant stereotypes of nominalism and ignorance of the Scriptures.  Eventually I began dating Sara Stone, a pro-life Catholic Christian Wash. U. student that I met through InterVarsity.  She was looking for a good Catholic church at that time, and so we visited a number of Catholic churches in the St. Louis area.  Many, unfortunately, did fit the Protestant stereotypes: spiritual lifelessness and dead ritualism.  We finally encountered Sts. Peter and Paul.  Within a few minutes of the start of the liturgy, we both thought: this is it, this is home, this is what we've been looking for!  And so for the last two years I have attended the Saturday night mass at Peter and Paul, while continuing to go to Clayton Community Church on Sunday mornings.

I was aware of the claims of the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church claims to be the one church which has preserved intact both the fullness of the Christian Faith and the authority of the Christian Church, which Christ gave to His apostles and which were handed on, generation after generation, through the historical succession of bishops in the Church.

As Christians we confront non-Christians with the claims of Christ.  Jesus claimed to be uniquely the Son of God and the Way of Salvation.

"I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me."  (John 14:6)

"I and the Father are one."  (John 10:30)

"Before Abraham was born, I AM!"  (John 8:58)

We cannot brush aside these claims.  In C.S. Lewis' famous formula, Jesus is either liar, lunatic, or Lord.

Likewise, I felt that as a Christian I must confront the claims of the Catholic Church.  If it is indeed true that the Catholic Church in some sense maintains the fullness of the faith and the authority of the church founded by Christ, then I as a Christian should be united to that church; I should submit to its authority and its teachings.  On the other hand, if the claim is not true, then any church of any denomination will do.

So at Peter and Paul I went through the Catholic Church's RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program -- a four-month series of weekly catechism classes for those looking into the Catholic faith.  I went into the process with an open mind and a willingness to consider becoming Catholic.  At the conclusion of those catechism classes, I decided (for reasons which must await future elaboration) not to become Catholic.

As I attended mass at the Catholic Church, I encountered some things which I felt were lacking in the Protestant churches I had been exposed to.

The holiness of God.  The liturgy of the Catholic Church seemed to express a greater reverence for the holiness of God than was common among Protestants.  In the fundamentalist / evangelical Protestant churches that I had attended, God is our buddy.  We're good friends.  He helps us out when we're in trouble.  Catholics seemed to have a greater sense of the holiness, the majesty, and the sovereignty of God.

A sense of historical connectedness.  My heritage as a Protestant went back only as far as the Reformation, and then jumped over 1500 years of church history to the New Testament.  Our "saints" and heroes of the faith were all relatively recent figures in the history of the church: Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Charles Finney, Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaefer, Billy Graham.  I don't know if I could even name more than half a dozen Christians who lived between the close of the Apostolic Age and the Protestant Reformation.  The Catholic Church's direct link with the early church offered a much fuller view of the Body of Christ as it has existed throughout its entire history.

A sense of geographical connectedness.  Many Protestant churches I have attended are part of a denomination that is unique to America and thus is culturally very American.  Some might be connected to a denomination in Europe, in which case they would still be very Western.  Other churches are completely independent and not connected to any other church or group of Christians in any way.  On the other hand, the Catholic Church is truly catholic!  It is worldwide.  There is a sense of responsibility for the Body of Christ in every nation and every culture.

The body and blood of Christ.  At the Last Supper Jesus said of the bread which he broke with his disciples, "This is my body," and of the wine he offered them, "This is my blood."  In St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he writes, "Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord."  Protestants have demythologized the Lord's Supper.  We believe in a literal creation, a literal incarnation, a literal resurrection, a literal heaven, and a literal hell.  Why can we not believe in the literal body and blood of Christ present when we partake of the bread and wine together?

The family.  While the mainline Protestant churches have been falling all over themselves to accommodate divorce, fornication, homosexuality, and abortion, the Catholic Church has held the line on the sanctity of marriage, of sexuality, and of human life.

At the same time as all of this was going on, I was becoming increasingly active with Operation Rescue, a pro-life organization which trains and mobilizes Christians in the use of peaceful non-violent civil disobedience to shut down abortion clinics.  Some "rescue" events are of a local nature; at other times Operation Rescue co-ordinates regional and national rescues.

On one occasion a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Anthony, came to St. Louis from Oklahoma City to participate in a regional rescue operation.  As is commonly the case, those of us who participated in passively placing our bodies in front of the entrance to the abortion clinic were arrested for trespassing and taken into custody.

Father Anthony and I spent the day in jail talking about the issues that I was wrestling with in my investigation of the Catholic Church.

At that time I knew almost nothing about the Eastern Orthodox Church.  I did know that for the first thousand years of church history, the church was one unified body.  The Great Schism in 1054 A.D. divided the church between east and west.  The western church came to be known as the Roman Catholic Church and the eastern church as the Orthodox Church.  Five centuries later, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others started the Protestant Reformation within the western church.  During the time since then, the Protestant church has splintered into hundreds, even thousands, of separate denominations.

The talk with Father Anthony was my first encounter with the Eastern Orthodox Church.  He is one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever met.  His clear commitment to the cause of Christ, as well as his understanding of church history and of Scripture, made him very compelling to me.  I felt that we could have talked for days!

I came away from that conversation with a sense that in the Orthodox Church I would find the same things that attracted me to the Catholic Church -- the reverence for God, the sense of historical and global connectedness, the traditional understanding of the Eucharist as the body and blood of Christ, and the strong stand on morality and the family -- but without some of the problematic issues (again, a future topic) which caused me to decide not to become Catholic.

For a week afterward I was telling everybody I knew that I wanted to become a Russian Orthodox priest! (Especially since priests in the Orthodox Church may be married!)

However, I was already busy with many things, including my study of the Catholic Church, and I wanted to bring that to some kind of closure.  So I made a mental note in the back of my mind that someday I would have to investigate Orthodoxy.

My next encounter with the Orthodox Church was not until a year later.  While I was in the Middle East last summer I learned that many Muslim countries which today are very resistant to the gospel previously had large indigenous Christian populations, and that in many cases the Orthodox Church still has some presence there.

It bothered me that Protestant mission agencies have gone into countries where the Catholic or Orthodox Church has been established for hundreds or thousands of years, and the Protestants act as if they're the first ones to show up on the scene with the light of the gospel!

I met with an Orthodox bishop in Istanbul (Constantinople), and we talked for several hours.  I came away from that conversation with the same sense that I had gotten from the conversation with Father Anthony: that in the Orthodox Church I would find the same things which attracted me to the Catholic Church but without the issues that kept me from becoming Catholic.

By that time I had basically concluded my investigation of the Catholic Church.  Although I was (and still am) attending Saturday night mass at Peter and Paul, I was no longer seriously considering the possibility of becoming Catholic.  Therefore, a few months after returning to the states, I decided it was time to begin my investigation of Orthodoxy.

This was more difficult than my investigation of the Catholic Church, because when I started looking into the Catholic Church, I had Catholic friends and knew where I could find Catholic churches.  However, I had met only two Orthodox Christians in my entire life (as far as I knew), and neither one of them lived in St. Louis!  So I looked in the Yellow Pages for Orthodox Churches and discovered that there are about a dozen of them in the St. Louis area.  I called all of them and talked to the priest or whomever happened to answer the phone.  I asked some questions which I felt would identify those priests and churches who were prepared to deal with the kinds of issues that would face a Christian from a Protestant background who was interested in the Orthodox Church.

Two of the priests were especially helpful.  One referred me to a couple who used to attend his church before moving to another Orthodox Church in town.  The couple's names are Howard and Rhonda Webb.  They both grew up Protestant; both of them attended Washington University and Covenant Theological Seminary; Howard was ordained in the Presbyterian Church; and both have become Orthodox.  They also happen to live within a few blocks of Washington University!

The other priest was Father Dimitrie at the Romanian Orthodox Church.  He was familiar with many of the issues that I wanted to discuss, and we talked for about 45 minutes on the phone that day.  Just as in the case of my conversations with Father Anthony and the bishop in Turkey, it seemed that we could have gone on talking much longer!  I recently attended the Sunday liturgy at Father Dimitrie's church and met with him personally to talk (for several hours, of course!).

Back in December I also contacted Howard and Rhonda Webb, and they invited me to join an Orthodox study group which meets in their home every other Tuesday night.  I have met with them several times and also went with them to a Russian Orthodox church one Sunday.

My plan for this spring is to continue my investigation into the Orthodox Church in three ways:

1. Visit Orthodox churches.  I have decided to continue attending Clayton Community Church every other Sunday and on the alternate Sundays to attend various Orthodox churches in the St. Louis area.

2. Tuesday night study group.  I want to find out if there are other students in the InterVarsity chapter at Wash. U. who might also be interested in studying the historical church.  If so, I will offer to co-lead a small group with Howard and Rhonda.  We would continue meeting in their home every other Tuesday night; then on alternate Tuesdays I would meet separately with the other interested students, perhaps on campus, and follow our own plan of study.

3. Monthly newsletters.  I hope for this to be the first in a series of monthly newsletters in which I will share with you the things I am learning and seek your feedback and input.

Thank you for taking the time to read this rather lengthy letter!  I do appreciate your friendship, your prayers, and your thoughts on my journey.

Will you permit me to give you an "assignment" to do until my next newsletter?  I began this journey praying for unity in the Body of Christ.  Let me ask you to begin this series of newsletters by doing the same: Join me in praying Jesus' prayer in John 17:20-23 every day for the next month.

Let us pray daily for the reunion of Christ's church.