A Church's Leap Of Faiths -- An Unorthodox Idea: Pastor Leads His Small-Town, Evangelical, Conservative, Protestant Congregation On A Conversion To Ancient, Mysterious Orthodoxy

ARLINGTON - The piano's gone. That's OK, because the choir doesn't sing songs of praise and Protestant hymns anymore, just liturgical chants, a cappella, in a minor key.

Pastor Dave answers the phone as Father David now. He wears white priestly robes. Trailing sweet-faced acolytes, he starts the worship service by swinging a smoking censer in all directions, jangling the chain and fanning the smell of incense through the sunlit sanctuary.

Church members who used to scorn such rituals as "sort of Catholic-like" now bow and cross themselves before an altar hung with gilded and haloed likenesses of Christ, Mother Mary and the Apostles. They kiss icons and light candles. They follow the service, not from pew Bibles, but from "The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom." They pray for Mary and all the saints and martyrs, and Sweet Jesus isn't even mentioned.

This weekend, after six months of catechism studies, David Hovik and 104 members of Grace Community Church will convert to Eastern Orthodoxy in a ceremony presided over by Bishop Joseph of Los Angeles. The sign out front is being repainted so passers-by will know this is now St. Andrew Antiochian Orthodox Church.

Is this bizarre or what, this shift from an independent, conservative, evangelical, Bible-based, Jesus-as-your-friend faith to one laden with ancient Eastern tradition and early Christian mystery?

Yes, Hovik and his members admit.

And no.

There are born-again churches everywhere these days - Baptists turn Presbyterian, Lutheran and Episcopal churches become charismatic, Pentecostals join Episcopalians. One of the biggest movements is toward nondenominational churches like Grace Community - one expert says 1,000 are started every year - whose property and theology are theirs alone.

But there's also a smaller trend in the other direction, which Grace Community is part of - evangelicals and charismatics who decide they've had enough of the create-your-own-style worship and join the very structured Orthodox faith.

The great conversion of 1987

It's been happening quietly for the past decade. In 1987, some 2,000 evangelicals across the country - loosely united because their pastors had worked together two decades before in Campus Crusade for Christ - converted. Those congregations included Holy Cross in Yakima and St. Paul in Brier, which has been the mentor church for the Arlington congregation.

Since then, Orthodoxy also has picked up congregations in Spokane and Everson, Whatcom County.

And just last summer, Vineyard Christian Fellowship of San Jose, Calif., became St. Stephen Orthodox Church, dropping the charismatic trappings - the rock music, public prophesying and speaking in tongues - that had been part of its fundamentalist belief in favor of Orthodoxy's traditional liturgy, Old World chanting and kissing of icons of the Virgin Mary.

Grace Community members say they were - and are - certainly conservative, but "please don't call us fundamentalists." In fact, they say, visitors who would drop in expecting charismatic services often left Grace Community in disappointment after a few Sundays.

They have a hard time saying just what they were, they've been so many things over the years as they searched for a faith with which they felt comfortable.

A search for roots

What Pastor Dave calls "our journey" began with his own misgivings about modern Christianity and a quixotic need to do church the way the first Christians did it.

"All I knew when I planted that church was I was looking to plant a church that was more rooted in the historic church," he says. "But I had no idea what that meant."

Hovik taught a high-school class in church history at Arlington Christian School. Through his studies, he says, he came to appreciate that the church of the Apostles was the synagogue of the Jews - full of liturgy, ritual and ancient tradition.

So he began adding things to their bare-bones service, little ones at first, and then more debatable ones. They began saying the Lord's Prayer and the Nicene Creed. He shoved the pulpit off to the side, to make the altar the focal point of worship. Pretty soon they were celebrating communion more than once a month, even though some grumbled, "If we do it that often, it won't be special anymore."

"At every point of the way, there were people who said, `Too much, too much. Can't take that, can't do that. Not candles!' " Hovik says. "I call it Rome-a-phobia."

They began to try different denominations on for size. They'd adopt the Baptist faith at one time, then move on to Lutheran, Episcopalian or Presbyterian dogma. If the faith fit, sometimes the politics didn't - more than one denomination was dropped when they discovered it differed with their conservative views on abortion or homosexuality.

The Orthodox discovery

Then, three years ago, Sandi Meier, who had known Hovik since high school and was a charter member of his church, ran into a book about the 1987 evangelical conversions and gave it to Hovik.

"I was shocked to the point I had tears in my eyes when I read it," he says. "I realized this was the way the first Christians worshiped, and it hasn't changed in 2,000 years. They still say the same prayers, the same creeds they did in the early church. I still had some of the old hangups about Mary and the saints, things I had no frame of reference for, but as I read I became convinced Orthodoxy was my faith, even though I was pastor of an evangelical church."

Hovik had been losing people all along as he fiddled with the service, but had managed to keep the majority of the church council with him. But when he told them he had decided Orthodoxy was the way his church would go, 50 people walked out.

Rose Kratz was one.

"I was a charter member of Grace Community Church," she says. "He was my spiritual mentor for years. But I couldn't fight his theology. I just wasn't comfortable with it, all that `cross yourself from left to right and not from right to left because that's not right' stuff.

"Orthodoxy just left me cold."

Among those who stayed were Tom and Jessamine Hoag, who had been involved in a charismatic Vineyard church before joining Grace Community at about the same time Hovik was making his stand.

"This isn't the religion for everybody, but it was like a breath of fresh air for me," says Jessamine Hoag. "In the churches I'd been in, you couldn't get a straight answer for anything. Here, the answers have been the same for 2,000 years."

Orthodoxy considers itself the inheritor of the early church. Its roots are Eastern and it is split into ethnic groups with Greek Orthodoxy being the most prominent in America, with some 2 million adherents. Grace Community will be part of Antiochian Orthodoxy, which has about 300,000 U.S. members.

It is full of mystery: The bread and wine of the Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ, although, as Hoag says, "In Orthodoxy, it's just a mystery. They don't try to explain it. The Orthodox Church believes in these things like speaking in tongues, too, but that's minor. It happens, OK, but it's not expected."

There've been so many changes along their journey to Orthodoxy, the people of Grace Community have lost count - Wednesdays and Fridays are meatless fast days now; wine, not grape juice, is served for communion; and the people will have to learn to prostrate themselves as Lent approaches.

Most difficult for those who decided to stay was Orthodoxy's insistence on infant baptism, Hovik says. Most evangelicals and many Protestants argue that baptism is for adults or older children who can grasp its significance.

Suffering for a belief

The break from evangelical faith has been painful for Hovik and all his flock, past and present. Hovik had to take salary cuts when his congregation went from 110 families to 37; an assistant pastor and church secretary had to be let go.

Family members, particularly those still in conservative or fundamentalist Protestant faiths, are shocked and dismayed over the mass conversion to a denomination some consider anathema. Some members say they've just had to quit talking about it with family. Hovik fielded angry letters and phone calls at first.

And the gossip in the community is that Pastor Hovik has led his members into a cult of some kind.

"It's been really hurtful to a lot of us," Hovik says. "We had 160 people attending church on Sunday, and we went down all at once - 20 percent of the congregation just gone. It was terribly painful to lose them. It broke our hearts."

The members of St. Andrew who decided to stay say this switch to Orthodoxy hasn't changed their basic Christian conservatism, just their way of expressing their faith.

Hovik is more clear than ever in his decision.

"For me, the biggest issue all along was my responsibility as a pastor. Was it to keep the group together or was it greater than that? Was it to say this is what I discovered, no matter what that does to the congregation? My answer was I found the faith, and if people leave, I'm just going to have to leave that in the hands of God. There's nothing I can do about it. It's really a matter of truth."

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