Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church by D. Oliver Herbel (review)

The parish I serve is part of the Orthodox Church in America. We have an exceptionally high number of clergy – six priests are attached, including the pastor, and two deacons – but the composition of the parish is not exceptional. Of the clergy, only one is Orthodox by birth. The rest are converts. We have a number of born Orthodox parishioners, most of them Russian or Ukrainian, but the majority of the members are converts from evangelical churches.

In Turning to Tradition, D. Oliver Herbel, an Orthodox priest, points out that 59 percent of the clergy in the Orthodox Church of America are converts, as are 51 percent of the parishioners. In the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, usually regarded as highly ethnocentric, 12 percent of the clergy and 29 percent of the members are converts.

Herbel explores the lives and journeys of four converts to Orthodoxy: Alexis Toth, Raphael Morgan, Moses Berry, and Peter Gillquist. Toth is something of an outlier in this company, though an important one. He was a widowed Eastern Orthodox priest who, because he was once married, was not allowed to serve in American parishes by Archbishop John Ireland. He gradually moved towards Orthodoxy, and brought many Eastern rite Catholic parishes with him. (As Herbel makes clear, it was not all smooth sailing once he entered Orthodoxy.)

Raphael Morgan was ordained in Constantinople in 1907, the first African-American born in the New World to be ordained in the Orthodox Church. He moved gradually from the Episcopal Church into Orthodoxy and had an influence, though a somewhat indirect one, on the later history of African-American and African Orthodoxy. Moses Berry is an African-American Orthodox priest who came into Orthodoxy after moving from the Holy Order of Mans – a New Age group – into an uncanonical Orthodox church, and finally into the Orthodox Church in America, where he serves as a pastor. He is also the founder of the Ozarks Afro-American Heritage Museum in Ash Grove, Missouri.

Peter Gillquist was deeply involved in the evangelical Campus Crusade for Christ, and with a group of other evangelicals discovered Orthodoxy through a reading of the Church fathers and early Christian history. Their group, the Evangelical Orthodox Church, was eventually received into Orthodoxy through the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

Herbel tells all of these stories, and a number of related ones, thoroughly, without ignoring the complexities and difficulties involved. He is especially good on the fact that there is something uniquely American in the stories of Morgan, Berry, and Gillquist – the American religious tradition of restorationism, an attempt to re-embody the early Christian church. There is also a certain irony in the post-modern fact that one can choose, on one’s own, a conservative and communal tradition.

Turning to Tradition is clearly and carefully written and is a welcome examination of contemporary American Orthodoxy. It is also, as the jacket copy says, “the first in-depth investigation of any kind of African-American Orthodoxy.” Much in this excellent book will surprise non-Orthodox readers, and will be news to Orthodox readers as well.