User:Frjohnwhiteford

My name is Fr. John Whiteford, and I pastor St. Jonah Orthodox Church, in Spring, Texas.

I was born in Riverside, California in 1966, and lived in Grand Terrace, California. My family moved to Murray, Kentucky in 1976, and then to Houston, Texas in 1978.

I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, but began studying Orthodoxy while working on my B.A. in Theology at Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Oklahoma. I decided to convert not long after graduating from there in 1990. I was baptized at St. Benedict Orthodox Church in Oklahoma City on November 10th, 1990.

I wrote an article entitled Sola Scriptura: In the Vanity of Their Minds, which laid out many of the theological reasons for my conversion. This article was published in the Christian Activist in 1995, and then was published in a revised and somewhat expanded form by Conciliar Press in 1996, under the title Sola Scriptura: An Orthodox Analysis of the Cornerstone of Reformation Theology. This essay has been translated into Russian, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, and Swedish. The Russian text was published as a booklet by the Brotherhood of St. Alexander Nevsky in Nizhny Novgorod, in 2000.

I married Wendy Woo in 1988, who was baptized in 1991 and took the name "Patricia". I now have two daughters, Elizabeth and Catherine, and you can see them all in this photo with Fr. Elias Wen (who turned 110 in 2006, reposed on June 9th, 2007, and was the oldest living priest in the Orthodox Church at that time).

I was ordained a deacon by Metropolitan Hilarion on March 4th, 1995, and a priest by Bishop Gabriel on January 14th, 2001.

I was a representative of the ROCOR Diocese of Chicago and Mid-America at the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, in Moscow, on May 17, 2007. For more on that trip, you can click here.

I currently am the general editor of the St. Innocent Liturgical Calendar, and also post liturgical texts on our parish web site.

You can read some articles I have written over the years by clicking here, and listen to sermons by clicking here.

You can read my spiritual autobiography: "A Pilgrim's Podvig" by clicking here.

You can hear an interview I did on the subject of Sola Scriptura on the Illumined Heart Podcast by clicking here.

You can hear a discussion on the same show on the issue of Orthodoxy, Socialism, and Capitalism by clicking here.

You can also hear a discussion on Ancient Faith today on the issue of Gay "Marriage" by clicking here.

This user belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia

This user is a member of the clergy

en	This user is a native speaker of English.

ru-0	Этот участник не понимает по-русски (или понимает с большим трудом).