User:Sendicott

Growing up in a nondenominational Protestant church, I always felt unrooted in my faith. After falling away altogether from Christianity in my adolescence, I was drawn back by one of the professors I studied under at Messiah College. I was attracted to her church because it was a PCA church that took liturgy more seriously than any church I had attended before and there was a strong intellectual current running through the congregation. The same professor who invited me to the PCA church had been pursuing Orthodoxy for a number of years and finally was chrismated a few years after I had first taken her class on the Inklings, where we met.

To better understand the faith she was pursuing, I downloaded the Orthodox Study Bible onto my Kindle and started reading through the New Testament, stopping every few seconds to read another footnote. I fell in love with Orthodoxy because of the footnotes. Suddenly, here was a church rooted in unbroken tradition, a church who could trace their lineage back to Jesus Christ and His Apostles. My wife and I are now catechumens at an Orthodox Church in the Philadelphia area, reading about and experiencing the one true faith. Through the wisdom of priests including Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (who recently spoke at our church), Fr. Stephen Freeman, and our own Fr. Victor Gorodenchuk we have already learned so much and are so excited to continue this lifelong journey.