They Were Hungry for God: Why I (Almost) Converted to Eastern Orthodoxy

In 2019, I nearly converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. I was finishing my time in college, at the tail end of a long and painful process of sifting the convictions underlying my muddled understanding of Christianity. In this piece, I hope to show what converts and seekers find alluring in Eastern Orthodoxy. More than likely, there is a young, intellectual, questioning man in your congregation considering a conversion to it. This article combines a synthesis of survey data conducted by the Orthodox Church in America,¹ personal interviews I’ve had with Orthodox converts or seekers, as well as some insights from my own initial steps into Eastern Orthodoxy. But first, some context.

1. “2023 Orthodox Convert Survey Summary” (presentation, 2023 Parish Development Forum, Archdiocese of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, Orthodox Church in America, 2023), slide 20, accessed April 22, 2026. This study surveyed 773 converts to Eastern Orthodoxy across the United States, including 382 converts who converted between 2019 and 2023.

Eastern Orthodoxy in North America is growing. Forty-one parishes were opened in the (Eastern) Orthodox Church in America and only twelve were closed between 2021 and 2025.² The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia nearly doubled its conversion rates in 2023.³ High-profile converts on YouTube continue to emerge. Americans are not only taking an interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, but are joining it. But what’s the draw to a primarily ethnic, intellectually Eastern, and 2,000-year-old expression of Christianity? Let me explain—along with why I abruptly ended my spiritual pilgrimage to the East.

First Steps out of Protestantism

Who They Are

In America, nearly all converts to Orthodoxy convert out of a different branch of Christianity. This is especially prominent after 2020: 84 percent of converts to the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) are from either Protestant or Catholic backgrounds, and 64 percent of those converts come from Protestantism.⁴ The numbers are almost identical for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia converts.⁵ Most of these converts I talked with were highly active in their Protestant churches before leaving for Orthodoxy. Some were pastors, others had gone to Bible college, and most were active in small groups or worship teams. Even the rare convert who wasn’t deeply involved in their faith before they converted tended to be voracious in their search for secular truth. They were hungry, and most were seeking for a deep union with God. Why couldn’t they find this within Protestantism?

Orthodox converts are overwhelmingly educated and have a consuming drive for truth. Eighty-four percent of converts to the Orthodox Church in America had some form of college experience.⁶ Almost all the converts I talked to had gone or were going to some form of Christian higher education. The few exceptions were usually heavily involved in truth seeking elsewhere—often in conservative politics. Protestantism created a hunger and also put faith seeking understanding in the groundwork of spirituality. Orthodox seekers and converts accepted this foundation and sought to deepen it, usually starting in their local Protestant church.

6. “2023 Orthodox Convert Survey Summary,” slide 18.

Why They Leave

They did not leave because of burnout from too much service in their church; most converts to Eastern Orthodoxy I interviewed left because of the seeming meaninglessness of their Protestant church in the one thing that mattered: salvation. No one could tell them why they were doing their frenetic labors, or what maturing Christianity looked like beyond re-experiencing conversion. In fact, they found peace in the labor of the Orthodox liturgy, a practice that has continued through history and in heaven, and a practice that contributes to your union with Christ here and now (or so Eastern Orthodoxy claims). Insufficient value for labor wasn’t the only problem they found with Protestantism.

Nearly all converts and seekers I spoke with said that their initial impulse toward Orthodoxy was a movement of the Spirit toward the higher things of God. Deeper theology, better hospitality, more authenticity, greater beauty, clearer gender roles—these weren’t what first drew them. In fact, conversion to Orthodoxy wasn’t the goal at all; it was simply a means to an end. Orthodoxy promoted union with God in a way that Protestantism didn’t, and these converts felt that God was calling them to greater depth.

The First Doctrines that Go

As they started digging, the converts I interviewed—and I myself, when I was seeking—primarily began to doubt two of Protestantism’s five solas: sola Scriptura and sola fide, the respective ideas that Scripture is the only inerrant authority and that faith alone saves a person. Those who end up becoming Eastern Orthodox often reject sola Scriptura first, and that usually starts with the perspicuity, or the ability to rightly interpret and understand Scripture. If the Scriptures were so clear, their thinking goes, why is Protestantism the most outwardly divided church in Christendom, both denominationally and congregationally?⁷ Not only this, but if most churches think they have the correct doctrinal view, then how can someone possibly survey all the literature from all the churches to find out which is right? Many converts and seekers to Eastern Orthodoxy tried to do this historical survey, and they got understandably burnt out. Eastern Orthodoxy was simpler, and it presented a more historically rooted and unified front. On the philosophical side, Eastern Orthodoxy prioritizes the community in intellectual and interpretive activity—and hence its claim to an infallible Eastern Orthodox ecclesial community. Their arguments sound plausible: No man lives in a vacuum, no one merely “sticks to the plain meaning of the text,” every reader of Scripture is influenced by their reading community. Therefore, if the Bible is to be clear at all, their thinking goes, it is only clear within a community and under its authority. And thus the Eastern Orthodox Church, along with all of the wisdom of her accrued traditions, becomes the inerrant judge of what Scripture actually means.

7. Here and throughout I’ll signify Eastern Orthodox thinking in italicized sentences.

Sola fide, or faith alone, usually goes next. Seekers leaving Protestantism tend to react strongly against the Lutheran-inspired conception of justification by faith alone. These seekers don’t deny salvation by Christ alone (solus Christus), but they hold that Christ’s saving activity is no longer solely received from the gospel as found in the biblical word read, preached, and obeyed. For the Eastern Orthodox, God’s grace can be obtained through nearly anything, since matter itself was redeemed by the incarnation and God is free to do what he pleases. Once these two fundamental aspects of Protestantism are doubted, and then denied, there remains very little reason to remain Protestant. The nets are then widened, and fishing starts in deeper waters.

My Own Journey into the Mystery of Orthodoxy

Once seekers overthrow the pillars of Protestantism, they find a compelling new (but historically old) church in Eastern Orthodoxy—or at least, compelling upon first impression. Personally, rose colored glasses and selective presentation were powerful psychological tools in shaping my view of Eastern Orthodoxy when I flirted with it. In the next section, I will describe Eastern Orthodoxy as I saw it, even though it was not the complete picture.

At some point, nearly all Orthodox seekers—including myself—found the online personalities that impacted 50 percent of conversions from 2019 and on.⁸ Podcasts such as The Lord of Spirits or The Symbolic World opened up new vistas in both Scripture and philosophy that were hitherto unknown, and utterly compelling.

8. “2023 Orthodox Convert Survey Summary,” slide 32.

As if for the first time, these seekers were taught what their shallow Protestant church didn’t: there was more to this earth than the individual and their woes and felt needs; there was a cosmic battle being fought by an entire host of angels and saints. This battle wasn’t primarily intellectual, either, but spiritual, a war fought against vice and carnal desires, and against the principalities and powers of this earth. These Eastern Orthodox teachers taught with authority, drawing their insights not from their fancies or from pop Christian psychology, but from the shared, infallible, unchanging tradition of Jesus himself.

As these seekers continued in this newfound system, a church began to emerge to them from the mists of time: a church that didn’t begin thirty years ago, or even five hundred years ago. It was started by Jesus, and passed on faithfully for over 2,000 years, as he promised. It remained largely inviolate; heresies emerged, but Christ gave the church Scripture, councils, creeds, and saints to combat them. It wasn’t up to the local congregant to adjudicate what the faith was and wasn’t; the entire body of the faithful, from the beginning of the Church to the modern day, had a voice in what was and wasn’t the faith. Neither did this faith need to have every logical thread tied off; all it sought was to unify the believer with God, stay within the great tradition, and thereby save people’s souls. And it turns out that this mystical faith was far deeper than their experience of Protestantism had to offer.

The faith encapsulated an entire system: a system that—by the grace of God—saved the whole you, both body and soul, through the channel of his body. And the channels within that mysterious body were far greater than the local Protestant variety of the Word and worship through song. Inside Orthodoxy, mystery is a feature, not a bug. Salvation could come through the prayers of a saint, still fighting the cosmic war against Satan by asking Christ to give strength to you through the day. It could come through the liturgy, as the earthly church joined in with the heavenly liturgy that was started on the day Christ took the scroll, and partook in the actual body and blood of Jesus. Salvation could come through visible pictorial icons, windows into heaven that let the believer mysteriously experience the presence of the thing signified. It could come through correct dogmas, divine teachings that sanctified the mind so that it could ascend to God and, during this life and the next, somehow become god. Icon corners in the rooms of homes extended the channels of gracee that previously were only available at a church building. The whole person was converted through physical prostration and fasting, not just the mind. Every part was integrated, every piece leading to the greater whole.

In fact, Eastern Orthodoxy seemed to integrate all of reality, and it had its earthly hub at the divine liturgy. Weary throughout the day, you could dive back into the perpetual liturgy of heaven and earth to be renewed. One way to be renewed was through the Jesus Prayer—repeatedly meditating on the prayer of the publican, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner,” and using it like an arrow to heaven. For the advanced, emptying your mind of all things that stop you from thinking about God correctly and centering your body around breathing can lead the soul up the ladder of created things to the energies and closer to the essence of God. As the convert grows deeper in his Eastern Orthodox faith, he sees the energies at work more clearly. Everything’s part of a larger cosmic liturgy. Everything seeks to unite itself back to Christ. The church was the head of a cosmic symphony declaring and proffering the glory of God. The ceaseless intellectual wandering of Protestantism was replaced by a grounding and focus on the great tradition of the church, where there was no hidden poison or wolves in sheep’s clothing waiting to lead you astray.

Or so it seemed.

My Journey Out

Eastern Orthodoxy compelled me to the point that I nearly converted to it in 2019, and my story was largely the same as all the other stories. But what brought me out was the same thing that led me in: a renegotiation with the gospel through the Scriptures. The Scriptures are clear, capable of making us wise unto salvation (2 Tim. 3:15), and I could not deny from the Scriptures that we are so corrupt that we could never have accomplished salvation ourselves; we only need to trust in Christ who bought and paid for us (Titus 2:11–14). The gospel message is so authoritative that Paul would have the Galatian church cut him off from the faithful if he or any other apostle preached a different gospel (Gal. 1:8–9). This was the truth that brought me back to Protestantism. The work of Christ was finished (John 19:30). This work was, at least in part, a forensic declaration—I am righteous, despite my sinful self, because of the cross and the shed blood of Jesus (Rom. 4:5; Col. 2:14). I didn’t have anything to add to my salvation and couldn’t if I wanted to.

And while some Eastern Orthodox priests and laity may agree with what I just expressed, I knew that most wouldn’t. I also knew that their ecclesiology and sacramentology couldn’t agree with Paul’s gospel—that non-agreement was even one of the initial draws of Eastern Orthodoxy. And I knew that I couldn’t go to a church that didn’t bring up the gospel of grace alone through faith alone every Sunday to remind me. There is a saying I heard about the Eastern Orthodox Church, that the Church has every medicine, but not everyone needs all of them all the time. But I have learned that we only need one medicine, and while the Eastern Orthodox may possess it, at best it’s viewed as one medicine among many.

With greater gospel clarity came greater scrutiny. After further reading and studying,⁹ I understood a fuller picture of Eastern Orthodoxy that was not fronted to me in my initial online forays. Beyond the Orthodox rejection of salvation by faith alone¹⁰ and their rejection of Scripture as the ultimate authority,¹¹ I learned that:

• Official Orthodox confessional statements such as the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) anathematize to hell all non-Orthodox.¹²
• Eastern Orthodoxy denies total depravity along with inherited guilt from Adam at the Fall.¹³
• Eastern Orthodoxy venerates icons and kisses them as part of the gathered liturgy, a practice that the Orthodox-endorsed Seventh Ecumenical Council made binding on all Christians under anathema.¹⁴
• Eastern Orthodox practices are not an unbroken tradition that goes back to the early church.¹⁵
• Eastern Orthodoxy denies Christ’s imputed righteousness along with penal substitutionary atonement.¹⁶
• Prominent Orthodox theologians teach a lack of assurance of salvation, and this is observed among Orthodox laity in practice.¹⁷
• Eastern Orthodoxy has more theological divisions than it appears, and they have failed to disavow at least one prominent universalist among their ranks.¹⁸
• Eastern Orthodox themselves acknowledge a “Toxic Orthodox Social Media Environment” that feels like the novel “Lord of the Flies [with] a lot of unsupervised, macho energy.”¹⁹
• Eastern Orthodoxy may distort the Creator/creature distinction in its essence and energies distinction.²⁰

These are all important issues, but I did not ultimately go to the East because I could not place the gospel on a shelf to be used when desired. Neither could I place the Scriptures on that same shelf, as something impossible to understand outside the Church’s tradition. Finally, I didn’t realize all of the entailments of Eastern Orthodoxy that were hidden behind the storefront. Seeing the full picture of Eastern Orthodoxy sealed the door shut for me.

Conclusion

The Eastern Church cannot bear the weight of granting salvation; no earthly thing can. Churches should be free from that burden; in fact, Jesus died to purchase that exact freedom. We need only proclaim it. And that is compelling. It has the full compulsion of truth, Scripture, and all the redeemed in heaven and on earth on its side.

In spite of their official teaching, I’m convinced that there are genuine Christian men and women in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and I thank God for this. But for those moving toward Eastern Orthodoxy like I was, my counsel for you is this: if you are in a shallow church, seek for a healthy church with depth—a church that values expository preaching, meaningful membership, and discipleship. Churches that are part of the 9Marks Network are great places to start. Chances are, what you are looking for is not a change of doctrine, but a change in depth. Pray for and find a Christian mentor whose life you respect and learn from him. And do the research! The online signpost pointing toward Eastern Orthodoxy is not quite what it seems, and there is a better way toward the West.