---

Author calls modernization
‘fruitless’

Contemporary music rather than chanting. Skits instead of rituals. Ministers who adapt theology to lifestyles and politics to make scriptures relevant. Western Christianity does change with the times.

But for Frederica Mathewes-Green, "modernized" religion is not the real thing.

"It's a fruitless pursuit because times continue to change," said the nationally syndicated religion columnist and author, who will speak here Tuesday. "There's a saying: 'He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow.'

"God is still making the same basic model of human being," she said. "The apostolic faith of the early church really is complete. It teaches us how to pray, how to fast, how to be healed.

"There's a timelessness to religion. Certain things transcend time, such as love. The value of love is a truth no matter what century you live in."

Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Beliefnet.com, a multifaith online magazine, and appears as a commentator on National Public Radio. She writes movie reviews for National Online Review and articles and columns for Christianity Today, First Things and other publications. She is the author of six books, and has won awards for Christian and spiritual writing.

Seven years ago, Mathewes-Green and her family made the choice to join a branch of Christianity that claims to have remained unchanged since the first century. They became Orthodox Christians, embracing customs and rituals rooted in the Middle Eastern cradle of Christianity.

She will tell the story of her personal faith journey in a 7 p.m. talk Tuesday at Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Pacific (930 Lunalilo St.). Her talk on "The Ancient Faith for Today's World" is free and open to the public.

"In college, I wasn't even Christian," said Mathewes-Green in a telephone interview. "I had a dramatic conversion experience when the Lord spoke to me out of the blue while I was hitchhiking around Europe soon after I graduated."

She and her husband, Gregory, attended Virginia Episcopal Seminary together, earning master's degrees in 1977. He was ordained but she was not -- it was the early days in the Episcopal Church's acceptance of women as clergy and "hard to find a diocese that would ordain a woman."

The couple became disenchanted with "Western Christianity that kept changing to be relevant. What troubled us at the time was theological revision that was going on, leaders questioning resurrection, the virgin birth. We wanted to be in church where classic Christian faith was taught and upheld."

She said it was providential that they were introduced to the Rev. Peter Gillquist, formerly an evangelical campus minister. When he and other nondenominational pastors undertook a study of what the first-century church was like, they were persuaded that Orthodoxy still held that model intact. They brought 2,000 of their members along as converts to the old church.

"We noticed that orthodoxy hadn't changed when it went from Greece to Russia to Alaska," Mathewes-Green said. "Different cultures but using the same prayers -- it was staying the same. People were satisfied with it. There wasn't a restlessness, agitation to update it.

"In the West, Roman Catholicism went in a different direction -- for instance in medieval times, the development of the pope."

The separation between the Eastern and Western churches had complex causes, a key facet of which was their developing relationships with the secular governments of the times. The year 1054 is identified as the date of the Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox branches. Western Christianity was divided even further with the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, while no similar split occurred in Orthodoxy.

As a seeker, Mathewes-Green found "wonderful, spiritual books" about Orthodoxy, "all over my head." That led her to write a journal of her conversion experience, "Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy," published by HarperSanFrancisco in 1997. "That's what I do when I speak: I come to give my testimony."

She said "the purpose of religion is healing, uniting us with God again, having the presence of God with us. Each of us is spiritually damaged; we don't love very well, we don't understand ourselves or other people very well. We have a sense that something is out of sync in our life. Christians would say that goes back to Adam and Eve, when there was essential damage in our relationship with God."

Father Gregory Mathewes-Green was ordained an Orthodox priest and is now pastor of Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Baltimore. Their three children were teenagers when the whole family was "chrisimated" in 1998, entering the church in an anointing ceremony equivalent to confirmation.

In Honolulu about 15 people become converts each year, said the Rev. Nicholas Gamvas, dean of the Greek Orthodox cathedral. "They're looking for something more mystical, getting back to the traditional roots."

The lecture Tuesday is "an enrichment for our own parish and an outreach for people who want to know about Orthodoxy," Gamvas said. About 150 families worship at the cathedral, and there are also Honolulu congregations of the Russian Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox churches.