Fr. Peter Gillquist

Gillquist came to faith as a student and went to work for Campus Crusade for Christ, then among the most effective evangelical ministries in the United States. He began its work at Notre Dame and became a regional director — a career of considerable promise in the world he had grown up in.

In 1973 he and several colleagues left it. What they were after was not a better method but a missing thing: the church described in the Acts of the Apostles, with its bishops, its sacraments and its continuity. They built a network of house churches and set about reading the Christian centuries in order, beginning at the first, to find where the church they knew had come from — and, as they gradually concluded, where it had parted company with the one that had been there all along.

By 1979 the network had adopted liturgical worship, ordained clergy on the pattern they had found in the Fathers, and named itself the Evangelical Orthodox Church. It was an unusual position: a body convinced of Orthodoxy's claims, worshipping as Orthodox, and belonging to no Orthodox jurisdiction.

The attempts to resolve that were not quick and were not painless. An approach to one jurisdiction ended with a delegation travelling overseas to meet a patriarch and returning empty-handed. The account Gillquist gives of those years in Becoming Orthodox is candid about the discouragement of them, and it is part of why the book has been useful to enquirers: it does not present conversion as a tidy process.

The resolution came through the Antiochians. Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch had visited the archdiocese in 1985, and the conversations that followed led to Metropolitan Philip (Saliba), who agreed to receive the whole body. The receptions took place through the early months of 1987, the largest of them in the Los Angeles area on 8 February, where Metropolitan Philip chrismated the greater number himself.

Seventeen parishes and roughly two thousand people came in, and were organized as the Antiochian Evangelical Orthodox Mission. It remains the single largest reception of converts in the history of American Orthodoxy, and it changed the composition of the archdiocese: a Middle-Eastern immigrant church took in, at one stroke, a large body of American evangelicals, most of whose clergy were re-ordained and went on serving.

Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith tells that story from the inside. It has stayed in print for decades and remains the book most often handed to an English-speaking enquirer, precisely because it is written by someone who arrived from outside and remembers what was strange.

Gillquist also served as project director of the Orthodox Study Bible, the first English study Bible produced from an Orthodox standpoint — the New Testament and Psalms in 1993, the complete edition with the Old Testament in 2008. Whatever the scholarly arguments about it, it put an Orthodox reading of Scripture into the hands of ordinary English-speaking readers who had no other access to one.

Fr Peter Gillquist's importance is not that he converted, but that he brought a community with him and then stayed to do the unglamorous work of settling it. The 1987 reception remains the largest of its kind in American Orthodox history, and the parishes founded out of it are ordinary parishes now — which is the point. A movement that had spent fourteen years outside any jurisdiction ended inside one, under a bishop, with its clergy re-ordained.

Through Becoming Orthodox and the Orthodox Study Bible he then became, for a great many English-speaking readers, the voice that first explained the Orthodox Church in terms they already understood. He is not glorified and this page implies no veneration; it records a priest whose particular gift was translation in the widest sense — carrying a thing intact from one language, and one world, into another.