Some of us find the recent turn to Eastern Orthodoxy among some in our churches quite concerning. This phenomenon is what has led us to conceive this issue of New Horizons. There are those in the pews and in the pulpit who have been part of this rather curious movement to Eastern Orthodoxy. We want to explore why Reformed folk would turn away from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to become Greek, Russian, or another form of Eastern Orthodox.

Perhaps the best place to start is to acknowledge that we can understand why broader evangelicals might make such a trek. The broader evangelical world is besotted with much theological pablum, and, perhaps even more relevantly, its worship is often self-centered, not God-centered, containing no hint of reverence and awe. Little wonder that those enmeshed in the broader evangelical world come to long for something more evidently transcendent, mysterious, and otherworldly.

Worship is not the only question, although it is an important one. The greatest proponents of and apologists for Orthodoxy, as can be seen elsewhere in this issue, see their greatest strengths, especially over against the bulk of Protestantism, as being unbroken continuity with the early church, thus best reflecting today, they argue, what the church since its inception has always been and done. This has, its partisans claim, netted Orthodoxy doctrinal stability, particularly in its adherence to conciliar theology (though only from the first seven ecumenical councils) and to a liturgical (and sacramental) fidelity and fullness absent in the Protestant world, which they argue is always given over to the latest craze. There are further matters, like Orthodoxy’s approach to Scripture and tradition, minus what Orthodoxy finds wrong with Rome, especially papal absolutism, and Orthodoxy’s seeing salvation as being too juridical in the West and better conceived as theosis, as it is in the East. This is a quick summary of what Eastern Orthodoxy perceives as its relative advantages over the whole Western church, Roman and Protestant.

Otherworldly Worship

Orthodoxy has great curb appeal for those seeking otherworldly worship, not only among evangelicals but also when what passes for Reformed worship is more evangelical than Reformed in character —perhaps quite contemporary and informal in style. Even when Reformed worship is better conducted, taking its cues properly from Scripture as to what constitutes worship, it lacks the ceremony that some associate with truly ancient worship.

However, while we ought to eschew a kind of worship that lacks reverence and awe, that does not mean Orthodoxy is the answer. The Westminster Confession of Faith makes it clear that worship in the New Covenant era is different and better than that of the Old, making this contrast:

Under the gospel, when Christ, the substance, was exhibited, the ordinances in which this covenant is dispensed are the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper: which, though fewer in number, and administered with more simplicity, and less outward glory, yet, in them, it is held forth in more fullness, evidence and spiritual efficacy, to all nations, both Jews and Gentiles; and is called the new testament. (WCF 7.6)

Eastern Orthodoxy perpetuates a misunderstanding of the matter: New Testament worship, according to them, is not simpler or less outwardly glorious. We, however, as Reformed, believe that the kind of worship that marked the life of Israel when it was the church underage, ought not to mark the church now. That’s what’s in view in WCF 7.6. We believe that our worship should be defined scripturally in terms of its elements, such as preaching, praying, singing, etc. And such is not elaborate and high-flown but something that can be done in any place on the Lord’s Day, requiring only a preacher and the Word, and water and wine for the sacraments, all of which comprises a comparatively simple liturgy.

Certainly, some people like the casual liturgy of evangelicalism. Similarly, some Reformed folks come to find a regulative-principle approach too confining and gravitate toward the iconography of the East, together with all the mystery and pomp of its worship. I’ve had people ask me whether I like great art and argue on that and related bases for Orthodox worship. Indeed, I do like great art (and architecture), and that’s why I regularly visit great museums. I don’t look for that in worship, however, because that’s not what biblical worship involves or what it properly is.

So why do some seek this in the liturgy of Orthodoxy rather than going to the places I go to for art? I think such art-starved Christians actually make quite an “evangelical” mistake here. Just like some people want the sort of contemporary Christian music they hear played on the radio in the worship service, along with drama, dance, and whatever else might go on in such evangelical worship services, others feel a need in their life for what’s represented in Orthodox liturgy—the music, art, and drama—and seek it in church instead of in the concert hall or the museum.

Both the seekers of a casual liturgy and the seekers of a high church liturgy, then, are wrongheaded about what properly comprises biblical worship. Both look for things they like instead of realizing that divine worship is about God and his glory and is to be done in keeping with his directives. We can go elsewhere for great music and art. The notion that what one likes must be in the worship service afflicts both our broadly evangelical friends and our friends who are converting to Orthodoxy. This is why in both cases partisans of such worship urge us who remain Reformed with words like this: “You just have to try it. It feels so right. It feels like I’ve come home.”

Longing for the Experiential

I think that both responses to worship, in that they both seek comfort and security, appeal especially to us in an age in which all seems so threatening, as society continues to darken, throwing off its Christian past, everything seeming topsy-turvy, and technology advances at an increasingly fast pace. What might make Boomers comfortable—worship with music and the informal approach they like—doesn’t work for others, who realize that the church has been around for millennia and want the kind of tradition and antiquity that Orthodox worship brings and the sense that it has been around forever. The experience of what feels like ancient worship may provide the security that folk threatened by our current culture crave. Orthodoxy focuses more on worship, liturgy, and what one experiences, than on doctrine. It tends to look down on the Western Church in general, as noted, especially on something like the Protestant doctrine of forensic justification by faith alone, finding the transformative at the heart of salvation rather than the juridical.

As the Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, Orthodoxy has not advanced theologically much since the late eighth century. In a highly contentious age as ours is, when polarization and politicization have created much dissension everywhere, it might seem safer to abandon mere doctrinal disputes, as the Eastern Orthodox might see them (perhaps even regarding them as rationalistic and obscurantist), for the sheer experience that Orthodox worship provides for the senses and not merely the mind—which is again Orthodoxy’s caricature of Protestantism particularly, especially the Reformed faith.

In contrast, for many Reformed Christians, we cannot think of anything more comforting in this life than the assurance that we are as justified now as we ever will be. As the line in Toplady’s hymn has it, the saints in heaven are “more happy but not more secure” than we. That sort of assurance is not to be found in Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, which do not embrace and teach that salvation is all by grace alone through faith alone.

Learning from Orthodoxy

Truth be told, all Reformed Christians fall short, even though the Reformed faith, properly confessed, is Christianity come into its own. We do indeed find things among Reformed Christians that Orthodoxy charges us with: rationalism, a downplaying of the sanative aspects of salvation (championing the forensic at the expense of the transformative), low ecclesiology, and the like. I reject that the remedy, however, to all this is to be found, respectively, in an apophatic approach that tends towards irrationalism at points, in salvation by theosis, and in a churchianity that swallows up all else, including doctrinal development throughout the history of the Christian church.

We certainly have the things to learn from Orthodoxy—like the proper integrity of the hypostatic union and that rationalism (and hyper-Calvinism) is a problem—but these are not to be learned by giving over to Orthodoxy’s understanding of the work of Christ, the work of the Spirit, and the church. Let’s learn what we can from our Orthodox friends so that we can be better Reformed Christians and, at the same time, labor to convince them of the rightness and joy of the Reformed faith.

The author is president of Mid-America Reformed Seminary. New Horizons, June 2026.