I converted to Christianity from agnosticism in August of 1982 when I was 25 years old, and began preaching in front of Willard Building on the main campus of Penn State University a few months later.
I was happily Protestant for 14 years when in the fall of 1996, after saying something some students didn’t like about the Virgin Mary; an Orthodox undergrad and a Catholic Grad Student approached me. I had never heard of Orthodoxy before, and the grad student was the first Catholic I had met who could reasonably defend his faith. This led to months of debate with the two of them.
Finally in March of 1997 after debating with the Orthodox undergrad as to whether the proper authority in Christianity was the scriptures alone or Church tradition he challenged me to find the idea of sola scriptura, or “the scriptures alone” in the Bible. It was late Friday afternoon so I told him I would take the weekend to find it and get back to him on Monday. I spent the entire weekend searching through all my resources only to come up empty. On Monday afternoon I had to admit to my adversary that sola scriptura was not in the Bible. He then proceeded to show me scriptures that indicated that the Church and her tradition is the proper authority.
This ultimately drove me to the library to study the Church Fathers in order to find out what the Christian Church had always said was the proper authority. Needless to say what I discovered on this and many other subjects surprised me. It was evident from the first century onward that the Church was considered to be the authority.
Eventually this reading of the Church Fathers led me to convert to the Orthodox Church. It is the only Church I know of that was with the Apostles in the beginning, and is still here today, who has not changed the doctrine or the way worship, and so in my opinion is the true church of Jesus Christ.
