15 years ago today I was received into the Orthodox Church.
In a way that may be incomprehensible to Protestants, this isn’t at all like flirting with First Assembly of God and the “Plymouth Brethren” in college, or my affiliating with a Presbyterian Church instead of a Bible Church when I moved to Dallas from the Chicago area, or like finding myself without a church home in a small town in Oklahoma (although we went somewhere every Sunday), or like joining a Conservative Baptist Church when we moved to Arizona, or becoming Presbyterian again during law school or becoming Christian Reformed thereafter. Those were denominational shifts born of personal taste for a particular congregation or pastor where the doctrine was more or less okay by me.
Fifteen years ago, in contrast, formalized my then-recent and rapid shift from a denominational mindset to an ecclesial mindset, wherein faith in Christ and faith in His Church is a single act of faith, not two (as the late Richard John Neuhaus put it).
Protestants and I now are in many ways “separated by a common faith.”
I was reminded of this last night as I searched for a needle in a haystack (I didn’t find it) and stumbled on to the website “Rapture Ready.” This website shamelessly and recklessly misrepresents Eastern Orthodoxy (and I suspect it equally badly misrepresents Roman Catholicism, Lutherans, and anyone else not connected to John Nelson Darby‘s pandemic heresy) and even has the gall to call orthodoxy “sectarian.”
But about two things, the website is right.
First, “Orthodoxy, while using the same biblical words as evangelicals, mean[s] something else.” Where the schismatic author errs is thinking that Orthodoxy’s position is the deviation, Evangelical foolishness the norm. The website’s “rapture” nonsense was utterly unknown in the cosmos until about 200 years ago (and is denied sotto voce by more than a few more sensible Evangelicals still today).
The other thing about which it is right is that to know Jesus Christ is life eternal. It is surely possible to be within Christ’s Church without knowing Him. That is an important caution that Priests issue routinely, not a reality that we somehow overlooked.
But I am very skeptical that it is possible to know Him without His Church, particularly when one without arrogantly rejects 1800 years of Christian history, despises the sacraments, arrogates to himself a personal papacy of infallible interpretive abilities (“every man a Pope!”), and reduces knowledge of Christ to subjective emotionalism.
That’s not what “knowing Christ” means any more than memorizing the Creed’s Christological affirmations means one “knows Christ.” To put it bluntly, such a sectarian likely is not talking about the real Christ, but a a substitute (an “antiChrist”).
I’ve written before about the surprising relative unimportance of right doctrine as compared to knowing Christ. I value my Orthodox Church home far more for being the place where I meet Christ, and having met Him find healing for my soul, than for being the place where I hear, and am tied down to a Procrustean bed of, precise and narrow doctrine.
Glory to Jesus Christ for bringing me into His ark!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
It has been almost as many years for me too. I’m glad you survived the “awakening to reality” stage and are still here. Many years!
Congratulations, reader John!
It is coming to the US, and meeting converts to Orthodoxy that made me, cradle Orthodox, look again into my faith with one burning question “What is it that I have and take for granted that you (as in “y’all” 🙂 don’t in other ‘churches’? Why do you sacrifice so much to become Orthodox?” I love reading converts’ stories because they teach me about my faith and make me see treasures that I never appreciated before. May God help you and keep you on this narrow but right path.