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This is a nice article and expresses much of what I have heard from converts in our parish. Our converts seem to come from ECUSA or Evangelical Protestantism; the former mostly because of what they see as the apostasy of ECUSA from traditional Anglicanism and the latter for precisely the reasons outlined here. I've seen very few converts from the Roman Church, though I'm told that two families are coming this weekend who have been chewing on the idea of Orthodoxy for several years now and one of our priests is himself a convert from the Melkite Rite of the Catholic Church. We do have some Maronites in the parish, but that almost doesn't count as conversion (actually, I suppose the Melkite conversion doesn't either).

As many of you know, I just returned from Greece. While there we discussed the Faith with a number of lay people and the nuns at the monastery outside the village. They expressed great delight when told about the level of conversions to Orthodoxy here and were very pleased to hear about the move to greater use of English in the Divine Liturgy and that there is definitely a trend towards an American Church here. They inquired about how we finance and run the parishes here as they seem overwhelmingly convinced that the Church of Greece will, and ought to, be disestablished sooner rather than later.

The only thing in this article which really concerns me is the line that the congregation which is highlighted was accepted en mass, along with their priest after only 6 mos. of catechesis. This isn't nearly enough time to inculcate the Faith in the majority of people, certainly not in an entire parish as in this case. The Antiochians, unfortunately, have a penchant for doing this. I suspect most of the converts on FR will agree with me that their understanding of living in an Orthodox manner changed rather dramatically over the first few years of their life in Orthodoxy. I'm not saying that catechesis should take years, though in some cases it might, before chrismation, but I do feel that it takes more than six months and there is a definite danger in parishes made up entirely of converts with no long experience in the Faith lead by a priest who apparently attended at best a very abbreviated seminary course. Orthodoxy changes everything, and I mean everything, about a person; it becomes part of the very cells of our bodies and the souls within us. That doesn't happen in six months.