Below are some exciting updates from Share the Faith supported parishes. Share the Faith is actively seeking to help more priests, but we need your help to do that. An anonymous donor has agreed to match all funds raised in the next three months, dollar for dollar, up to $100,000! Many mission priests work 7 days a week to provide for their families and to keep their missions growing. Stipends from Share the Faith reduce the financial burden on the priests, and allow them to devote more time to their families and to ministry, rather than to secular employment. Now is the perfect time to help as any amount you donate will be doubled!
Please visit our matching funds donation page to find out more!
STF is supporting two priests battling cancer. Please keep them in your prayers.
Now, on to our updates from the mission field!
St Anna Orthodox Mission
Father Andrew Short
I’m very glad to receive this request from you. Please forgive my delay in responding to this. I am undergoing treatments, scans, and further evaluation for my esophageal cancer. Meeting with doctors daily. Scheduled to begin another round of intensive treatments lasting 6 weeks in the next few days. The clergy from St Ignatius in Franklin, TN are sharing the load of covering the services at St Anna in my absence and we are in regular communication about the needs and parishioners at St Anna. Since my parish update in July, we have baptized 3 infants, rejoice at the announcements of 2 more pregnancies, welcomed another catechumen among our people (we now have 4!), celebrated our Patronal Feast and annual church picnic for the Holy and Righteous Ancestor of God, St Anna and celebrated the Orthodox Christian Marriage Blessing of a founding couple in our parish who were married before becoming Orthodox Christians. We have also spoken to 3-4 additional inquirers who are seeking to become catechumens. In August we celebrated the Feast of the Dormition and in September, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Additionally, on Labor Day, our youth and young adults and their parents completed the annual 5 mile Duck River Float Trip. I’m limited in my capacity and energy but still managing to occasionally meet individually with key leaders as well as making use of texts, emails and phone calls to help keep up the continued progress and God-sent growth at St Anna. Thank you for your continued support and prayers, especially during these days. We treasure your prayers. God bless you.
Father Andrew Short+
All Saints Orthodox Mission
Father Elijah
LODI, CALIFORNIA
Brief background history of our mission
All Saints Orthodox Mission was started in November 2021 as a ROCOR Western Rite Mission with the blessing of Metropolitan Hilarion of blessed memory. We started off with 5 baptized members (my family) and 10 inquirers. We met in a chapel we built in my converted garage in Stockton, California. At this time almost everything we had as a mission we had to build ourselves from scratch.
We met in that garage chapel for 9 month. In July 2022, the Lord in His great mercy and love, provided a store front space for us to rent (at a monthly rental rate one third of the market rate). The store front was located in Lodi California, so we officially moved All Saints to Lodi, where
we are the first and only Orthodox Church in the city of Lodi (population 60,000+) In the last year in in Lodi we have seen an increase of inquirers, and by God’s grace have
made 20 catechumens in the last 2 years, most of them have been in the last 12 months. In total we have 17 baptized members (1 recently reposed), 20 catechumens, and over a dozen regular inquirers.
But beyond the numeral growth, the biggest joy in our mission is seeing people start their journey of repentance. Our mission is made up of many different people from different cultures, religious backgrounds, and economic backgrounds. We have many in our mission who were formally homeless (and nomadic) youth. We have seen
catechumens who have come from backgrounds and have renounced being Neo-Nazis, Trans, Wiccans, occultists, and Thai Buddhists. We also baptized a former Roman Catholic Sub- deacon.
Highlights of the Last Year
Some pastorally precious and holy moments for me this past year:
1) Moving out of the garage and into our own rental space.
2) Cooking for and hosting on 20+ people at our home Thursdays evenings for our dinner and Catechesis time.
3) Seeing a Neo-Nazi burn all his Nazi music and paraphernalia.
4) Having a former trans person (who is now a catechumen) tell me after a pilgrimage to venerate the Iveron Hawaiian Icon, that she feels the Theotokos is helping her to learn to be a women again (after hating her own femininity for many years and rejecting it to try to become a “trans man”)
5) Seeing the writings of Saint Saphrony of Essex help a devote Thai Buddhist practitioner renounce Buddhist and become a catechumen (eventually leading to his whole family becoming catechumens)
6) Seeing a formally homeless young man in our parish get a steady job, and even start budgeting and having a bank account and credit for the first time in his life. And also seeing another young man who was also formerly nomadic and homeless, just get his CDL and start a career as a truck driver. These two young men have gone on to help 11 of their friends become catechumens.
The last couple years have not been easy, I was unemployed for 10 months while founding the mission, and during that time our family lived on food stamps, mortgage deferral, and what little money I could make selling homemade sourdough from my home. Now I am employed, and work 40 hour a week (remotely) as a contracted Analytical Linguistic Project Manager (Contract ends June 2023). This has provided for my family, but has made it so that I don’t get any days off during the week, so I work 7 days a week without a break (between my secular work and work at the Mission, averaging 60-80 hour work weeks).
Opportunities And Challenges
Our mission is currently in the process of opening a bookstore and reading room/cafe. The goal of this is to provide a place for people in our community to be introduced to our parish and to Orthodoxy in an approachable way. Most people in our city have never heard about Orthodoxy, and this can serve as a way of introduction for them.
One of our big challenges as a parish is transportation and housing for parishioners. Many of our parishioners, especially catechumens, are unemployed or underemployed. Although we have worked hard to help find employment for many of our parishioners in need, the cost of living in our area is still very expensive, and about 1/3 of our parishioners do not have their own form of transportation. This makes it hard for everyone to attend services, catechesis, and pilgrimages. We hope to get a (used) Church Van in future to help with our transportation needs. We also hope to someday get some land outside of Lodi to build a future Temple, while in the meanwhile using the land as an Eco Village and Educational Center for Sustainable farming. This would help provide a home base for prayer and Orthodox community, but also
provide transitional housing for those in need in our community.
Acknowledgment and Gratefulness
I would like to thank Share the Faith for everything they have done to help and support out mission. I would also like to specially Fr Angelo for all his
words of encouragement and guidance. He has been very helpful in supporting our recent growth as a mission. We started this mission with no funding and no financial support. Share the Faith as been the first outside organization that has stepped up to help financially support our mission. This financial support from Share the Faith means so much to us and helps our mission in so many ways. One way it has helped is that it has helped alleviate some of the financial burden for my family and me and allows us to be able to afford to cook for 20+ catechumens and inquirers every Thursdays. The fruit of this since receiving funding from Share the Faith has been that we were able to make 9 new catechumens on a single Sunday, bringing our total number of catechumens to 20. Glory to God!
Being a bi-vocational priest of a new mission is very hard, but the support from Share the Faith has given me the hope that someday I may be able to dedicate all my time to serving our parish and not be torn in two directions needing to work at a full-time secular job while also trying to tend to the full time needs of our parish.
Photos of our beautiful parish can be found on our website.
Christ is in our Midst!
Father Elijah+
Saint Tikhon Orthodox Church
Rev. Fr. John Cook
Well we are preparing to go to the Western rite conference in Sarasota Florida next week. Since starting with Share the Faith, St. Tikhon is getting ready to Baptize two, starting another Catechism class once I return from the conference and we have had eight new parishioners.
Father John+
St. Brendan the Voyager Orthodox Church
Fr Mark Hodges
From parishioner Royce Light:
My name is Royce Light and my wife, Justine, and my three children (Boone, Elise, and Boaz) have been attending St. Brendan the Voyager Orthodox Church in Bullhead City, AZ since 2022.
I was attending church and surrounded by kind people. I could never make a meaningful connection to what was being taught. At the time, worship, fellowship, and even love were vague concepts to me. I desired to know what they meant. I made no real progress in truly understanding any of them. Although I spent much time reading the Bible (even learning Hebrew and Koine Greek), attending small groups, and being involved in various ministries, I bore little spiritual fruit. In an attempt to find Truth (as giving up was not an option), we bounced between several churches. This eventually took our family from Honolulu, Hawaii to Hackberry, Arizona.
At the time I learned of Orthodoxy, I was serving as a deacon at a Bible church in Kingman, Arizona. It so happened that the lead pastor was getting rid of his 38-volume set of Early Church Fathers and I agreed to take them. Upon reading about the Seven Ecumenical Councils, the Didache, and the like, I was quite eager to visit an Orthodox Church. Doing an internet search, I found that the closest Church was St. Brendan the Voyager in Bullhead City, Arizona. Though we live an hour and a half away, this would be a small price to pay for finally coming to the Truth. Perhaps it was rash at the time, but when my wife and I decided to visit St. Brendan’s, I resigned from my position as deacon and left our church.
St. Brendan’s has been a life-giving place for us. Through the participation in the Holy Mysteries, this is quite literal. Father Mark and our new family have been welcoming since the beginning, instructing us in the True Faith and demonstrating the fullness of the Orthodox life. Everything we had long hoped for in Christ’s Church we have found in Orthodoxy. The once far-off notions of Worship, Communion, and Love are now astonishingly clear. Everything has new meaning. Indeed, Christ, through his Church, has made all things new. This new life would not have been possible without St. Brendan’s and Father Mark, to which and to whom we shall always be grateful.
Myself, my wife, and three children were baptized and chrismated into Holy Orthodoxy at St. Brendan the Voyager Church on August 20, 2023.
“We have seen the True Light! We have received the Heavenly Spirit! We have found the True Faith! Worshiping the Undivided Trinity, Who has saved us.”
+
From Justine, who has been with us for just less than a year (newly baptized in late August):
Born and raised in an evangelical household, I went to church faithfully, never deeply questioning what I was taught, yet always seeking something more as I grew older. My search for “more” landed me in a “Christian” cult, and that was the beginning of a downward spiral in my life. Meeting my husband, Royce, in 2013 was an act of mercy and kindness of God. Though I was a person full of sin, chaos and confusion, Royce patiently loved and accepted me. By the grace and mercy of God, Royce dragged me out of the cult, and we got married, with him vowing to love God the best he knew how. Throughout our marriage, we continued our involvement with various churches, but it always eventually resulted in lacklusterness, disappointment, and drudgery.
After moving to Arizona from Hawaii during the pandemic in 2020, our final involvement in an evangelical church resulted in great disillusionment for my husband, along with serious questioning and rejection of the movement we had been in for years prior. Royce’s unwavering rejection of our previous church experiences/doctrines ignited the same questioning in myself. I began conducting my own research and I knew I needed to go straight to the primary sources: the Early Church Fathers. I only wanted to find the church denomination that behaved closest to the original Church of the Apostles.
To my astonishment, I found that the Orthodox Christian Church did not just behave like the ancient Church; it *is* the original Church! Both my husband and I knew we had found it. This is what we would be willing to drop our nets for. We did a DuckDuckGo search and found St. Brendan’s Orthodox Church, and became catechumens soon after. During the weekend of the Feast of the Transfiguration in August 2023, we were baptized and chrismated by Father Mark Hodges into the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
I shall be eternally grateful to finally have found our Home. Though I continue to struggle with my sins daily, I feel extremely fortunate to be in the continuously flowing stream of God’s healing and wholeness through the sacraments at St. Brendan’s Orthodox Church. Since our Baptism and Chrismation, there has been more love in our family. I personally have learned much by being with our brethren at St. Brendan’s and remembering their good, humble, loving examples. During Confession, I have only felt God’s love and forgiveness through Father Mark Hodges, even when I thought that my sins were too great and would certainly cause him to dismiss me in anger or disappointment. I also appreciate Father Mark’s love for my three children. Even if our three year old doesn’t quite understand the Sacrament of Confession, he never misses an opportunity to get in line, kneel and bow under Father’s stole, and receive God’s grace and blessings. Glory be to God!
+Fr. Mark Hodges
St. Andrew the Apostle
Since last update (3 months), 5 brought into the Church, current 7 catechumens one of whom one is waiting to schedule baptism. We are very happy to see this progress for Holy Orthodoxy.
Post by SMM Coordinator – Eric A. Tweten
