I think I was a teenager when I started critically engaging the hamartiology I had been brought up with. The rhetoric in the 80s and into the 90s from the mouths of televangelists called every disease or disaster a punishment for sin. Someone once said–and I do not care to find out who it was exactly–that the terror attacks of 9/11 were God’s punishment for America’s sins.
But eventually my young inquiring mind perceived that this was not how the world worked–from my own theological understanding and experiences, God did not punish sin, like a tyrannous enforcer of lex talionis–yet we do have to face the consequences of our actions, whether sinful or virtuous. Sin brings suffering, whether delayed or immediate, and whether the effects are felt individually or collectively.
What I was to learn later in Bible college was that I was reacting against Western Christian penal substitution and the Calvinistic teaching of Total Depravity, which had leached into the Pentecostal tradition that I was brought up in via Southern Baptist and Reformed influence. It was here that I started to untangle the myriad influences and theological strains of thought that made up my early life, being brought up at the peak of Evangelical culture in America.
What is an Evangelical?
It wasn’t until very recently that I learned that Evangelicalism in the United States is comprised of three separate traditions: those of the Pentecostals, the Charismatics, and the Southern Baptists. Due to the fiery, black-and-white, polemic style of most Southern Baptist preachers, it was easy for Pentecostals, who faced a dearth of scholarship and quality resources from our own tradition, would accept SBC preachers as authoritative. This meant that clearly non-Pentecostal (often Reformed) theology came in to influence spiritual formation and the worldview.
I grew up as a Pentecostal pastor’s kid, attending an Assemblies of God Bible college from 2010–2012. My entire childhood took place during the golden years of the Christian music industry. While CCM was booming, many lives were being changed and people were being saved through all kinds of outreaches across the country, and Falwell’s Moral Majority was becoming a cultural juggernaut in American political life. I became a teenager at the peak of the purity culture movement, and just after the introduction of the radical new ideas touted by the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye.
Before the relativism of postmodern thought crept in, before my generation slowly grew up and started leaving their churches (giving us the deconstruction discourse and the exvangelical crowd on Twitter), there was the stable foundation of American Evangelical Christianity, which was and is just as much a cultural movement as it was religious. But what I had been assured was watertight theology and biblical interpretation, and was the truest expression of the early church was in fact not true in the slightest.
Questioning: Theological Beginnings
I did a bachelor’s in the missions program at Bible college, having received a call to missions in Europe aged 17, and there I had my first basic theological education: systematic theology classes; a class on the history of Pentecostalism and theology; hermeneutics; survey courses in Old and New Testament, and a few upper level OT courses.
It was in some of these classes that I continued to question, following the growing realization that I was not on board with a conception of the sin nature in humans being “totally depraved,” and puzzling over the complex and hopelessly confusing multitude of Western atonement theories. Gaps in biblical interpretation were not filled and were instead explicated away, creating what I felt were convoluted thought pretzels to make sense of seemingly incongruous details.
One key example: when I attended the AG General Council meeting in Indianapolis (1999) as a child, another child my age prayed over me in order to receive the gift of tongues, and she prayed in Spanish–but she was not Latina. Although I have been prayed over several times for the gift of tongues, to this day I have still never spoken in tongues. During Bible college, I asked a teacher if the gift of tongues could be given to include the supernatural knowledge of earthly languages, rather than only heavenly languages–he said that this phenomenon was not attested throughout history, or in the Bible. (Bear in mind in Acts 2, each person converted that day hears their own earthly language being spoken in the upper room.) This was just one instance of the spiritual dissonance that was increasing for me as I went through my education.
One of the most beautiful experiences I had, which made me painfully aware of what I was lacking, was when we traveled to a nearby beautiful church to discuss the theology of communion. It was the first time I had been in such a beautiful church, which had stained glass windows. We took communion together in complete silence–no music, no fancy lights–and I was struck to the heart by the beauty of the solemnity and awe with which we approached God that day. It was a shocking contrast to the era of “Jesus is my homeboy” t-shirts and the flippant, overly casual, and outright disrespectful attitude that Pentecostal Christians can sometimes approach God with.
I left Bible college silencing the unanswered questions in the back of my mind, and craving a faith that approached the God of the universe with reverence and solemnity.
Dabbling in Dublin: Catholicism
One of my Bible college professors, during a meeting in which I was seeking pastoral council, recommended I read from the mystic St. John of the Cross and his Dark Night of the Soul, and I rejoiced when I saw that someone else had had the same experiences I had, throughout the course of his walk with Christ. Years later I discovered Doctor of the Catholic Church, Theresa of Ávila, and had the same feeling of meeting a friend who deeply understood me. I learned then the value of reading the works and lives of the saints, and began to crave the depth of tradition and profound, mystical spirituality that I could not find reflected back to me in the Pentecostal church.
The summer before I moved back to Dublin for my master’s, having already served one short-term missionary term with Assemblies of God World Missions from 2014-2015) I happened upon a sermon from Catholic priest, Father Mike Schmitz, speaking about the True Presence in the Eucharist. Pentecostals have ordinances, rather than sacraments, and for Pentecostals the communion elements of grape juice (not wine) and bread are merely symbolic of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
His thesis centered around one verse, John 6:66, wherein many of the disciples leave Jesus after being told they must eat and drink His body and blood, or else have no part in Him. He simply posed the question: “If communion was only ever meant to be symbolic, and the disciples knew that, then why did they abandon Jesus?” He said that these devout Jews would have had to have been so offended by the idea of consuming real flesh and especially blood, that this could be the only reason why they left Him in their droves. I was convinced immediately.
My master’s was under the Catholic institute in Trinity College Dublin, called the Loyola Institute. Through this time I was deeply exploring Catholic theology in all of my classes, while at the same time attending biweekly Eucharistic adoration meetings in the parish of St. Paul’s of Arran Quay, a vibrant young adult group, and the occasional Mass. I was enthralled by the reverence with which my Catholic friends adored the consecrated host, and loved the silent and solemn atmosphere in these meetings. Up to this point I had hoped to live in Dublin long-term, for decades even, and I did sincerely consider Catholicism as an option for me, especially considering the communities I was a part of.
But there were too many things I found impossible to digest, or even flat-out wrong and unnecessarily harsh in Catholic theology. Papal infallibility struck me as simply the ecclesiastical version of a classic European monarch; the requirement of celibate clergy was clearly the reson for many if not all of the abuses in the Catholic Church; and especially the Scholastic impulse to overanalyze every aspect of the mysteries of the Church exhausted me. I loved the sacramental and liturgical aspect of the Catholic faith, but there was too much that was deemed too definite in a realm that I knew was hardly ever black and white.
Theosis
Within the first month of my master’s, one of my teachers mentioned the Orthodox term theosis–the process of becoming like God. I was immediately intrigued, and made a mental note to come back to the idea when I started the research phase for my dissertation. I was drawn in because my focus in ministry up until that point had been the issue of discipleship, or spiritual formation. I was passionate about the lifelong process of what in the West is known as sanctification; becoming more and more like Christ. I wanted to teach people very practically how to read their Bibles, cultivate a prayer life, and continue to grow in their faith their entire lives.
Just before I started studying Orthodoxy, I met someone from Thessaloniki, who was raised Orthodox and came back to his faith as a teenager in a charismatic community called Metamorphosis. We met at the AG church I was attending in Dublin and became fast friends. God knew I would need someone to walk alongside me throughout the journey, who understood both my charismatic upbringing, but had a firm grasp on the finer points of both Orthodox catechesis as well as the Greek language.
He was the living vector of the Orthodox faith for me, and throughout our friendship in those years, we had countless conversations in which he would explain concepts I was reading about, or correct my thinking with what he had been taught in Greece. I grew in the depth of my relationship with God in a way I never had before. I was coming closer and closer to the Orthodox Church.
That first summer after I met my Greek friend, I wrote my master’s dissertation on fasting and compared Orthodox praxis with the paucity of its practice in the American Evangelical context. Meanwhile I was reading texts like Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, and learning that all the places where I found impossible tension in Catholic theology, the Orthodox perspective immediately resolved. The seven sacraments are called the seven sacred mysteries, and the Orthodox do not even attempt to outline just how something like “transubstantiation” takes place during communion (this word is a Western Christian word), let alone systematize their theology. Hamartiology bleeds into Christology which is inextricable from soteriology… Orthodox priests can be married. And for the Orthodox, sin is viewed as an illness from which we need healing, rather than an crime that must be punished and corrected.
By 2019, two years after beginning my master’s and a year after meeting my Thessalonian brother, I realized with much trepidation that perhaps God was calling me to become Orthodox. I couldn’t understand it, as it made no sense for my current context. I had no desire to cut myself off from the faith communities I was a part of in Dublin, but I promised God I would do it whenever the time was right. It would be six years before I even remembered making such a promise.
Germany and the Doctorate Years
A year and a half after I moved to Göttingen to do my doctorate, I was sporadically attending a local Evangelisch church, that is, Lutheran. I had tried several churches and was deeply frustrated, and had contented myself with attending services once or twice a month in a tiny church where I was the youngest person by several decades. I would come and listen and leave–and speak to no one, except to say goodbye to the pastor. All done in one hour, I would trudge back home. I was depressed and had fairly resigned myself to the fact that this is how my faith was going to die; that at last after so many rounds of theological education, I would become a classic case of an exvangelical academic.
By this point I was still interested in Orthodoxy, and had even bought myself a small komboskini bracelet (black prayer rope) to try and revive my prayer life again. But I had forgotten the promise I made to God, forgotten that I had even wanted to be Orthodox. Yet through a series of events, made friends with two Ukrainian housemates who attended the local Romanian Orthodox church here, and by early March 2025 I was a catechumen, and was baptized then four months later, on July 6th. Finally home!
In part two I will do a little comparison and reflection on my spiritual life now, and look back at Evangelicalism from newly-Orthodox eyes.
Leslie Flores 