Ex-FIEC church explains switch to Eastern Orthodoxy

The leader of a former FIEC-affiliated church which became Eastern Orthodox in September has been explaining why they made the move.

Hope Church Halifax, which was part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, has become St Hilda’s Orthodox Church, part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland. It now uses a Roman Catholic building, St Malachy’s, for its services.

One of the church’s leaders is Deacon Caedmon Clark, who was formerly known as Doug Clark before he took the name of his patron saint.

Speaking to en, he said: “We began to struggle when, as evangelicals, we came across clear statements in the Bible that were contradicted by the teaching of our evangelical tradition.

“The chief and most significant of these contradictions was around the words of our Lord at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body.’ After much study and prayer we realised that the historic teaching of the Church on the Holy Communion was correct; that in the Eucharist the bread becomes the body of Christ, and the wine becomes the blood of Christ – that this is the plain teaching of Scripture and the Church.”

This query about the Lord’s Supper, Clark said, led the church to question its other beliefs in relation to Scripture; the then- Protestant community concluded that they’d been mistaken into thinking that other people follow traditions but that evangelicals solely, and simply, believe the Bible. “This wasn’t true, we also had our own traditions and models of Biblical interpretation, but they were relatively new – 500 years old – and we were beginning to see holes in them,” Clark continued. “We again turned to Holy Scripture. What we read was that the Lord promised He would send His Holy Spirit to keep the Church from falling into error; we read that the Bible was sometimes hard to understand; that God has given us the Church to interpret the Scriptures and that it is the Church which is the foundation of truth, putting [guardrails] on the interpretation of Scripture.”

According to Clark, they concluded that there must be a “True Church” – their definition, “a church that has not changed its teaching from the days of Christ and the Apostles.” Through studying church history, Hope Church Halifax settled that for the first 1,000 years there was “One Church”. “That is not to say there weren’t disagreements or doctrinal developments in the first 1,000 years, but [that] there was an agreed way to sort them out, and to interpret the Scriptures,” Clark told en.

en approached the FIEC for comment.
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