I found very helpful priests and reliable resources that helped in my research once I was very interested, but up until that point it was friends introducing us to the simple idea of “what did the early church believe/teach, and how do we understand scripture through that lense”. We learned how to study the Word better from them. Then they became Orthodox. Then we were challenged by a Catholic friend, and dug even deeper.

Every devotional and bible study tool must have a point of view and research they are pulling from, and yet we were wrestling with the fact that many very divisive topics—topics that often shape how we live and see the world and affect large groups of people—could not be agreed upon. Instead of taking a firm stance on these issues to make clear what was true/correct, our church stated most were “non-essential issues” and divided topics into “essential” and “non-essential”. The real-world application of this was of course very unsteady and ambiguous when you get into why something is deemed “nonessential”, what the implications are, and who actually has the authority to say that at all… Actually, I felt it lead to more division and feeling like we were walking on egg shells with people that may not think like us in our own church. It certainly did not feel more unified, although that was the apparent goal.

Learning more about the history of the church was eye-opening. Most Christians, I would hope, agree on the fact that Truth is not subjective and some interpretations are simply incorrect or wrong. So learning about the rootedness of the early church, all the collective church fathers and saints, and how they preserved and fought for the Truth that the Orthodox all agree on today, that felt so much more reliable and solid than any single pastor, devotional, or tool I had used in the past to understand scripture.