ON THE THIRD DAY of Easter, I stood in front of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine. With me was a prominent scholar of American religion who was visiting Eastern Europe for the first time. We were watching a priest and his flock process around the cathedral with icons, incense and crosses. "Have you heard that more Americans are becoming Orthodox?" she asked me, smirking slightly. "Smells and bells. One more way to have someone tell you what to do and what to think."

Her remarks touched on a question of increasing importance in American Christianity. With trends toward mega-churches and worship as entertainment, and with heated debates in some denominations about the ordination of homosexuals, American Christianity seems to be moving in a less orthodox rather than a more orthodox direction. In the United States, Eastern Orthodox Christianity remains a very small religions group (just 1.3 percent of the population). To many American Christians, Orthodoxy is an obscure and foreign type of religion.

But the observation of the visiting scholar was not incorrect. The past several decades have seen an increase in conversions to Orthodoxy in the U.S. Frederica Mathewes-Green writes that nearly half the students in Orthodoxy's two largest American seminaries--Holy Cross and St. Vladimir's--are converts. The number of Antiochian Orthodox churches in the U.S. has doubled--to over 250 parishes and missions--in 20 years. The Antiochian Church, unlike most Orthodox organizations in the U.S., has committed itself to seeking converts in North America and sees itself "on a mission to bring America to the ancient Orthodox Christian faith." The missions organization of this branch of Orthodoxy estimates that 80 percent of its converts come from evangelical and charismatic orientations, with 20 percent coming from mainline denominations. In 1987, Peter Gillquist, a former leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, and 200 others in a single evangelical congregation made national headlines when they were chrismated (or confirmed) into the Antiochian Orthodox Church. In the ensuing years a slow trickle of converts has followed them. Daniel Clendenin suggests that while Or thodoxy may be too small to have an effect on American religion as a whole, conversions may be having a "seismic impact" on the way the faith is practiced in the U.S. In the context of American Christianity, Orthodoxy may seem archaic and irrelevant. Yet it has a strong appeal to many. The question is: why? Is it exoticism, as my colleague suggested? Is it a desire for stability in the midst of rapid culture change? Are conversions a form of protest or, as Gillquist writes, a form of homecoming?

In order to answer these questions, I decided to sit down with some converts and listen to their stories. What I learned is that converts find in Orthodoxy an antidote to American Christianity's individualism and commercialism. While some of them seem to be reinventing Orthodoxy in America's image, others are struggling to reinvent themselves in Orthodoxy's image. This contrast can be striking.

In central Colorado, far from the traditional centers of Orthodoxy in Constantinople, Moscow and Mount Athos, is a small monastery where five monks live together on the sagebrush foothills of the Buffalo Range. Their abbot, Archbishop Gregory, is a renowned iconographer and something of a renegade. The denomination to which he belongs, the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (ROAC), is not in communion with most other Orthodox, who it claims have strayed from the true faith via the evils of "ecumenism." Archbishop Gregory has joined and left several different groups on the fringes of Orthodoxy, and the Colorado monastery itself has changed hands more than once.

Brother John is a young monk who joined the monastery during his years at Trinity University, in San Antonio. A former Presbyterian, Brother John recounted to me his early dismay at the liberalism he saw in the Presbyterian Church. He felt that the church was in "open denial of Christ and the apostles" and not adhering to biblical principles, and had been corrupted through accommodation to the world. At the end of his first year of college, he was seeking to be baptized into the Orthodox Church. Not only had he found the Bible-adhering church he sought, but he was also convinced that it was the one holy church founded by Christ and the apostles.

Most Orthodox churches do not rebaptize converts from other Christian denominations since the Orthodox teach that baptism is a one-time-only sacrament. Those who have been baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit need only to be chrismated--anointed--to be received fully into the church. But Brother John felt that his baptism as a Presbyterian was not truly a baptism. His local priest in the Orthodox Church of America (OCA) refused to baptize him, and he grew frustrated. Much in the OCA seemed impure and wayward to him, and he began to look into groups farther from the Orthodox mainstream. His search for greater purity ended in an encounter with then Arehimandrite Gregory in the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. The leaders of the ROAC consider the Russian Orthodox Church to be apostate and have broken communion with all those whom they consider "ecumenical."