How Converts Are Received

What you'll notice

It's a Saturday morning before Liturgy, and two adults are being received into the Church. They've stood together in the back for months, both in the same catechism class, both wearing white today.

The first one is led to a big tub in the middle of the nave. The priest prays over the water, breathes on it, and makes the sign of the cross in it with oil. Then she goes under three times, all the way, and comes up gasping while the choir sings. She's dried off, dressed, and anointed with a small brush on her forehead, eyes, nostrils, lips, ears, chest, hands, and feet, while the priest says "The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit" at each one.¹

The second one never goes near the water. He renounces some things, confesses the faith out loud, and is anointed with the same brush and the same words. In the old Russian form he starts in the narthex (the entrance hall) and is led into the church holding the end of the priest's stole.² Ten minutes, and he's done.

By the end of the morning they're both Orthodox Christians, both receive Communion from the same spoon, and nobody in the room thinks one of them got the discount version. If you're the visitor in the back, though, you have a reasonable question: why the difference?

What it's called

The first person was baptized and chrismated. The second was received by chrismation. Chrismation (Greek chrisma, Slavonic miropomazanie, Arabic al-mayrun) is the anointing with myron (chrism), a fragrant oil consecrated by the head of a self-governing Church. It's the Orthodox counterpart of what Western Christians call confirmation, and it always follows baptism, whether the baptism happened ten minutes ago or thirty years ago in another church.

The rules behind the choice are the canons (Greek kanon, "rule" or "measuring stick"): decisions of councils and Fathers, collected over the centuries.

What's actually happening

Every convert does three things, in the Church's own order: confess the Orthodox faith, be baptized, be chrismated. Everyone does the first. What changes from case to case is whether the Church counts a baptism the person already has.

If you were never baptized at all, or your baptism didn't use water and the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you'll be baptized. If you were baptized with water in the Trinity's name in another Christian body, your bishop decides how you're received. Many bishops receive such people by chrismation, often after a first confession. Some receive them by baptism. The parish priest applies his bishop's practice; he doesn't invent his own. Hapgood's service book says so in a rubric: the power to receive converts belongs properly to a bishop, who may delegate it to a priest well versed in the faith.³

Field Note: who does what. In the OCA, "the general practice throughout the OCA parishes" is to receive someone baptized in the Trinity's name "through the Sacraments of Chrismation, Penance, and the Eucharist, together with a statement of faith"; someone baptized with another formula is baptized.⁴ Hapgood's 1906 book for the Russian Church in North America did the same for Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed Christians, and Armenians, each renouncing specific errors before the anointing; its notes add that people baptized by pouring in other churches were anointed, not rebaptized. Of the Greek form it says there are "several differences," "but they are not important."⁵ In the Greek Archdiocese, people baptized in the Trinity's name are ordinarily received by chrismation. In Antiochian parishes, the bishop and priest decide case by case. The bishops of the Russian Church Abroad ruled in 1971 "to baptize all heretics who come to the Church," allowing chrismation only "if strictly necessary" and with a bishop's express permission; the older, gentler practice, they said, existed "to facilitate their conversion."⁶

Which way you'd be received is your bishop's decision, applied by the priest who catechizes you.

Why it matters

Every Sunday the whole congregation says, in the Creed, "I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins."⁷ Paul said it first: "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:5). There's no such thing as a second baptism. That's exactly why the question of reception is handled so carefully: the Church is trying to say truthfully, for each person, whether the one baptism has already happened.

That's a judgment about a life, and the Church has never pretended it could be made by formula. Around 374 Saint Basil the Great reported that the ancients sorted outsiders by "the names of heresies, of schisms, and of unlawful congregations" and treated each differently, and where practice still differed, "it is right to follow the custom obtaining in each region."⁸ The bishop stands in that tradition. He's not grading your old church. He's welcoming you by the rule he's been given.

Where it came from

The canons are the Church's house rules: decisions made at councils, mostly about practical problems, which bishops apply to real people. Two words describe how. Akriveia (exactness) is the rule applied as written. Oikonomia (household management) is the rule applied with the flexibility a good father uses at his own table; it bends the rule for a person without replacing it. On converts, nearly every side calls its own practice the rule and the other side's the concession. This entry lays out who does what and leaves the refereeing to the bishops.

The canons on converts are old, and they already contain the range you saw on Saturday. Taken together they sort outsiders three ways: some are baptized, some are chrismated after a written renunciation, and some are received by the renunciation alone.⁹ Canon 7 of the Council of Constantinople (381) is the classic case. Arians, Novatians, and others renounce their errors and are "first sealed or anointed with the holy oil upon the forehead, eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears"; Eunomians, "baptized with only one immersion," and Montanists are received "as heathen."¹⁰ Canon 95 of the Council in Trullo (692) repeats the lists. None of those canons names any modern church, because none existed yet.

In the third century, Saint Cyprian of Carthage held that heretics and schismatics coming to the Church must be baptized, and Pope Stephen of Rome held they need not be; the East kept both principles alive rather than choosing one.¹¹ The later record is a sawtooth. A council in Constantinople in 1484 received Latin converts by chrismation and a signed confession of faith. Moscow under Patriarch Philaret required baptism (1620–21); Moscow in 1667 went back to chrismation. Constantinople ordered rebaptism in 1722, in retaliation for Latin missionary work in Syria, and in 1755 Patriarch Cyril V's Horos called Western converts "unholy and unbaptized." In 1875 Constantinople wrote that the Eastern Churches followed the Horos while Russia followed 1667.¹² The Rudder, the standard Greek canonical commentary, argues in a note on Basil's first canon that Latins are heretics and not merely schismatics, and so should be baptized.¹³

Practice has never been uniform. By the time Orthodoxy reached America, most converts from other Christian churches were received by chrismation, though some jurisdictions and monasteries baptize. Two saints the Church venerates came in without rebaptism: Saint Elizabeth the New Martyr, born a Lutheran princess, received by chrismation, and Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, a former Eastern Catholic priest, received by confession of faith in 1891.¹⁴ Nobody calls them half Orthodox.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: when someone is received by a different rite than you were, say "Welcome home" and mean it. The bishop's decision is the Church's decision.

If you're visiting: when you become a catechumen, you'll be asked how and where you were baptized, if you were; bring the details if you have them. That, measured against your bishop's practice, settles the rite. The Path In covers the catechumenate itself. However you're received, you'll be fully Orthodox, with the same Communion, the same Church, and the same saints as everyone else in the room.

Field Note: "You weren't really baptized, so you're not really Orthodox." You'll hear this, usually from someone who means well. No Orthodox bishop who received you thinks so. The ancient canons themselves receive some people by chrismation, which means the Church has been doing it on purpose for seventeen hundred years.

Go deeper

• Ephesians 4:1–6; Saint Basil the Great, Letter 188, canon 1 (NPNF2 8); the canons of the Second Ecumenical Council and the Council in Trullo (NPNF2 14).
• Hapgood, Service Book, "The Office for the Reception of Converts," pp. 454–467.
• Father George Dragas, "The Manner of Reception of Roman Catholic Converts into the Orthodox Church" (1998), the whole history in one place.
• The Path In and, for life after reception, The First Year After Reception.

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