While Berry says he is one of few black Americans to be ordained an Orthodox priest-the first is believed to be Father Raphael Morgan, ordained in 1907-the church has a long history in Africa, particularly Ethiopia, and draws growing numbers of people of color in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church blossomed into the Russian Orthodox Church, Greek Orthodox, and others. The two sides mutually excommunicated each other over a variety of long-standing differences.Ĭatholicism would continue to dominate the West, with the Protestant Reformation later sprouting a variety of other denominations. His small Orthodox church sits near the cemetery where his ancestors were buried.Įastern Orthodox Christianity is the product of a schism within Christendom in 1054, which separated it into the Catholic Church in the West, and the Orthodox in the East. He now commemorates his family’s history, and the history of African Americans in the Ozarks, with a small museum featuring his family’s history. “When I look at the struggles that some of them have gone through, I’m embarrassed by my own struggle.” We had quilts from the underground railroad in our house,” he said. We had his slave chains and neck irons in our house. The transition, he said, felt natural and easy, compared to the struggles his family had been through. “And 20 minutes later he said, ‘Now we should set a date,’” Berry said. The process typically takes time and education, but Berry said the bishop asked to have a conversation with him. Soon, he said, he approached a bishop he knew in Chicago and asked whether he might ordain him. “Their whole life depended on their relationship with other-worldliness.”īerry was baptized again with the church’s ancient traditions. “It wasn’t the church that I was looking for,” he said. At that Virginia church, Berry said, he felt the icons telling him, “We are the flowers in God’s garden that you’re looking for.”īerry is a third-generation African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor’s child, and says he’s always “had a love for Jesus.” But as a young man he became disillusioned with the Christianity he’d been exposed to and drifted from the church, leaving home at 15. The icons in the Virginia church also reminded Berry of his childhood, when his grandmother told him that there were so many races of people because they were all flowers in God’s garden. Together, they’re transforming a tradition largely tied to white ethnic groups in America, and reaching out to others in the African-American community with their message. “And that was my first introduction to the universal church, not just in theory or in words but in actual depictions of saints from different countries who were always part of the development of Christendom,” he said.īerry is one of a small but growing number of African Americans moving from Protestant churches to Orthodox Christianity, inspired by the Church’s long history in Africa, claim to authenticity, and reverence of black saints. The priest told him that they were actually replicas of third century icons, linking back to a Christianity that originated hundreds of years ago. “My first thought was that these were just some very liberal white people who were doing some outreach and trying to appeal to black people,” Berry, now known as Father Moses, told The Daily Beast. He would never forget the day he first encountered St. He and his wife were living in Atlanta at the time, and visiting a friend when they stopped by. When Karl Berry walked into an Orthodox Church for the first time in 1983, he saw icons of black saints.
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