Saint Brendan Orthodox Mission

Our Worship

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The Shorter Saint Colman Prayer Book, and the Saint Colman Prayer Book, are the primary liturgical books in use at Saint Brendan Orthodox Monastery Mission. PDF file at the link for the Shorter Saint Colman Prayer Book.

People of Saint Brendan's

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Saint Brendan Monastery Mission Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Mount Royal

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Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Mount Royal Monastery (ROCA), Easter Triduum 2011.

Dom Augustine (Whitfield)

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Memory Eternal.

Easter Triduum 2010 - Saint Brendan Mission

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Abbot David of Our Lady of Mount Royal at Easter Triduum 2010, Saint Brendan Monastery Mission, Lynn Haven, FL. Altar Server Ari Adams. Also pictured - Deputy Joseph McQuillan, RIP.

Paschal Triduum 2009 - Saint Brendan

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Dom David and Brother George of Holyrood House at the Sarum liturgy, Saint Brendan Monastery Mission, Pascha 2009.

England Pilgrimage 2010

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English Rite Orthodox Liturgy at St. Magnus Martyr - London, England November 6th, 2010.

Fr. Hieromonk Michael (Wood) of Saint Petroc Monastery, Cascades TAS assisted by Ari Adams of Saint Brendan Monastery Mission, Lynn Haven, FL.

The Servant of God Joseph

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Pray for the servant of God, Joseph, departed this life in the hope of the Resurrection. Faithful father, pious Orthodox Christian and member of Saint Brendan Monastery Mission, beloved and respected Peace Officer in Walton County, Florida, native son of Mobile, Alabama.

Picture above is of Abbot David of Our Lady of Mount Royal at the graveside service.

History of the Mission

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The seeds of Saint Brendan Monastery Mission began with a small group of Orthodox Christians in Tulsa, Oklahoma who were seeking to form a Sarum rite Western Orthodox mission with ROCOR in 2004. When the core of the group moved to another diocese in 2005, an Orthodox Study Society was set up in Lynn Haven, FL under the patronage of Saint Petroc Monastery (Hieromonk Michael (Wood), and in contact with Holyrood House (Dom David (Pierce)which was in the process of seeking reception to ROCOR under the direction of Dom Augustine (Whitfield) of blessed memory, at the Chapel of the Holy Virgin, Dormition of Our Lady of Mount Royal Monastery in Jacksonville, FL.

Weekly Mattins and Vespers began in Lynn Haven, FL in July 2005 using the Saint Colman Prayer Book - containing the Sarum Liturgy in English, and the Day Office of Sarum in English. In 2007 a member of the Society participated in the St. Eanswythe Pilgrimage in Folkestone Kent and retreat at Capel-Le-Ferne led by Fr. Hiermonk Michael of Saint Petroc Monastery. In 2008 the Society was reorganized as a Monastery Mission with the elevation of Metropolitan Hilarion of New York City as First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. In 2009 Saint Brendan held their first Paschal Triduum services according to the Sarum Rite at a borrowed Anglican Catholic parish. Dom David (Pierce) of Holyrood House, having been formally received into ROCOR in the previous year, was the celebrant - along with Brother George assisting at the altar, and Ari Adams chanting. We had guests from the Antiochians and Anglican Catholics. Later in the year, the convener of Saint Brendan met with Metropolitan Hilarion at a Pastoral Conference in Atlanta, GA to begin discussions towards ordination.

In 2010 Dom David (Pierce) was elevated to Abbot of Our Lady of Mount Royal - the oldest Western Rite Orthodox monastery - at the retirement of Abbot Augustine. Metropolitan Hilarion in response to a question of whether the community was in the Eastern Archdiocese advised our community on March 28th, 2010 that we were directly under the Metropolitan. The 2010 Paschal Triduum was again served by Abbot David at a borrowed Anglican Catholic parish in Panama City, FL, with Ari Adams assisting with chant and in the altar. We had guests from the OCA and the Anglican Catholics, as well at Saint Brendan's seven Orthodox members, one catechumen, and two inquirers. Deputy Joseph McQuillan of Walton County Sheriff's Office was chrismated on Holy Saturday. Saint Brendan's later sent two candidates to an Ordination Conference at Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne, WV at the Metropolitan's direction. In July Dom Augustine Whitfield reposed, followed in September by the servant of God Joseph McQuillan of Saint Brendan's Monastery Mission. Graveside services were said by Abbot David of Mount Royal at Whistler Cemetery in Alabama. In October, at the Metropolitan's suggestion, the convener flew to the UK to visit the ROCOR WRITE English Mission and was made an altar server while assisting at liturgies in Devon, Dorset, and in London.

In 2011 the members of the Mission traveled for the Paschal Triduum at Our Lady of Mount Royal Monastery in Jacksonville, FL. A visit was also made to Dom Augustine (Whitfield's) grave, and to St. Photios National Shrine in St. Augustine, FL.

In 2012, members of the Mission will be traveling to Our Lady of Mount Royal Monastery for Christmas services.

Coming Home to Christ

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Have you ever wondered why there are so many Christian churches? Where they’re all going? Where they all came from? And where – among so many choices – Christ is lovingly calling you to find your true and lasting home?

Once upon a time, for a thousand years after the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, there was one Christian Church throughout the known world. Like a great and noble tree, this Church, springing forth fresh and alive from its original planting by our Lord when He dwelt on earth, spread its branches far and wide in east and west, north and south. This great tree flourished, being full of the life and wisdom flowing into it from Christ Himself. Occasional storms troubled its branches, but essentially it remained strong and whole.

Then, after a thousand years, one branch of this tree – a vast and leafy limb – broke away from the main trunk planted by Christ, but pretended to itself that nothing had changed: that it was still alive, still part of Christ’s tree, still rooted in the faith and teaching He gave to His Apostles. It even, after a while, forgot it had broken away and came to think of itself as the one true tree planted by Christ. Unwilling to acknowledge its separation from Christ’s original Church, this separated branch, living off the residue of life that remained in it, enjoyed for a time an illusion of life, prosperity and growth – like a branch full of buds still putting forth blooms for a season after being cut off from the mother tree.

Still, all was not well with this broken-off branch, and soon it was remarked how it had lost its original life and had begun to change and wither. This branch was the western – or Latin, or Roman Catholic – church. And those who first noticed the change and decay were the Protestant reformers. These men and women, protesting the changes and decay, sought to regain the true faith and spiritual health that had been lost. They in turn broke away from the diseased limb, but neglected to regraft themselves onto the original Church whose existence they had forgotten. Instead they themselves continued to divide and break up into countless smaller branches – the thousands of denominations we see today – none of them grafted onto the living Church of Christ.

Meanwhile firmly rooted and planted by Christ Himself, the original tree of the true Church grew and flourished – just as He said it would – watered and nourished by the undiminished stream of life and truth flowing into it from Christ. This tree – the only one planted by Christ Himself -- is known today as the Orthodox Church. (Orthodox means holding right beliefs and worshipping in the right way.) Despite persecutions and martyrdoms throughout the centuries (including the twentieth century as one of the fiercest and bloodiest in its history), this original and true Church has remained alive and strong to this day, rooted in the soil of ancient truth and wisdom and holy tradition. By an accident of history and geography, this Church continued to grow and flourish almost exclusively in eastern countries – Greece, Rumania, Russia, etc. Its presence in the western world was minimal and obscure – largely forgotten – until the end of the second millennium.

As the twentieth century unfolded, countless eastern Christians, driven by political and social upheavals (such as the Communist revolution in Russia), emigrated to the western lands of Europe and America, bringing with them their ancient Christian faith and tradition, the original true Church of Christ – the Orthodox Church.

Unlike the western (Latin or Roman Catholic) church which, until very recently, had forbidden liturgical services in the local languages of its people, the Orthodox Church almost invariably has used local languages (e.g., Greek, Russian, Arabic). In the original countries this use of a “homely” language brought people into a close relationship with their Church and its services. When these people came to the west, bringing their Church with them, the varied languages and cultural forms sometimes suggested to westerners that Orthodoxy was a foreign and exotic faith.

In reality, beyond the unfamiliar externals of language and different rites, westerners have begun to recognize – after a thousand-year absence – the true Church that had existed once in the western world: the ancient Orthodox Christian Church as it had existed in England, Ireland, Italy, France, Scandinavia and all of Europe before the breakaway in 1054AD of the Roman church and its subsequent alterations of the original faith and the invention of new and erroneous teachings.

In the twentieth century westerners began to experience – and to deplore – the withering and decay of their familiar western churches. Some also began to look more closely at the Orthodox Church, now present among them, and to find there what they thought had been lost: the true faith of the Gospels and the authentic and original Church founded by Christ and preserved by His grace for two thousand years.

Today the western denominations seem to be collapsing in a moral vacuum, torn by controversies which are the stuff of daily news: rejection of traditional morality and teaching, loss of the devotional life and spiritual disciplines such as fasting and abstinence, rampant sexual scandals, feminist and politically correct revisions of Scripture, abandonment of the ideals of holiness and the spiritual life, as well as of its traditional heroes – the saints and martyrs who lived and died wholly for love of Christ and His Church. All these phenomena reflect the decay and withering that follow upon separation from the one true tree of Christ’s Church, a process of withering that has gone on now in the west for a thousand years.

Some western Christians, sincerely seeking the true Christian faith, and desperate to restore order, work and hope for a reform within the western churches and denominations. But the whole branch of western Christianity, once cut off from the trunk of Christ’s true Church, cannot be made healthy and alive again except by being regrafted onto the living Church, abandoning all false teachings, and returning gladly and humbly to the authentic faith and tradition of Christ’s one true Church – the Orthodox Church.

Slowly but steadily, Orthodox Christians, now transplanted into all western lands, have begun to recognize their missionary task of awakening their western brothers and sisters to their lost Christian heritage, summoning them to return home to the Church their fathers had lost a thousand years ago.

True to its tradition, Orthodoxy has translated its services and prayers into most western languages (in the USA, English) in order to make the faith fully accessible and “homely” to all who seek the true and original Church of Christ found in the pages of the New Testament. Some Orthodox groups in the United States still cling to their old world culture and languages, but for the most part Orthodoxy in America stands ready to welcome its western brothers and sisters home to the family of Christ’s true Church.

Orthodoxy has also begun to recognize that westerners, despite their thousand-year separation from Christ’s Church, possess in their ancient worship a rich and holy tradition from the first millennium when all the west was still fully Orthodox – in Ireland, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and all of Europe. One of the great saints and wonder-workers of the twentieth century, Saint John of San Francisco, blessed and encouraged this recognition: “Never, never, never let anyone tell you that in order to be Orthodox you must also be eastern. The west was fully Orthodox for a thousand years, and her venerable Liturgy is far older than any of her heresies.” This western-rite Orthodoxy, with its traditional liturgy of the Mass and the Sacraments, restores to westerners in a homely and familiar form the Orthodox faith and worship they lost a thousand years ago.

Today at the dawn of the third Christian millennium, westerners are awakening to the spiritual bankruptcy of their churches and denominations. Amid the dark and stormy tumult of our times, the bright beacon of Christ’s true Church beckons with a welcoming light. Like a venerable and ancient tree, planted by Christ Himself, and now, after a long absence, replanted in western lands, the Orthodox Church is still full of sap, still fresh and green and flourishing with the only food that can satisfy the hungry hearts of modern men and women.

If you have felt yourself tossed about in the tumult of the modern world, hungry for the light and truth and wisdom of Christ, come and explore Orthodoxy – the real “faith of your fathers, living still.” Come and find your true home – and your eternal salvation – where Christ wants it to be found – in the true Church where He promised He would remain for all time, even to the end of the world.

Discover the true faith of your fathers – come home to Orthodoxy!

(copyright, 1998 Christ the Savior Monastery)

Faith of Your Fathers - Living Still?

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For generations, countless thousands of Christians – both Catholic and Protestant – have sung with assurance the words of the hymn:

Faith of our fathers living still,
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.

The singers thus expressed their confident belief that their faith and their church were in fact true reflections of the faith and church of their fathers.

In recent years, as churches have altered their beliefs, their moral teachings and their worship, many Christians find themselves anxiously wondering sometimes whether the faith they hold is indeed the faith of their fathers. Have you found yourself ever wondering whether you belong to the true church which Christ Himself established?

If you are Protestant, you have to wonder–with nearly 30,000 existing Protestant denominations to choose from–whether the church you belong to is the one Christ had in mind when He said, “On this rock I will build my Church.” Notice: one church, one rock. Not many churches on the rocks!

If you are Catholic, you have been told that you belong to that one church built on the one rock. But with the many changes in belief, morals, and worship you have seen over recent decades in the Roman Catholic church, you might understandably wonder how stable and solid is the rock of faith on which your church claims to be built. The faith “once delivered to the saints” is not something that should be easily shaken or changeable.

The fact–as any honest seeker examining the history of Christian churches will discover – is that for the past thousand years, both Roman Catholics and Protestants have been tinkering with the “faith once delivered to the saints.” What both Catholics and Protestants have thought of as the faith of their fathers is not the faith of their earliest fathers – those closest in time and place and history to the apostles and fathers who walked and talked with Christ Himself and received from Him His true and authentic teaching and His commission to build one Church on that firm and unshakable foundation.

At one time, for about a thousand years, that one church flourished throughout the world, keeping intact the faith and worship delivered to it by Christ Himself. After that first millennium, the church in the west – known today as the Roman Catholic church – began to wander from the tradition and faith “once delivered to the saints,” inventing new teachings about the Holy Trinity, the structure of the church, the powers of the Bishop of Rome (the Pope), etc.

Four hundred years later, western Christians, disturbed by the changes wrought in the western church, protested these changes and sought to reform the church, bringing it back into line with the original one church of Christ. Instead, this movement of protest and reform (the Protestant Reformation) splintered into the nearly 30,000 denominational fragments which comprise Protestantism today.

So the question with which this article began is a real and burning one: Is the faith of our fathers still living? And if so, where can it be found?

When He founded His one church, our Lord Jesus Christ assured His followers that it would exist until His coming again, and that hell itself and all the powers of evil would never prevail against it. So we have the promise of Him who is Truth that His Church is still alive in the world–that the faith of our fathers is living still.

How then, given 30,000 varying Protestant choices and a Roman Catholic church that, for a thousand years, has wandered from its moorings as the true Church of Christ–how then, and where, is this one, true Church to be found?

That Church is alive and well–as it has been for two thousand years, and will be until Christ returns in glory at the end of the ages–and is known as the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy means “right believing, right worshipping.” By calling itself Orthodox, the Church wishes to identify itself as the original Church which has steadfastly refused to change or abandon any of the teachings and beliefs given to it by Christ through His apostles. Historically, the Orthodox Church exists in unbroken continuity with the Church found in the pages of the New Testament, unlike the Roman Catholic church which separated itself from the Orthodox Church after a thousand years of co-existence, and the Protestant denominations which separated themselves both from the Roman church and from each other over differences of belief and observance.

The faith of your fathers–the Orthodox Church – is alive and well. If you have felt homeless and distressed in the ferment of the modern western churches, in the uncertainties of shifting worship – perhaps God is calling you home to His true Church, calling you home to the faith of your fathers–to Orthodoxy.

Don’t turn away from that invitation to come home to your Father’s house, to Christ’s true Church. To His first disciples He offered the invitation, “Come and see.” That invitation and offer He extends today to you–to return to the faith of your fathers. Come and see – and come home to Orthodoxy.

(copyright 1998, Christ the Savior Monastery)