The Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship
Nurturing the roots of Orthodoxy in Dixie’s Land
The Philip Ludwell III Orthodox Fellowship is an association of Orthodox Christian believers from diverse jurisdictions who seek to serve the Church’s evangelistic mission in the South by promoting the enculturation of the Orthodox faith into the South’s unique ethos and “older religiousness.”
Rationale
The Orthodox Church teaches that there is one human family, derived from the old Adam and recapitulated in the New, and that the Orthodox Faith is for all people in all places at all times. Nonetheless, Christ, in his Great Commission, bid his disciples to “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations (ethnoi).” From the day of Pentecost, when visitors to Jerusalem first heard the Gospel in their own languages, the Church has recognized that the one human family is composed of many distinct peoples, each of which has an absolute claim on the promises of Christ and his Church.
The peoples who settled the South beginning in the early seventeenth century created an enduring culture – itself composed of multiple sub-cultures – that was distinct from that of the puritan settlors of New England: a culture tied to the land and traditional folkways and steeped in Biblical and classical idioms. Poet Allen Tate observed that Southerners developed a sacramental view of the places and life of the South but, being largely Protestant, did not have a sacramental religion. These qualities predispose Southerners to receive the revelation of the fullness of the Gospel, to be found only within the embrace of the Holy Orthodox Church.
Philip Ludwell III was the first known Orthodox convert in North America. In 1738, the 22-year-old grandson of the royal governor of Carolina and son of an influential member of the Royal Governing Council sailed to England, where he was received into the Orthodox Church in a small Orthodox parish in London. Because of the prevailing laws and attitudes of the time, Ludwell could not practice his faith openly. He spent nearly two decades in Virginia, thousands of miles from the nearest Orthodox parish. Yet he remained steadfast in spirit and piety. So, when he returned to London in 1760, he had his three daughters baptized into the Church and received permission from the Holy Synod to publish his English translation of St. Peter Moghila’s Catechism.
Though Ludwell founded no parish in North America — at least not one that survived — through his piety he sowed seeds which bear rich fruit even to this day. All Orthodox Southerners are the spiritual descendants of Philip Ludwell III. The purpose of the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship is to cultivate this vineyard by ensuring that the planting takes deep root in the fertile soil of Southern culture by fostering a creative synthesis between Orthodoxy and those material, cultural manifestations indigenous to the South, with particular respect to the sacred arts of architecture, iconography, and music as well as social manners, folkways, and foodways.
