How many Orthodox converts stay in the Church? In our 2024 study of converts in 20 parishes, the answer is that, for those converts received between five and ten years before we gathered our data (i.e., 2023), at least 81.8% were still Orthodox. The actual retained number is undoubtedly higher, because another 9.2% are unknown, and it’s likely that some of those unknowns are also still Orthodox. For more recent converts, received less than five years before the study, at least 94.5% are still Orthodox, with another 3.7% unknown. (Link below)

Shortly after Pascha, I had a great conversation with Fr Theodore Dorrance of St Catherine Greek Orthodox Church in metro Denver, about the convert surge his parish is experiencing. Here's a clip, and in below I'll post a link to the full interview.

@ludwellorg on FB: Philip Ludwell III is the first known convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Americas. He was a prominent figure in pre-revolutionary Virginia and a relative by blood or marriage of many great early figures in American history. The scion of one of the largest landholding and politically prominent families in early Virginia, he was born at Green Spring near Williamsburg on December 28, 1716, making him a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, with whom he shared a friendship. One year after his marriage in the summer of 1737 to Frances Grymes, herself the granddaughter of a governor of Virginia, the young Ludwell traveled from Williamsburg to London, England. Twenty-three years later, in 1761, the Orthodox priest in London, Fr Stephen Ivanovsky, wrote: “In 1738, during the incumbency of the late Hieromonk Bartholomew Cassano at this holy Church, an English gentleman named Ludwell, born in the American lands and living there in the province of Virginia, came to London seeking the True Faith, which he, with God’s help, has swiftly found in the Holy Graeco-Russian Church. And so on the 31st of December of the same year he was confirmed in the same with the holy Chrism.” Link below.