Fr. Joseph Huneycutt: All right. One more time, just for good luck.

Fr. Paul Solberg: This is Fr. Paul Solberg, of Christ the Good Shepherd Orthodox Mission in Concord, North Carolina, and you’re listening to The 153 on Ancient Faith Radio.

Fr. Joseph: So I’m sitting here with Fr. Paul Solberg in Concord, North Carolina. When Fr. John Finley was going to visit, he told me—he said, “I’m visiting Conkerd.” I said, “No, it’s Concord,” because I grew up about 30 minutes from here. Three syllables. Fr. Paul, welcome.

Fr. Paul: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here. I’m glad you’re here with us.

Fr. Joseph: What is the reason that you are here or that there’s a mission in, of all places, Concord, North Carolina?

Fr. Paul: When I think about what’s happening here in Concord, I think about the phrase of St. Paul saying that all things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to his purposes. In a brief synopsis of what happened with me, I was happily serving St. George Antiochian Orthodox parish in western New York when I started losing my vision, and I applied for retirement because of loss of vision in 2018, and Sayidna Joseph granted it so that in January of 2019 I moved down to North Carolina. Three months later, after seeing a specialist at the Duke Eye Center, they said to me, “You’re only allergic to the preservatives in your eyedrops. We’ll take you off the eyedrops,” and my vision was restored.

So I had 20/20 vision, a little correction to read, and then I asked Bishop Nicholas, “What should I do?” So I did pulpit supply, I helped our mission in Boone, North Carolina, for a while, and I received a phone call last September by Bishop Nicholas, and he said, “There’s a group in Concord that want to start an Antiochian Orthodox mission. Would you be willing to go there on Saturdays, two or three Saturdays a month, and to be with them and to kind of see what’s going on?”

Simultaneously to that telephone call, he was already doing a weekly Bible study. He would do a Bible study with the children for 45 minutes, there would be a 10-minute break, then the adults would come on for about an hour and 15 minutes. There was anywhere from 15 to 20 family units that were part of that Bible study that he was doing. So I came here to Concord on a Saturday and was asked to do a vespers service. They were meeting—because their parishes were closed—they were meeting outdoors. There were people spread out all over the place. Over half of the people were children. Even in the first service that I did, two chickens walked by and walked underneath the table, which was the altar at the time.

Fr. Joseph: Hey, come on now!

Fr. Paul: And they were visually kind of a distraction, but nonetheless brought smiles onto everybody’s faces.

We had the pledging families that were required, and we applied for mission status, and Metropolitan Joseph gave that to us on January 28 this year.

Fr. Joseph: And what do you think of North Carolina?

Fr. Paul: I think everybody would want to come to live here if they just could experience it and the people. It is growing at a fantastic pace. This mission meets on Saturdays. We still can’t meet at this particular location on Sundays. We hope that will open up in September. We already have organized the Antiochian Women, the A-Men group, the teen group, and we have 14 altar boys that serve in the altar that we divide up into teams. We average over a hundred people per worship service.

Fr. Joseph: Now, this is not normal, I must tell you, starting a mission so… well.

Fr. Paul: Well, God put this together. There was this group of people; many of them belonged to the same homeschooling network, and some of those that were in this homeschooling network were Orthodox Christians, and they came from a couple of other churches. So they received a blessing from their priest to start having reader’s services on this farm property. Ironically or interestingly, the family that hosted us, they are catechumens right now, and five of them will be baptized by Bishop Nicholas on August 7, and two of them will be chrismated—the parents. And they provided their house for these meetings the entire time until we could meet in a public situation.

There’s already been around 12 baptisms, and we have right now 11 catechumens. We have six baptisms and two chrismations coming up on August 7. It’s nothing that I can take credit for. God was working in the lives of all of these people. There is just a joy. In the secular world, we would say there’s a buzz. There’s a spiritual joy just being with these people. They’re fantastic. Most of them are 45 years of age or younger.

Fr. Joseph: We just finished recording a piece here for the Antiochian Online, the virtual convention, and one of the questions from an established parish was: How do we reach people to bring them into the Church? I know you said, humbly, that this is not your efforts. In fact, you don’t even live in Concord! You commute, to come…

Fr. Paul: We travel 50 miles to come here.

Fr. Joseph: To serve here. So I’ll ask you the question: What are some things that y’all have done, other than allow for “the buzz”?

Fr. Paul: Almost all of the people that are part of the mission right now have been aware of it through relational, one-to-one conversations with the people that began to attend here. We have a website; we’re on Facebook: we have some social media presence that way, but that’s what has transpired. We have not done any worship services, livestreamed services; we have not done that. But the one is through word of mouth.

But the second one is, then, that people have just seen the sign as they drive by, and they were curious. Others have been told about it by a bookstore in Concord. There’s a new bookstore; it’s called Goldberry Books, and when I first came there to that bookstore, there were two shelves of Orthodox books on it it with icons in the top. In that conversation… That’s now one entire unit in the bookstore. But that would open up conversation.

It would open up conversations with people that were Orthodox that lived in the area and worshiped in Concord, and they would talk about it with their friends and refer to the fact that there was an all English-speaking Orthodox presence in Concord. Other people would dialogue with the people that came there. Oftentimes we would be there. There’s a coffeeshop adjacent so that you could walk from the bookstore into the coffeeshop, so we would be sitting in the coffeshop or in the bookstore, and these people would come by and they would see me dressed as a clergy, sitting and meeting with people.

One day in particular, I’m in there having coffee, meeting with somebody who was interested in the Orthodox Church, and somebody else comes in and asks if she could join us, and an hour and a half later, the meeting was over with—she was on a one-hour lunch break—and now she’s a regular attender of the church.

What we kind of experience is that many of the people that have come to speak with me or that show up here that aren’t Orthodox have already heard of the Orthodox Church. They’ve inquired, they’ve gone online, many of them have read books. One gentleman showed me seven books that he had read—but he was here today, and he says, he keeps telling me, “I’m just happy to be an Episcopalian. I’m just happy to be an Episcopalian,” but what I’ve found out is that he loses his enthusiasm in saying that every time he talks to me.

Fr. Joseph: [Laughter] Thank you, Fr. Paul. The name of the mission in Concord?

Fr. Paul: It’s called Christ the Good Shepherd Orthodox Mission in Concord. We are so blessed, and we appreciate anybody’s prayers that could come our way. If you’re ever in the Charlotte area for whatever reason, check us up. Right now we worship on Saturdays, but we hope this fall in September to start worshiping on Sundays.

Fr. Joseph: Thank you, Fr. Paul!

Fr. Paul: God bless you. Thank you.