Saint Barnabas Orthodox Church began in the mid-1970s as an Orange County home fellowship. Over one hundred such fellowships countrywide were formed by men who left Campus Crusade for Christ in search of a model of the early New Testament church.
As these men studied early church history and the writings of the Church Fathers, they found the historical New Testament church of the first millennium still existed today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Thus began a ten-year quest to become identified with Eastern Orthodoxy while growing from small fellowships into larger churches. In 1987, their search for the timeless and unchanging truth of God culminated in the historical reception of Saint Barnabas Orthodox Church, along with sixteen other parishes numbering more than two thousand people, into the canonical Orthodox Church by way of the Antiochian Patriarchate. The story of our journey is recounted in the book “Becoming Orthodox” by Peter Gillquist. https://store.ancientfaith.com/becoming-orthodox-a-journey-to-the-ancient-christian-faith/
Since then, we have grown in the Faith, children have become adults, parents have become grandparents and seven men from our Parish have become priests.