In Becoming Orthodox, Father Peter Gillquist tells the story of a nationwide fellowship of evangelicals, whose leaders had begun as staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1960s, setting out to find the most perfect expression of the church they could. Though some of them were already ordained as Presbyterian or Baptist, or had backgrounds with charismatic and other traditionally conservative evangelical churches, the more they searched, the less satisfied they became. Eventually, they decided to form their own denomination, and trying as best they could to make it conform to all the New Testament had to say about the early church, they launched another Protestant church.

But eventually someone noticed that the church they'd come up with was similar to the Orthodox Church, which they hadn't even considered in their initial search, so foreign to them was the idea. And on that realization, they went back to the source documents and found some additional changes that made their church look even more like the Orthodox Church.

Finally, they merged their fellowship of nearly 2,000 believers across the country into an established Orthodox jurisdiction in communion with the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople. But theirs is only a small portion of a similar pattern of long-time Protestants, and some Catholics, converting to Orthodoxy in the United States, and, to some extent, in Great Britain. Over half of all the Orthodox priests in the United States now are converts from other faith communities, and the movement continues.