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From Restless Protestant To Orthodox Believer: A Journey Of Belonging Mystery & Healing | Kyle David
What if the church you’ve been searching for all along is the one you didn’t know existed? Kyle David shares how a lifetime of sincere belief still left him split between Sunday performance and weekday drift—until a medical collapse forced brutal honesty about faith, pride, and the limits of self-reliance. The story begins with restless church-hopping across megachurch stages and traditional pews, and moves through a pandemic-era return to the sanctuary that felt more like rebellion than routine.
We trace Kyle’s path from church fatigue and a divided life to a near-death crisis that reawakened faith, reverence, and daily discipline. The journey lands in Orthodoxy, where mystery is honored, repentance is central, and community finally feels like home.
• Protestant upbringing across multiple denominations
• dissatisfaction with casual worship and lack of reverence
• gap years from church without renouncing belief
• pandemic as a catalyst to reexplore tradition
• medical collapse, surgery, and dependence on grace
• honoring science while affirming providence
• music as a metaphor for spiritual discipline
• Eastern sense of mystery aligning with Orthodoxy
• finding belonging at St. Anthony the Great
• repentance and Christ as the physician of souls
That restlessness turns into a reckoning when COVID pneumonia, a hurricane evacuation, and months in hospitals strip away pretense. Kyle talks candidly about respecting modern medicine and still seeing providence at work: surgeons and science as channels, not the source, of healing. From that edge of life, he stops “presenting” as Christian and starts practicing one—daily prayer, Scripture, repentance, and a slower, steadier walk. We explore how Orthodoxy’s humility before mystery resonates with his Korean heritage and why the Church as a “hospital for the soul” shifted his understanding of mercy, sin, and healing.
Music threads through the conversation as a living metaphor. As a drummer, Kyle learned to keep time within and adjust to the room without losing the beat. That’s how he approaches faith now—discipline that makes space for grace. The turning point came at St. Anthony the Great in San Diego, where belonging finally felt honest: fewer smoke machines, more reverence; less hype, more healing. If you’ve felt the gap between head knowledge and a changed life, this story will meet you where you are and invite you deeper into a faith that doesn’t explain away mystery but teaches you to stand before it.
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To find the Orthodox Church and realize like this is what I was searching for my whole life and I didn't know it existed. Everything that came before that, which was, you know, basically all the various Protestant denominations, like, that was all valuable because it brought me to the point where I was searching for something more, you know, like and it gave me the foundation, it gave me what was important. And and it's funny that um St. Anthony's was founded my birth year in 1994. No way. So it's like, yeah, they're waiting 30 years for me to arrive.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's cool. That's cool.
SPEAKER_02:But uh my mom's still like Methodist, or she attends a Methodist church, and she's talking about maybe the dissatisfaction she's having there. Um and the more that I go into orthodoxy, the more that I I feel satisfied. You know, yeah, I had like a really crazy like near-death experience, um, extended medical like hospitalization, like 200 days. So like that's also kind of like, I mean, that's a huge part of my journey that was like the nail in the coffin that like this is real, God's real, yeah, uh, Christ heals, you know. Like basically, I wouldn't be alive if I, you know, obviously, uh without uh what I personally believe was like divine intervention.
SPEAKER_00:Hi, Jeremy Jeremiah here, Cloud of Witnesses. We're really excited that you're here. Thank you for giving this video a chance. Kyle David is telling his story, his journey to orthodoxy. I encourage you, especially this time of year, maybe you're doing some laundry, maybe you're about to do the dishes, have this playing in the background. Hear Kyle tell his story. I guarantee it, you will resonate with him, if not in many parts, certainly in at least a few. So please enjoy. Remember that the full uncut, unedited interview with Kyle David is at our Patreon, available right now. But we do hope that you sit back right now and enjoy this conversation with Kyle David.
SPEAKER_02:My name is Kyle David. I'm an Orthodox Christian, uh and I attend uh St. Anthony the Great Antiochian Orthodox Church in San Diego, California. My background, I was born and raised, just general Protestant, uh, born and raised in Hawaii for 18 years. And, you know, I was born into a Christian family, attended church as from my earliest uh memories as a child. Uh it was just a general, full, full gospel, four-square, non-denominational, kind of like a megachurch in Honolulu, my hometown. Uh, I attended a Baptist school for nine years, attended a Methodist church, a Korean American Methodist church in Hawaii in my high school years. Uh, when I was interested in discovering or just taking my faith a little bit more seriously after college, I attended here in San Diego, uh, Korean American Presbyterian Church. Um, tried the historic Heritage Lutheran church for a few services. And then eventually, my ultimate dissatisfaction was with non-denominationalism, which was the last church that I attended semi-regularly before I discovered orthodoxy. And the dissatisfaction for me was that I just never felt like I belonged or fit into whatever church that I attended. And I knew about all the theology. I always uh knew about just the head knowledge. Um, after a certain point in my adult life, I would say that I did begin to also like take more of this um emotionally to heart as well, rather than just having these abstractions and being aware of those things. And yet, given those two things that, you know, are both very important interpersonally and uh from a cultural perspective, I felt like I never really fit into whatever type of church that I attended, whether it was the more classic and traditional Protestant churches or the hyper casual, no tradition, non-denom churches. And I couldn't understand personally why I felt that way, or what was either wrong with those types of environments or what was wrong with me. I thought maybe I'm just a bad Christian, maybe I just need to take this more seriously. And yet, year after year, I never felt like I found the right church for me. I come I came close to it and I found good communities, and I was definitely inspired over the years by all the different people and places that I attended. And yet, at the end of the day, there was ultimately a dissatisfaction with I think the style of worship, which was just like a cold play concert or a UTU concert of smoke machines, um, the worship singer or leader with a you know backwards snapback, ripped jeans, taxon hoodie. And I just instinctually knew that that was not the kind of environment that I wanted to be a part of. And yet, even in the more traditional higher church environments like a Lutheran church, I just felt that something was just missing from it. And I couldn't put my finger on what it was, but ultimately it was just a yearning for something that I couldn't describe or couldn't put into words of my own. Yet this dissatisfaction lingered wherever I went. There was there were several years where I kind of fell out of going to church altogether. Um, and the last church before I attended that one was uh the Methodist church in high school. So basically it was like I went from high school to post-college, and there was a multi-year gap where I just kind of walked away from church. And I was never an atheist. I never renounced my faith. I just wasn't actively pursuing it in any degree. Uh, so definitely my lifestyle reflected that and um definitely kind of went to the wayside. So when I did express an interest in uh taking ownership of my faith again, that was my first foray back into it was through Presbyterianism. And I think I did respect uh some elements of it. It was a Korean American church, so I felt like this was my first attempt to kind of uh go back to what I was last uh familiar with. But I quickly realized that it wasn't something that was like sustainable for me. And like I mentioned, I just couldn't ex understand or explain why I was feeling this way. For me, it manifested in the fact that I was attending, regularly attending on Sundays the worship service. But to me, that's kind of where my Christian walk really ended. And as soon as I maybe got lunch or had fellowship with uh the people that I knew there, once I went back home, it was kind of back to the world. And it felt like a very divided sense of I'm performing a certain way or I'm presenting myself a certain way when I'm at church or when I'm with other believers. But when I'm with my secular friends, there was nothing that could truly distinguish me in terms of my lifestyle with those that of my secular peers. And I never really took ownership on a deeper level and also never took a sense of honor or pride in my Christian identity when I was in the world, because there was still this desire to kind of fit in with my surroundings, even though I knew what I believed. Um so theologically, I might have had all this knowledge about the religion itself or um the abstractions, the ideas behind it. But in terms of like everyday practical life, I wouldn't say that I was any more committed to being a Christian than anyone else in the world. And there was nothing truly that could convict me in like a court of law, for example, that says this is how we know that Kyle is a Christian and this is how he's living as a Christian. So I think that was a big issue for me where I was presenting and performing a certain way on Sundays, or if I'm with other believers. But then beyond that, there was nothing that could really indicate that I was a true believer and follower of Christ. My journey was trying to go from performing or presenting as a Christian to actually living and being a Christian and a true follower of Christ. And I think what it came down to, if I had to pinpoint one or two things, was the overall culture of lukewarm kind of one foot in this world, one foot in that world. And that wasn't necessarily just exclusive to myself. That's kind of the overall atmosphere that I picked up on. Where sometimes, you know, depending on what um demographic or what what atmosphere I was a part of at the time, sometimes it just felt like my church congregation, or my peers at least, it felt like Greek life that just went to church on Sundays. And like this, there was there was no real sense of reverence or tradition or history beyond just showing up to church on Sunday and just having some fellowship with people. And I think if I wanted to just hang out with people, I would just hang out with people. I don't, I didn't feel like I had to go to church. So there was an overwhelming sense of just hyper casual atmosphere with everything about uh the Protestant churches that I attended that I couldn't understand why I didn't feel attracted to this. There was nothing that made me feel like I'm in the house of God or I'm um pursuing the true Christian faith or taking up my cross every day. Um and I think that because I was searching for that and I wasn't finding it, that's what subconsciously, and maybe directly just led to a sense of dissatisfaction, um, especially because church is a community, and because I felt like I wasn't being motivated or challenged in certain ways, um, I just couldn't understand why I didn't really fit in or wanted to be a part of these kind of environments. Um, so that's what ultimately led to a sense of dissatisfaction. I think what ultimately brought me back to re-exploring church after this multi-year period of dissatisfaction and of varying degrees was uh the fact that when the pandemic was happening, a lot of places were shut down and locked down. I was living in New Orleans, Louisiana at the time, uh attending a grad program. Um, and when everything around me was shut down, and when everything around me was locked down, or you could only be there if you're wearing a mask, for example, um, there was maybe one or two smaller churches that remained open. So to me, it's not like I wanted to really go out of my way to attend church, but because I couldn't attend anywhere else, it seemed like more of an attractive option. So I think a lot of it was these very extenuating external circumstances that um obviously there's a lot of uh crazy, crazy things that were happening during that period of time. So trying to navigate all of that uh from a religious and a secular and a political and a social level, I think it it kind of something, something changed in my mind where I wanted to at least explore that avenue again, maybe in a different way, or I was going with a certain agenda. Uh, but seeing and recognizing that, okay, these churches were actually being bold to stay open and they weren't mandating or forcing anybody to do anything that they didn't want to do themselves of their own free will. So I respected that spirit, even if I was still not necessarily completely sold on the idea of the Christian church, or if I had disillusionments about it. Um, so that was definitely one kind of development that changed the narrative for me, where almost like going to church became somewhat of a rebellious thing to do because of everything else going on in the world, everything else that was just extreme and radical in society, it seemed like returning back to more of the traditions that I knew from church and my Christian upbringing, that this was a form of kind of social rebellion, if you will. And ultimately, uh, that was what brought me back in that direction. But it was essentially when I went through a complete and utter medical crisis, that that's what really shifted the narrative about God and Christ and how immediate both of those things were in my life. Um because given the fact that I was still going to church, there was still not a true heart transformation. And I still wasn't willing to die to my old self. So basically, after um making a series of very reckless and poor decisions and becoming gravely ill at the time with uh COVID pneumonia and the complications that resulted from that, I got hospitalized in East Texas at the time when I was um actually evacuating from New Orleans uh from a hurricane at the time that was about to hit the city. And I was telling taking shelter in Texas in multiple different cities, kind of just couch surfing with people that I knew place to place, living on the road, living very recklessly, um, going on a bender, and just not taking health or uh prioritizing my safety, and just basically just making a series of irrevocably bad decisions that led to me getting extremely and utterly sick, getting hospitalized in three different cities.
SPEAKER_00:What would you say to someone who comes up to you and you know says, Kyle, you know, I appreciate your story, and that's really neat, you know, that that you have this second chance at life. But let's be honest, it wasn't God that saved your life. It was this transplant that's science. The doctors saved your life. You should be thanking science.
SPEAKER_02:I respect modern science. That's the reason I'm alive today. Um a lot of people complain about the problems that we have with modern or postmodern society. To me, it is the best time to be alive for me. Because if I had been born in any other time period, this wouldn't have happened. I wouldn't be alive. Um, so first of all, I do respect science. I'm I'm a living testament of that. That being said, I would not be willing to go back into the same circumstances, same conditions of everything that I was going through prior to my surgery and spin the lottery wheel and hope for the same exact outcome all over again. Because yeah, it's it's one of those things that you never wake up that thinking that I'm gonna this is what's gonna happen to me today, until it does. And until you're in that type of situation, until you believe genuinely that you're on your deathbed and that you have nothing else uh to live for, to keep going for, other than the faith and the strength that God will provide you day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, until you're in that position, you don't fully comprehend and internalize how helpless and weak you really are, and all of us really are, whether we're in the hospital or not. Um, because every day, every breath is a gift from God. So I wouldn't be willing to go back, put myself in the same exact situation, and just kind of hope for the best and think that I'm just gonna roll the dice again and get lucky because that's not how I see things like that. It's like you you don't unexperience what I went through.
SPEAKER_00:Amen. Amen.
SPEAKER_02:Um, so music was something that I was a part of and it was exposed to from a young age. Uh, I learned piano at seven years old. I picked up drums when I was uh starting to get rebellious in middle school and didn't want to do classical piano anymore. Um, I also learned guitar shortly after that, just from a summer school course, and just kind of kept it up, kept playing on my own ever since then, never really stopped. Um, picked up a banjo in college, was inspired by some road trips and hiking trips to kind of connect with the more roots folksy instrument. So banjo was kind of my next adventure. Uh since then, I've learned um a good amount of mandolin, uh harmonica, and most recently picked up the accordion as well. So music's always kind of been uh in my blood. It's just been something that was always a consistent thread throughout every stage of my life, uh, which also exposed me uh to just multiple different genres of music and different ways of seeing and hearing music in all capacities. And I think uh what you mentioned about uh there's a level of discipline and commitment to being a drummer specifically, um, that parallels a lot of not just my faith, but just the way that I approach life as well, where you just have to kind of know what's right on the beat for you, you know. And if you're hesitant about that internal conviction, whether it's about rhythm or anything else about deeper convictions, other people will be able to sense that you're getting off that beat, you know. So there's a sense that you have to cultivate that discipline. You also have to listen, whether it's to uh the the bandmates that you're playing with, with other musicians, or just kind of being able to read the room like sonically, energetically, and being able to not just hold your own within that, but also to adapt accordingly to the acoustics of the room, to um the stage that you're playing on with the sound system. So there's it's a paradox of being able to play music and play this rhythm instrument percussion um to maintain that beat both internally and externally, and then also being able to adapt and respond to everything that might be going on around you as well. So when it comes to my faith, I think that um probably the biggest takeaway with that parallels uh my journey as a drummer has also been uh just being able to be steady and just be able to cultivate that discipline, whether it's you know daily prayers or being able to um truly recognize and acknowledge the sovereignty of God, um, studying the scriptures, uh doing all these types of things that might seem like chores or it, or you know, it's it's not something that's always inherently engaging or that we want to do, but that's ultimately something that, uh, and I tell this to my students as well, like we have to practice and keep doing these rudiments because this is gonna help us and strengthen us to be um being a better musician, being a better drummer, and you know, extending beyond that, being a better Christian as well. Um, so I'm a fourth generation Korean American. Um I was born and raised in Hawaii, as was my dad, as was his his dad, and my great-grandpa came from Korea. So we have four generations going back on my dad's side. And my mom is from South Korea, she was born there, and then came to Claremont, San Diego uh from sixth grade and on, went to Berkeley. So she became very Americanized, but her origins were from Korea directly. Um, so that kind of put me in a unique position where um I grew up speaking English instead of Korean. Um, and I definitely saw the world through more of an Americanized lens than um a Korean lens, or even from a Korean-American lens, which is kind of its own perspective in itself. Um, but I would say that um just the fact that that's my background, that's my cultural heritage, Koreans are very devout people, whether they were Buddhist before Christianity arrived to the nation of Korea. But I believe that Korea also has probably the most amount of Christians per capita. Um I could be wrong, but that's my impression that it's they're definitely devout people of faith. Um, there is an element of mysticism within just Eastern Asian countries in general that I think translates within orthodoxy. And one thing that I really do appreciate about the Orthodox perspective is that they don't try to explain everything because we can't explain God. We'll never fully know God because we're not God. We're just human beings. It's like expecting ants on the log to understand quantum physics. Like it's just never, it will never happen because it's completely beyond what they're capable of knowing. In the same way, we will never fully rationalize or be able to reasonably explain God with the dialectic that we've created. Um, and the orthodox perspective is that there's a grand mystery to a lot of these things. There's a unexplainable, unutterable quality about God. We'll never approach God as equals. Uh, we are just beneath him in every dimensional aspect. So that Eastern perspective of there's a mystery, there's a mysticism involved with this, I think is a kind of what resonates with me personally. Um, not even just from a cultural heritage perspective as a Korean, as an East Asian, but also just from an intellectual approach with humility. It's like we can never explain God or God cannot be explained with paragraph seven, subsection C, bullet point A. It's like we can't do that with God. So approaching God with humility and reverence and also just approaching it as the grand mystery that all of this really is. I think that's what probably resonates the most with me uh from my perspective and also within the Orthodox perspective, too.
SPEAKER_01:I was the first person you met at St. Anthony's, right? I remember having a real conversation. I remember Lori uh putting uh like she had you stand next to me during the liturgy. Yeah, yeah. I remember I was like, if you need any explanation for anything, let me know. Like I was whispering, like, do you have questions? Don't feel obligated to do anything, you know? And then afterwards we went and ate at Agape. So I think it's awesome. I mean, how long ago was that, like a year ago?
SPEAKER_02:At least, at least a year, probably a year and some change by now.
SPEAKER_01:That's amazing. And then I remember I think you came back the next week, if I remember correctly. I'm like, oh, piles back.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. I was in it to win it after a certain point.
SPEAKER_01:I love that.
SPEAKER_02:And I think the community that I found at St. Anthony's, um, part of it, you know, like I expressed earlier, this dissatisfaction, part of it stemmed from uh the church cultures themselves or just like the lack of traditions, just the hyper casual atmosphere that I didn't didn't resonate with me. But also part of it was also the types of people I encountered where they were nice, they were polite, um, sometimes overly friendly. Um they really wanted me to be a part of their, you know, group chat to go throw the football around Mission Beach, for example. That was their idea of fellowship. I was like, is this all there is to it? Like, I feel like I don't really resonate or connect with most people I meet in like most of these denominations. And at St. Anthony's specifically, I'm just very blessed that I found my home church and my home community where a lot of my peers, um, and even people that are not my peers, for the first time I feel like my personality meshes with these people, like who I am, what I'm interested in. Um, I never felt like I have to kind of fake or present a certain way. I could kind of just authentically be myself. Um, and people could appreciate um me for who I was rather than, oh, Kyle's a little bit different than us, because I was different than most people that I would meet at these Protestant churches. Um, so being able to find people that uh genuinely I could socially connect with for the first time, that was also what kept me coming back beyond just um the deeper level issues as well. Growing up in church, we always kind of hear about how, oh, church is not for perfect people, it's for the wounded, it's for the sick. Um and I think that within orthodoxy, there's a strong emphasis on repentance and for um not just fellowship, not about, you know, these like surface-level things, but we really have to examine ourselves in front of God, um, as we all will have to one day. Um, and by examining the depths of our own soul, of the grievances and how we sin every day against God, against ourselves, against our own bodies. With all these things, I think that there's a strong sense of repentance within Orthodoxy that obviously the topic of repentance is not unique to the Orthodox Church, but there's a strong sense of asking for God's mercy, asking for God's grace, um, in a way that we have to humble ourselves not just to God, but to even our just ourselves, who we are. So I think that within that Orthodox perspective of the hospital for the soul, um, it's not necessarily something that is brand new. It just redefined and brought that uh concept to life in such a different light than what I was used to hearing before. Um, but Christ is the ultimate physician, he was sent to heal our souls, all infirmities, all maladies, um, grievances, spiritual or physical, emotional, mental. So it's definitely one of those things that you just never really on experience after you've been divinely healed and resurrected, that brought back to life, in my case, literally from the dead on two occasions, and almost from complete death on the third one, where I felt like one foot was crossing over into the other side, and the other foot was about to cross over as well. But Christ grabbed my ankle before I crossed over and said, Not yet, your time's not come, and divinely healed me and brought me back to life. So um Christ is the ultimate physician. He is the divine healer, without a doubt.
SPEAKER_00:Look at that. You made it to the end. We hope that you enjoyed this conversation. Please give us a like if you did enjoy the content. Let us know your thoughts down below. Check in with Kyle David, see how he is doing currently. We do appreciate your um time spent with Cloud of Witnesses, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one. Thanks again, and God bless you. Bye bye.