Pastor

The future Father Michael Shanbour was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas and baptized into the Holy Orthodox Church as an infant.  His home parish of St. George, under the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, was officially established in 1921 by Orthodox immigrants from Lebanon.

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Shanbour’s maternal great-grandfather, the Rt. Rev. Shukrallah Shadid, was called with his family from his home country to the U.S. to serve the Orthodox community in Oklahoma City.  Father Shukrallah also travelled to Wichita to serve the community there as well, a mission church community at that time without a priest.  That mission church has grown to become St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral, home of Bishop Basil Essey of the Antiochian Diocese of Wichita and Mid America, with a thriving community of descendants from those first Lebanese immigrants as well as a large and growing contingent of converts to the Orthodox Faith.

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Although raised Orthodox, by his teenage years his exposure to a non-denominational Protestant community caused him to seek explanations for the great divergence between Orthodox and Protestant worship and teaching.  Over the next three years he read early Christian literature such as the Apostolic Fathers (St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp of Smyrnea, etc.) and early texts of the Liturgy which convince him of the veracity and authenticity of the Orthodox Church’s claim to be the historical and spiritual descendant of the Church of the Apostles... (Full Biography Click Here!)