St. Peter’s Monastery — Updates

Lending Library

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (Father Ephraim) — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 19:00:00 GMT

We now have a Lending Library with 900 different titles that anyone may borrow for free.

If you would like to keep a book, we ask that you consider making a donation so that we can keep all books in stock.

Here is our current inventory:

Hilandar Visit

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (David Hicks) — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:00:00 GMT

On October 22–24, 2025, the Very Reverend Archimandrite Methodius, the Abbot of the Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos, Hieromonk Arsenije, and Stefan Milenkovic visited St. Peter’s Monastery and Abbot Ephraim. During their visit, the Igumen met with fifty young men from as far away as Canada and Arizona. They listened attentively to his homily and asked great questions during a two-hour Q&A with the two abbots.

The Story of the Monastery of Saint Peter

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (David Hicks) — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 19:00:00 GMT

A beautiful thousand-acre ranch on the north shore of Harrison Lake roughly three miles east of the town of Harrison, Montana, pop. 187 souls, is offered in a Life Estate for an Eastern Orthodox monastery. Initially, it was thought that this might be an ideal site for a skete of St. John Monastery (OCA) in Manton, California, and a cross was planted and moleban celebrated by Bishop Benjamin (OCA) and Abbot Meletios (St. John Monastery) on the land in 2012. Meanwhile, the architect Mark Headley designed an Athonite-style monastery, and local OCA clergy and Hieromonk Innocent from St. John have led very popular summer youth camps on the land for the purpose of beginning construction on the Monastery and offering instruction in monastic life and Orthodox Christian living. Unfortunately, a decline in the population of St. John prevented this from happening, and in 2022 Archbishop Benjamin blessed the owners to approach other jurisdictions, making this gift available to them.

The land is in a conservation easement that designates a twenty-acre area for the Monastery and buildings related to it. The ranch features a square-log dacha and boathouse, octagonal two-story barn, and Palladian villa. The property is two miles off the grid and generates its own electricity from a wind turbine and solar array. Philosophy River, named by Lewis and Clark in 1805, flows for one mile through the land. Its Rainbow trout are resistant to the whirling disease that decimated the trout population throughout the West, and Montana Fish and Game now spawns these trout from the ranch and has successfully replenished stocks throughout the West with the Harrison Rainbow strain.

This offer has few conditions. These include a requirement that the Monastery be English-speaking and pan-Orthodox — open to all Orthodox Christian monastics and guests. The Life Estate will continue to be held by the owners until the Monastery is built and a minimum of four monks and an abbot are in full-time residence. At that time, the Life Estate will be assigned to the Monastery with the abbot as chairman of its foundation.

The Monastery will require a significant gift or gifts to be established, probably in the neighborhood of $5–6 million to build infrastructure and the main residence for 12–18 monastics, an abbot’s study, library, work spaces, guest quarters, and a temporary katholikon and trapeza per the Headley design. The footings and ground floor stone and reinforced concrete walls for this building are already in place. The entrance tower is under construction.

There are several opportunities for the Monastery to generate income via the fiber optic cable extending to the Monastery and an extensive and outfitted woodworking shop above the barn. The property also contains 100 irrigated acres ready for organic farming (no chemicals have been applied for over twenty years) and 40 acres of bottomland appropriate for fruit trees. Its proximity to Yellowstone Park, the largest ski resort in North America, and world class fly-fishing rivers and streams make “hospitality” also a potential source of income.

What’s in a Name?

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (David Hicks) — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 19:00:00 GMT

I’m sometimes asked why — with the blessing of the Bishop — we named the Monastery for St. Peter. Initially, the Monastery was planned as a skete of St. John Monastery in Manton, California, and both Bishop Benjamin and the Abbot of St. John officiated at the moleban service in which the land was blessed and designated as a skete in honor of St. Peter. As I recall, we made three prayerful considerations in choosing this name.

First, it seemed to us that the ranch sloping down to Harrison Lake with over a mile of shoreline and another mile of Philosophy River feeding the lake bears a striking resemblance to the Galilee with its Jordan River no larger than our creek where Peter and his brother Andrew grew up and practiced their trade as fishermen. Mostly wheat is now grown on our dry rocky rolling hills sheltered by snow-clad mountains for much of the year. As it happens, Philosophy River is one of Montana’s favored fishing spots. It is also the river in which Montana Fish and Game found Rainbow Trout resistant to the dreaded whirling disease and milked the wild trout to repopulate the rivers of the West with disease-resistant trout.

Second, our wide valley, like most of Montana’s valleys, is sparsely populated by ranchers and farmers and their families. Most of them are Protestant Christians or unchurched. Orthodox Christianity and the saints of the Ancient Church, through no fault of our neighbors, are largely unknown to them. No one came to tell them about the Ancient Church and its saints. Orthodox Christians in North America generally stayed in their own ethnic enclaves. For this reason, we wanted the Monastery to bear the name of a recognizable Christian saint, and a famous fisher of men to boot!

And finally, Peter is, arguably, the saint who most reminds us of our selves and our fate in the modern world. He appears repeatedly in the Gospels brimming with confident faith one moment and riddled with doubt the next. This all-too-human condition, we Orthodox believe, calls for a life of perpetual repentance. It is perhaps best captured in the icon the Greeks call “Peter and the Waves”. The story is told by St. Matthew (14:22–33) of a time when Jesus was alone praying while his disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, fishing presumably, when a sudden storm came up. It is night, and Jesus comes to them walking on the water. Seeing this, the disciples, already afraid, think they are seeing a ghost, but Jesus calls out to them, “Be of good cheer. It is I; do not be afraid.” Peter, the bold one, answers, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you.” Jesus says simply, “Come”, and Peter scrambles out of the boat and begins walking on the wind-tossed waves until the violence of the storm shakes his confidence and he begins to sink. In that moment, he throws up his hands crying out, “Lord, save me.”

That is our moment too — when the world is too much with us, when our earthly cares and ambitions engulf us, when the noise of all our gadgets and entertainments drown out the silence of prayer, contemplation and reflection, when demonic theories of resentment, division and strife enthrall our secular minds, when our insatiable craving for things and for sensual pleasures consumes us, and when we come to believe that doubt and distrust is the only way forward. Having taken our eyes off Christ, as Solzhenitsyn warned us in his Harvard and Templeton addresses, we learn too late that none of our drugs and therapies can save us from drowning. In this moment we know: only God can save us.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us sinners and save us, O Good One.

David V. Hicks

Prayer to Saint Peter, Chief of the Apostles

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (Father Innocent) — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 19:00:00 GMT

Chief Apostle of our God and Savior
Jesus Christ, thou follower of
the Church, most praiseworthy Peter!

We laud and glory thy apostolic
labors, we lovingly commemorate thy
blessed coming to us, we revere thy
honorable sufferings, which thou
didst bear for Christ;

We ask and pray our Lord, God and
Savior Jesus Christ that by thy
prayers, always heard and accepted
by Him, he may grant us sinners all
those things needful unto our
salvation:

That a monastery named after thy
honor might be established in
Harrison, Montana for the salvation
of the monastics who seek their
repentance therein and for the
salvation of all who visit and sojourn
beneath its spiritual protection.

That as thou, according to the Lord’s
voice, didst promptly leave thy nets
and follow Him unwaveringly, each of
us might seek not that which is his
own, but think rather of the profit of
his neighbor and his higher calling.

And, having thee as a representative
and intercessor, we have hope in thy
prayers, which avail much before our
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to
whom belongs all glory, honor and
worship, with the Father and the Holy
Spirit, unto ages of ages. Amen.

Gift of a Royal Stone Cross

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (David Hicks) — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 19:00:00 GMT

In the spring of 2023, St. Peter’s received the unsolicited gift of a beautiful Royal Stone cross from Alexander and Rita Rua of Sintra, Portugal. Royal Stone (Lioz) is a rare ornamental stone quarried in the Lisbon area and used historically in palaces and cathedrals. The Lioz cross will “float” in the oracular window above the arch in the entrance tower that our Work Week participants are now building. St. John Chrysostom called the Cross “the adornment of the angels, the security of the Church, the boast of the Apostle Paul, the wall which protects the saints, the light of the whole world.” He also spoke of it as “the will of God the Father, the glory of the only-begotten Son, and the exultation of the Holy Spirit.” Glory to God.

Through the Creation to the Creator

stpetersmonastery@gmail.com (David Hicks) — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 19:00:00 GMT

We love our trees at St. Peter’s and are always planting them. But as the poet said, “Only God can make a tree.” This lecture by Bishop Kallistos expresses so well what each tree ought to mean to us and how the theology of the creation informs and vivifies every moment of our lives.