Fr. Seraphim Hipsh grew up in the Dallas suburbs where he attended a small private Christian school and graduated in a class of seven. A life-long lover of weather and the physics of weather, he went on to study Atmospheric Physics at New Mexico Tech, where he met his wife. They married in the Episcopal Church and moved to the vicinity of her job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of New Mexico and began work for a private company specializing in nuclear assay equipment used to evaluate radiation levels of nuclear waste at storage sites around the world. Not finding satisfaction in merely addressing the problems and questions of life from the realm of modern science and technology, he turned his attention to what he felt was perhaps the larger source of difficulties in his own life and the world at large: spiritual poverty. He had bottomed out on what he knew of Protestant Christian theology and its guidance to living the spiritual life. He felt the need for discipleship like what Christ had bestowed upon the Apostles, and set out to find where and how this need could be met. His search led him to the ancient Orthodox Christian Church, something that for all his education in world and religious history had all but been overlooked. Here he found all that he was looking for and more. Orthodoxy ended up being not the mere moral guidance that he grew up with, but the key to the healing of his person and the way to living in actual union with God and creation. After converting to Orthodoxy and spending several years working closely with a mission priest, Fr. Seraphim left his work as a programmer and physicist and attended graduate school at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in northeast Pennsylvania, receiving a Master of Divinity Degree and being ordained first a deacon, and then several months later, a priest.
Since ordination Fr. Seraphim has worked as assistant priest at St. Seraphim’s Orthodox Cathedral in Dallas as well as assistant to the Archbishop of the Diocese. He helped in the formation and development of Holy Apostles Orthodox Mission in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mid-2004, he was assigned priest-in-charge at St. Sava’s Orthodox Mission near Avenue K and Spring Creek in Plano, TX, where he is actively working to spread an awareness of ancient Christian teachings and tradition as they have been taught and passed from spiritual parent to child since the time of the Apostles.
