Mother Petra was raised in a family full of Wesleyan ministers, missionaries and church planters, and went on to study at Indiana Wesleyan. She became increasingly frustrated by divisions in Christianity over everything from Bible interpretation to worship practices, and at one point even stopped going to church. When one of her sisters became Catholic, it opened up to her the possibility that there really was an authoritative way to understand the reality of what it meant to be a Christian. She entered the Catholic Church, and eventually religious life at a Byzantine monastery.