30Jun09 Lay vs. Clergy Educational Standards

One of the things I have come more and more to realize is the how changing educational standards in America has brought about a change in the role of the priest in the Orthodox parish. The was a time not so long ago, and by that I mean within the life time of many of the parishioners, when the priest was one of, if not the most, educated person in the parish.

But those days are gone.

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30Jun09 Urban Parish Summit

Urban Parish Summit. Later next month (16-17 July 2009), I am speaking at a meeting of Orthodox Christian parishes as part of the parish health ministry of the Diocese of Chicago and the Midwest (OCA). The conference will bring together “clergy and laity to explore the role of the Orthodox Urban parish in the 21st century.” If you are interested, you can find out more about the Urban Parish Summit here.

Among the speakers is Fr Justin Matthews, Executive Director of FOCUS North America. FOCUS’s mission is to work “especially in the areas of Food, Occupation, Clothing, Understanding and Shelter.” In large part the ministry is called to “expresses Christ’s love through social action in North America for those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick or in prison (Matt. 25:35-6).”

Besides being able to hear about FOCUS North American, this meeting is important because “one fourth to one third of the parishes” in the Diocese of Chicago and the Midwest “ are located in major urban areas” rather than being in “the suburbs or rural locations.” As a consequence “Often parishioners have long since moved away and have long commutes to church.” Unlike parishes in the suburbs “with lush lawns and newer facilities” many urban parishes are located in declining neighborhoods and, together with those who live in the immediate area, the parish is “challenged by poverty and crime.”

The picture, however, is not by any means all bleak. Continue Reading »

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28Jun09 Met. Jonah speaks to Anglican Church in North America

Metropolitan Jonah’s speech at the recent Anglican gathering in Texas can be seen here: Metropolitan Jonah.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

h/t: Byzantine, Texas

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27Jun09 Tommy Tiernan On the State of the Priesthood

While the language is a bit, how shall I put it, coarse at times, I think Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan makes a number of good points about the Eucharist and the priesthood. So putting aside the language, what do you think?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

h/t: The Rosemary Tree.

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25Jun09 Orthodox Church Leader Rekindles Relationship with Anglicans
From the web site of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) comes the following new release:The leader of the Orthodox Church in America has re-kindled the oldest ecumenical relationship in Christian history. Addressing delegates and attendees of the inaugural assembly of the Anglican Church in North America, His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah, said, “I am seeking an ecumenical restoration by being here today. This is God’s call to us.” This significant gesture represents the possibility of full communion being exchanged between the churches.

Metropolitan Jonah represents the American branch of the Orthodox Church, a Christian denomination that has a long history of strong relationships with the Anglican Church. “We have to actualize that radical experience of union in Christ with one another,” Jonah said. Speaking for 45 minutes, the Metropolitan addressed the importance of looking past our differences in order to work together for mission. “Our unity transcends our particularity,” he said.

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25Jun09 Friendship and The Church’s Witness, part 4

And this brings me back to where I began, the mystery of friendship transformed.
Just as in the Liturgy bread and wine, “the fruit of the vine and work of human hands,” are transformed to become the Body and Blood of Christ, human friendships can also be transformed by God’s grace into something of eternal beauty and importance. But, and again as with bread and wine, these friendships must be properly formed. They must be real and healthy friendships just as the Eucharist must begin as real bread and real wine. At it best priestly ministry grows out of life long friendships transformed by grace. So to, I would argue, with the internal life of the Church and our Christian witness in the public square. Anything less then ministry, and ecclesiastical life and evangelistic outreach ground in wholesome friendships slowly transformed by divine grace is unworthy of Christ and of the humanity He shares with us.
I have seen my own relationship with Christ and my friends transformed by their ordinations and my own.
If we do not love each other, how can the world believe we love it? And if we do not love the world for whom Christ suffered and died, how can we say that we are love Him or our true to ourselves?
But the real question now is this, how will we proceed?
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory

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25Jun09 Augustine’s Origin of Species

Christianity Today’s online edition has an interesting essay by on St Augustine’s understanding of the Genesis story of creation by Alister McGrath, Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education at King’s College, London.  McGrath is an Anglican priest who in addition to a doctorate in theology holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University in molecular biophysics.  Given the number of Orthodox Christians who hold to some form of creationism in opposition to the current scientific model of creation, I thought the article worth reading.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th of the publication of his On the Origin of Species. For some, such as Richard Dawkins, Darwinism has been elevated from a provisional scientific theory to a worldview—an outlook on reality that excludes God, firmly and permanently. Others have reacted strongly against the high priests of secularism. Atheism, they argue, simply uses such scientific theories as weapons in its protracted war against religion.
They also fear that biblical interpretation is simply being accommodated to fit contemporary scientific theories. Surely, they argue, the Creation narratives in Genesis are meant to be taken literally, as historical accounts of what actually happened. Isn’t that what Christians have always done? Many evangelicals fear that innovators and modernizers are abandoning the long Christian tradition of faithful biblical exegesis. They say the church has always treated the Creation accounts as straightforward histories of how everything came into being. The authority and clarity of Scripture—themes that are rightly cherished by evangelicals—seem to be at stake.
These are important concerns, and the Darwin anniversaries invite us to look to church history to understand how our spiritual forebears dealt with similar issues. 
Read the rest here.

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24Jun09 Friendship and The Church’s Witness, part 3

A 6th century mosaic of :en:Jesus at Church Sa...Image via Wikipedia

Unfortunately the reciprocity that I mentioned yesterday is often been lacking in our witness. At times its absence has been embodied in our preference for a merely, or at least largely, ethnic parishes that is self-consciously closed to any who would are not Greek or Russian or at least are unwilling to be Hellenized or Russified.

More troubling to me however is a more recent phenomenon.

Largely as a result of an influx of converts to the Orthodox Church, we have seen clergy and parishes that are markedly sectarian and anti-intellectual. In this second case, for all that the community might be a buzz of liturgical activity (in English of course!) and adult education classes and sermons that quote (often out of context) the Father, we see people working zealously to exclude (and condemn) anything “Western.”

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23Jun09 Friendship and The Church’s Witness, part 2
It is always tempting to reduce the proclamation of the Gospel to an exercise of power—spiritual, moral, social or political. More easily then I prefer to acknowledge, I find myself thinking that because what I am proclaiming is of lasting, even eternal, significance, I can be indifferent, and if need be hostile, to what is of only transitory or of passing value. After all, “The good,” as some have said, “is the enemy of the perfect.”

Well, no it isn’t—the good is just that, good and just as we ought not to sacrifice what is best in our pursuit of a lesser good so too we ought not to sacrifice a lesser good in pursuit of a greater. When we do this—and this happens frequently in ways great and small—we commit an act of violence. The violence that afflicts the human soul and divides the human community arise precisely out of my willingness to sacrifice one good for another.

In the public square we often see this in the debates about abortion. A woman’s freedom, her physical or emotional health are often allowed to trump her unborn child’s right to life. All are good, but we justify an act of violence by our willingness to accept the sacrifice of some goods in the pursuit of others.

Or, to take another example, think about the pursuit of material progress. Yes, many of us are better off materially then any time in human history. And while there still are people in wretched poverty, as a whole humanity is better off. We have more to eat and we live longer and while these are both good things to be sure, they are good things that often come by our willingness to sacrifice other goods such as community or even the Gospel.

Christianity in the public square must, I think, proceed by way kenosis, a self-emptying witness patterned after the incarnation of the Son of God (see Philippians 2). His Beatitude place this kenotic witness at the heart of the vocation of the Orthodox Church of America. He goes on to argue that it is this self-emptying witness that is the way not only toward Orthodox unity in America, but also at the center of the Church’s evangelistic witness and engagement of America and her people. In his own words: “It is the task of the Church in this country not only to offer the life of the Orthodox Church to the American people, but also to bring to the practice of Orthodoxy all that is best, all that is valiant, all that is most noble, in our American life.” As I have suggested before, at the heart of our witness to Christ and the Gospel is a reciprocity in which we embraces not only each other but the surrounding culture.

But this raises for me a question: How has our witness be characterized by kenotic reciprocity?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory



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22Jun09 Friendship and The Church’s Witness, part 1

Over the years any number of my classmates, acquaintances or friends (and now SHOCKINGLY! former students) be ordained as deacons, priests and (in two cases) bishops (one Catholic, one Orthodox). Often men I have known since we were together in college are now serving as clergy and it always catches me a bit of guard when I see them vested and standing before God the Father at Christ’s Holy Altar.

The Gospel brought with it a great innovation, if I may use that word, in humanity’s religious nature. Religion, the spiritual life, was transformed “downward” from something extraordinary to something ordinary. In Greece and other titular Orthodox countries, it was not uncommon to see the village priest at work during the week as a cobbler or at some other trade. His daily labor was not a political statement as was the “worker-priest” movement among Catholic priests in France during the 1950’s. It was not, as with the worker-priests, at attempt to reconnect the daily life of the faithful with the Church, but rather simply a playing out of the life of the Church. While not universal, there is still an intimacy between clergy and faithful in the Orthodox Church that a Catholic friend of mine describes (appreciatively) as almost medieval.

The joy of the Church in America is that because of our relatively small numbers and poverty, we have retained, or maybe recaptured, that intimacy. Our parishes tend to be small and our clergy married. While small congregations are common in the Protestant world (both Mainline and Evangelical), these are by and large non-sacramental communities and they have (or so I imagine based on my conversations with my Protestant friends) a different ethos, or feel, about them.

My point here is not to compare Orthodox parochial life to Protestant, but rather is meant as an introduction to my thoughts about an address recently given by His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America. Given the title, “The 1917 Council and Tomos:
St Tikhon’s Vision Then and Now,” it is forgivable if American Christians (including I dare say, many Orthodox Christians) might dismiss His Beatitude’s address as having little any application to their own situation.

But as is often the case in our spiritual life, on another, deeper level, I think there is much to in the talk not only for Orthodox Christians (who are after all the His Beatitude’s audience) but also Christians in other traditions and indeed for women and men of good will who are interested in the place of religion in the public square.

We will tomorrow look at that talk and see what, if anything, it might say for the Church’s life and witness.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory


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