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Each of us is also gifted with “charismata” designated for a specific purpose. The Holy Spirit empowers each of us to build up the body of Christ in some special manner. Some of these gifts are teaching, prophecy, healing, administration, leadership, mercy, etc. What are your gifts and how might God be calling you to serve the Living Church of Christ – our Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA?
Continue Reading...Currently, I’m reading Clayton Christensen‘s book on marketing Competing Against Luck: the Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. The book’s basic argument is that consumers don’t so much buy goods or service but hire them to do a specific job. Successful product development and marketing requires the seller understand what job the consumer needs to have done. Complicating this is that …
Continue Reading...The moral and pastoral problem is that we’ve lost sight of the fact that the parish exists for a particular reason: to help people discern and live their vocation. For the vast majority of Orthodox Christians, our vocation is not to ministry within the Church–much less the local parish–but to the world outside the walls of the Church.
Continue Reading...If any be a devout lover of God, let him partake with gladness from this fair and radiant feast. If any be a faithful servant, let him enter rejoicing into the joy of his Lord. If any have wearied himself with fasting, let him now enjoy his reward. If any have labored from the first hour, let him receive today …
Continue Reading...April 14, 2017: Vespers of the Disposition Nicodemus. Joseph Of Arimathea. The Myrrh-bearing Women. Mary Magdalene. Because they love Jesus, all of these find the courage to defy both the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities. It is this love that causes them to bury the body of Jesus and so openly bear witness to their love for Jesus. God …
Continue Reading...For Christians, the decoration of the graves of our loved one flows naturally from the veneration we show to the Tomb of Christ. In both cases, we honor not simply the life of a loved one but bear witness to our conviction that death has been overcome “and joy has come into all the world.”
Continue Reading...It is only through knowing the love of God and forgiveness of God that any of us can hope to bear the burden of our own sinfulness.
Continue Reading...April 9, 2017: Matins for Holy Monday St Maximus the Confessor talks about three incarnations of the God the Son. The first, and most important, is the incarnation of the Son in the womb of the Virgin Mary. It is this event that we usually what we mean when we talk about the incarnation. The second incarnation is in the …
Continue Reading...… Orthodox churches, are voluntary communities that must strategize to retain and attract membership; hence the new significance of Orthodox evangelism and technological acumen in reaching inquirers. The perceptual fault lines between “convert” and “ethnic” Orthodox Christians as well as the categories of intermarriage and seeker converts in parish life provide a lens by which to observe the shift in …
Continue Reading...When we discuss the ascetical life, we’re generally pretty comfortable with prayer and fasting. In fact, not all that uncommon for Orthodox Christians to brag about the length of our services and the strictness of our fasting–even if we, personally, don’t attend the lenten service or keep the fast all that closely! But in the tradition of the Church, asceticism …
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