Losing our religion?

Source GazetteXtra.

Michael Gerson,a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group, observes that:

According to Pew, 74 percent of the nones grew up in a religious tradition of some sort. Yet while conversion has increased the ranks of the nones, retention is not particularly good. Protestantism, for example, loses about 20 percent of those raised Protestants. Of those raised unaffiliated, 40 percent fall away from the nonfaith and rebel toward religion, making for a new generation of awkward Thanksgivings.

While I might fiddle with the numbers a bit, this certainly has been my experience in the Orthodox Church. The Church is also suffering from the “declining trust in religious institutions since the 1990s.” This isn’t limited to religion but

…has been accompanied by declining trust in most institutions (with the notable exception of the military). Confidence in government and big business has simultaneously fallen—and the public standing of both is lower than that of the church. Americans may be less affiliated with religious organizations because they have grown generally more individualistic and skeptical of authority.

If I were to hazard a guess, it’s because whatever it is they do, Christians typically don’t invite young people (or anyone else for that matter) to become friends of Jesus AND His disciples. Like the larger culture, the Orthodox Church seem to be raising the next generation of “nones” precisely because we have failed to foster friendship, much less discipleship, among in our own parishes.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

h/t: Mirror of Justice

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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

Friendship and The Church's Witness, part 3

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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.”

In both cases the kenotic character of out witness is sacrificed in order that we might preserve our “special” quality of being Greek or Russian or somehow above or outside the cultural currents and debates that afflict our Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical and non-Christian fellow citizens. At the risk of offending, no matter how we are told by Old World hierarchs or monastic elders that it is so, no matter how many quotes we marshal from patristic or monastic authors “Turn on, tune out and drop in,” is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Him crucified and risen from the dead.

His Beatitude's words about the episcopal ministry are, I think, applicable as well to Christians and even the American people as a whole. He says,

No bishop of the Orthodox Church works alone; each is sustained and aided by a structure, developed over centuries, and implemented in any given place in accordance with the realities of the life which God gives us. This structure has to be capable of existing in a very wide range of different circumstances, as evidenced by the history of the Church. There have been times of plenty and times of famine, times during which political systems have been friendly and supportive, and others when they have been downright hostile and injurious to everything for which the Light of the Gospel eternally shines. As these changes have occurred, the Church has found the need to make laws and rulings, to protect the integrity of the life of Church under all circumstances. These rulings, or Canons, are a treasure-house of experience, which enlivens and enlightens each new situation which the Church, in Her life, faces in every age.

Likewise, and within our own areas of concern, as Orthodox Christians and American citizens, we are all of us sustained social structures both ecclesiastical and cultural, and by personal, economic and political relationships, that have developed over centuries. We are none of us is alone not matter what the reigning ideology of radical individualism might say or what, because of our own emotional and spiritual wounds we might believe about ourselves. In one sense at least, we are all of us cultural and ecclesiastical free riders, and thank God for it since who among us could recreate centuries of human creativity?

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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

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

Entrepreneurship & Evangelism: More Thoughts on the CAPS Conference

An interesting comment on economic recovery from Tyler Cowen of the Kauffman Foundation by way of Michael Giberson at the Knowledge Problem.  Referring to video of Cowen talking about blogging economics and other topics, Giberson quotes Cowen's  concluding comments on current economic conditions in the United States:

If there is one point I could get through about the mess we're in, it's that even if you think that the government needs to do something proactive, that is a holding action. Recovery is about entrepreneurship.

While Cowen's economic prescription has much to recommend it, what caught my attention is this: I think that it is not only the economic recovery but also the Church that needs to embrace the spirit of entrepreneurship.

Let me explain.

With the reception of Fr Peter Gillquist and the other clergy and lay members of former Evangelical Orthodox Church by the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of American, there was an increase both in awareness of the importance of mission work and actual missionary activity undertaken both in the US and overseas by American Orthodox Christians. Unfortunately, as I have said before, that initial zeal was not always (in my opinion) always wisely guided and indeed has lead to an unfortunate narrowing of the Church's evangelistic outreach.

While not absolutely the case, in the main Orthodox evangelical outreach (especially in the US) tends to focus on disaffected mainline Protestant and Evangelical Christians and very little to either the vast number of unchurched Americans or our own lapsed Orthodox Christians.

Beyond our quasi-official policy of proselytizing and neglect of the unchurced and the fallen away, I am also concerned that we have largely neglected the worlds of academia and public policy and morality. While in the latter case there is some hopeful progress—f or example Fr Hans Jacobe's American Orthodox Institute—in the former situation we have limited our engagement to a few, woefully underfunded, campus ministry programs. And while we have built seminaries and one undergraduate college, after more than 200 years in the States, we still do not have even a viable parochial school system for our children.

All of this was very much on my mind this weekend while I was at the CAPS conference. In session after session, I saw people who desired the riches of the Great Tradition in both its Western and Eastern forms. Unfortunately, there was in attendance only two priests, myself representing the tradition of Orthodox Church and my friend Fr Christian Mathis, a Roman Catholic priest.

Let me say upfront, I am ambivalent about the lack of a numerically substantive Orthodox presence at CAPS. We have in the last 30 or so years gotten rather comfortable talking down to people. Oh granted, we're gracious when we do so, but in the main we are more comfortable talking to people who want to join the Church. We our happy to enter into conversation, really often a monologue, with those who affirm us, who see us the solution to their problems. We are less comfortable with those who wish to relate to us as peers—as our brothers and sisters in Christ.

I am not convinced that, with a few exceptions, we would prefer to avoid conversations with those people who have competencies and expertise in areas about which we know little or nothing. Let me offer an example of a CAPS presentation I found not only interesting and valuable but challenging.

On Saturday morning the first plenary session was presented by Debra Taylor, MA, of Institute for Sexual Wholeness (a graduate program/ministry focusing on sex therapy). Taylor offered us an update on the research into women's sexuality that she published in her book that she co-authored with Archibald D. Hart andCatherine Hart Weber, Secrets of Eve .

Taylor's presentation,“Prisoners of Hope: Is Healing Possible for Sexual Strugglers?”was a challenge to the gathering to imitate the words of Jesus in Lk 4:18-19: (the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me...) and ourselves as psychologists and pastors to proclaim liberty to the captive, to set free those who are burdened and battered in the area of sexuality.

What made the presentation unique was not just what was said, but what wasn't said. Taylor did not focus on sexual immorality—we did not hear about homosexuality, adultery, fornication, or masturbation. Instead she spoke with great eloquence on the suffering of married men and women as they try and understand each other's different, but equally legitimate, sexuality.

At the core of this struggle is not simply the fact that husbands typically don't understand their wives sexuality. This lack of understand is situated within a social (and for that matter, research) context that pathologizes women's sexuality and foster in women (and so also in men) an increasingly unrealistic and unnatural view of feminine sexuality and the woman's body.

Listening to Taylor as she related experiences from her own life and clinical practice, I wondered how I might apply her insights to my own pastoral work. How many married couples who come to see me either together or individually, I wondered, are suffering because of the very lack of mutual understanding that the speaker has articulated? Having spoken with current and former seminaries, I know that if sexuality is addressed at all in their coursework, it is only done so in terms of morality (and even this, I suspect, is rather deficient, but that's for another time). But sexuality is never addressed as it was in Taylor's work.

Considering the apologetic energy we expend on the fact that—u nlike Rome—we have a married clergy, this lacunae is troubling. If, as Taylor argued, many, even most, married couples suffer because of a lack of information about human sexuality, how can this not be true for clergy couples? And how can this lack of information not but have an negative influence not only on the personal lives of clergy couples, but the pastoral practice of the Church?

Let me return to the question of an entrepreneurial approach to outreach and evangelism. As in my experience at CAPS, as well as in my participation in other professional settings, I have found that my willingness to participate as a peer—albeit one who wears cassock, cross and cap—has always brought a rich reward both for me personally and for my ministry. And, not incidentally, it has also resulted in new Orthodox Christians.

Over the years, I have spoken with man men and women from various professions who have become (or have always been) Orthodox Christians. A consistent theme in the stories they tell me is the joy and gratitude to God they have for their Orthodox faith. But they also tell stories of frustration that there seems to be little interest among the clergy to make use of their professional skills and gifts. While these professionals are happy to be the spiritual children of the Church, they are also competent adults whose potential contribution to the Church is often greatly limited by the inability of the clergy to engage them as professional colleagues.

At its core, I think this inability of some—maybe even many—c lergy to engage the laity as professional peers (though different professionals to be sure) both is the reflects our limited vision of evangelical outreach and is also a contributing factor to our narrowness of vision.

One of the participates I spoke with at CAPS was quite taken by the patristic notion that what is not assumed by Christ is not redeemed. I wonder, are willing our we as a community and personally to work to redeem academia and the professions? Are we willing to engage those who challenge us not simply because of their interest in the spiritual life but because they bring to the Church skills and insights that are new to us?

Or, let me make this personal, do I want ADULT spiritual children who insist on the integrity and value of their own professional contributions to the life of the Church?

As always, your comments, questions and criticisms are not only welcome but encouraged.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Thoughts from CAPS

The opening plenary session here at CAPS was interesting. Gary Moon, Ph.D., who teaches at Richmond Graduate University offered a presentation titled “Psychology and Christian Spirituality: Puttting the Soul Back in Soul-o-logy.” Having studied as an undergraduate with the Jungian James Hillman I was interested in the direction that Moon would take with his own presentation. Hillman was (at least when he was my professor) antithetical to any suggestion that Christian (or really, any religion) could have a place in what he called “soul work.”
Moon argued, correctly I think, that historically modern psychology developed out of philosophy and ultimately Christian theology. Where his argument took a provocative turn when he referenced Nicean Christology. Where his presentation took an interesting turn was his argument that just as Christ held together divinity and humanity in Himself, so too Christians are called to do the same. Correctly, Moon identified this as the Orthodox doctrine of theosis (deification). Remember, that CAPS is composed primarily of Evangelical Christians and you have a sense of the radical nature of Moon's talk.
It was noteworthy for me that in many of the presentations I heard—as well as in my side conversations with conference participants—there is a clear desire for the the Great Tradition of the Church (East and West). While this desire for the Great Tradition does not extend to an explicitly stated desire to join the Church, my experience at CAPS suggests that there is more that we can do as Orthodox Christians in our evangelistic outreach. We have, as I've said before, not really extended our outreach to the academic world in general, much less the world of the social and natural sciences.
But we need to—not simply because people are interested, but because Christ has commanded it of us!
Anyway, I'll post more on CAPS tomorrow.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Desert Like a Rose

A special concern for Orthodox Christians in America is the intersection of Christ, culture and missions. On this point, Peter Leithart, a professor of theology and literature at New Saint Andrews College and pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, has some interesting observations. He writes in First Things' blog "On the Square," That,

Time was when Christian missions occurred "over there." Every now and then, the missionary would show up at church dressed like a time traveler, to show slides of exotic places and to enchant the stay-at-homes with tales about the strange diet and customs of the natives. Foreign missions still happen, but that model seems like ancient history. With the new immigration and the increased ease of travel and communication, the mission field has moved into the neighborhood, and every church that has its eyes open is asking every day how to do "foreign missions."

After some very well thought out biblical reflections on the missionary character of both Adam and Israel he concludes his essay by observing that:

In its first centuries, the Church was mainly preoccupied with evangelizing Greco-Roman culture, a process that Robert Jenson has identified as the “evangelization of metaphysics.” Despite liberal accusations that the Church fell prey to “acute Hellanization,” the reality was almost the opposite. Cultural and intellectual life was transformed from within as Christians fit a gospel of a crucified and risen Redeemer into Greco-Roman clothes. The clothes were never the same again.


Greek conceptions of “being” and “substance” remained, and even found their way into Christian creeds, but they were now used of a Tri-Personal God. Greeks believed in an absolute, but Christians confessed that the absolute entered the temporal world as a man. After Constantine’s conversion, the impressively efficient Roman institutions and legal instruments remained but were, sometimes imperceptibly and over centuries, turned toward compassion.


Similarly, even the Christians most hostile to modernity don’t want to abandon the gains of the modern age. Mission to the modern world would humble, but preserve, science. It would retain the modern emphasis on the dignity of the person, and give it a surer foundation than secularism could. To the mission field next door, it comes not as a destroying flood but as an irrigating river, preserving a difference as robust as anything in multiculturalism, without letting difference collapse into the sameness of indifference.


For the modern world as for the ancient, mission is like water. What grows when the gospel comes is native to the landscape, but what grows would never grow but for the river. When the water flows from the stricken Rock, the land comes to life; and the fish, floating lifeless on the surface the Sea, live again.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Missio Dei & Pietism

Whatever ever else we might say about "missio Dei," it is I think an attempt to overcome the deep strains of pietism that have become the norm in American Christianity (including Orthodox Christianity). The Greek Orthodox ethicist Christos Yannaras has written extensively on pietism as an "ecclesiological heresy." In his book The Freedom of Morality, he writes that:

Pietism made its appearance as a distinct historical movement within Protestantism, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, around 1690-1730. Its aim was to stress "practical piety," as distinct from the polemical dogmatic theology to which the Reformation had initially given a certain priority. Against the intellectualist and abstract understanding of God and of dogmatic truth, pietism set a practical, active piety (praxis pietatis): good works, daily self-examination for progress in virtues according to objective criteria, daily study of the Bible and practical application of its moral teaching, intense emotionalism in prayer, a clear break with the "world" and worldly practices (dancing, the theatre, non-religious reading); and tendencies towards separatism, with the movement holding private meetings and distinguishing itself from the "official" Church.

Rightly he points out that in pietism, "experience" (very narrowly defined as a particular kind of experience) becomes paramount. "For pietism, knowledge of God presupposes the "rebirth" of man [i.e., a "born again" experience --web ed.], and this rebirth is understood as living up to the moral law of the Gospel and as an emotional experience of authoritative truths. Pietism presents itself as a mystical piety, and ultimately as a form of opposition to knowledge; as "adogmatism," in the sense that it ignores or belittles theological truth, or even as pure agnosticism cloaked in morality."

Though pietism arose in Protestantism, it has had a great effect of "the spiritual life of other churches, to this day" including he argues the Orthodox Church. As a result, and in "combination with humanism, the Enlightenment and the 'practical' spirit of the modern era-- the spirit of 'productivity' and 'efficiency'-- pietism has cultivated throughout Europe [and the US] a largely 'social' understanding of the Church, involving practical activities of public benefit, and it has presented the message of salvation primarily as a necessity for individual and collective morality."

We see the consequences of this in the increasingly common "utilitarian institutional mentality" that has come to infect "has led many churches and Christian confessions" resulting in what Yannaras describes as "a fever of anxiety." Lost in all this is the "miracle of repentance," of even the remembrance that we can experience a "transfiguration of sin into loving desire for [a] personal communion with God." As a result the " Gospel message is 'made void'," having been "emptied of its ontological content" in our desire to honor "the principle of keeping up appearances." And when appearance matters most of all " the Church's faith in the resurrection of man is made to appear vacuous," and we no longer understand that the Church is the epiphany that makes manifest that in Christ we are offered salvation "from the anonymity of death."

For Yannaras, the symptom of what has been lost—not simply in Western Christianity but also (as his criticism make clear) also in the East—is that rather than being prophetic events that announce the victory of Christ not simply over death, but over death in me, "the sacraments takes on a conventional, ethical character." And so, for example, "Confession turns into a psychological means of setting individual guilt-feelings at rest" the reception of Holy Communion a "reward for good behavior-when it is not a scarcely conscious individual or family custom bordering on magic" And, as I can attest from my own pastoral experience, even Baptism is robbed of its eschatological and soteriological content becoming instead "a self-evident social obligation, and marriage [as Fr Alexander Schmemann never tired of point out simply] a legitimization of sexual relations without regard to any ascetic transfiguration of the conjugal union into an ecclesial event of personal intercourse or communion."

Missio Dei is an attempt, I think, to rediscover a living sense of what Yannaras calls the "ontological truth of Church unity and personal communion" that has become ever more elusive in Protestant Christianity. But again, pietism has also had an effect on the pastoral life of the Orthodox Church such that the three forms of "sectarian" Orthodoxy I summarized above are simply taken as the norm, and even a desirable way of forming the life of the parish.

I would wonder, by way of conclusion, if missio Dei might not be a fruitful avenue of ecumenical conversation between Protestant and Orthodox Christians?

As always, your comments, questions, and criticisms are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Tradition as Hermeneutic and Mission

Fr Deacon Steven Hayes raises some interesting points in response to my earlier re-posting on the notion of "mission Dei." In response to my observation that Holy Tradition is (or should be) a hermeneutic by which we come to understand ourselves and the world of persons, events and things, Father writes: "That's what I understand by "Orthodox worldview" or Orthodox "fronima" -- trying to understand the world and other people and things around us in the light of the Orthodox Christian faith." I certainly agree with on this. In fact part of why I became Orthodox was because I became convinced that, as embodied creatures, human beings only know anything in light of a shared narrative, a tradition. This being the case, which narrative I followed, which tradition in which I stood, became very important for me.

Looking around I found that the Tradition of the Orthodox Church helped me make the best sense of myself and my own experiences. But this wasn't all. In addition to it subjective value (i.e., the value of Holy Tradition "for me") I also saw the objective value of the Tradition of the Church. Holy Tradition is a rich source of insight to help me understand the world of persons, events and things in which I found myself.

But Fr Steven also helped put into words my own discomfort with "missio Dei" as it has come to be articulated in the Emergent Church movement. Specifically and again returning to the words of the good deacon, "The problem I have with 'missio Dei' is that I can't see what else it could be. The proponents of 'missio Dei' seem to think it is a new thing, something no one has ever thought of before. But it seems to me that it is something that underlies all Orthodox assumptions about mission – 'as the Father sent me, so I am sending you'. It seems axiomatic." He then I think puts his finger right on the matter when he says perhaps the problem he (and I) have with "mission Dei" is that "Protestant ecclesiology is different."

Let me offer some random and somewhat unstructured thoughts on the theme Deacon Steven raises.

Maybe it's an American thing, but here in the States one often see Holy Tradition approached as an objective standard to be fulfilled rather than a hermeneutic. While these are not necessarily in opposition (and in my experience they are not only not opposed, they converge), it is not uncommon to see people here approach the Tradition in a neurotic fashion—as an abstract, rarified image to which people must conform—rather than a light that illumines human life and shows the traces of grace in the life of the person or community.

As a pastoral matter, this results in the life of the parish being constructed according to a personal ideology. By this I mean that when we fail to see the hermeneutical character, we build our lives around an idea that we have abstracted from the Tradition. As a consequence, we end up valuing some elements of Holy Tradition and our lives over others. In a word, our life often internally coherent, is not catholic (kata, +holos), or whole.

Typically this lack of wholeness takes one of three forms:

1. A tacit, and sometimes explicit, assumption that the parish is for "our" people. "Our" people might be either a members of a particular traditional ethnic community (Greeks, Russians, Arabs, etc.)
   
2. A group that prides itself on being "not-ethnic." This is often, though by no means exclusively, a community composed of converts. Interestingly, in the OCA (and I assume this is so inn other jurisdictions) one finds cradle Orthodox for whom anything of their own ethnic tradition is consistently minimized or rejected
   
3. Among some communities there is a frank imitation of monastic life. In these communities, the life of the community does not so much center around liturgy as much as it is reduced to liturgy. I should point out that, as with the other two examples, the attachment to monasticism is ideological. Monastic life is a great blessing for the Church. Those communities that purport to adopt a monastic model
   

In all three of these deformative approaches to Tradition and the life and mission of the Church, our vision becomes increasingly narrow and sectarian, our style of relating to one and other becomes increasingly chaotic and authoritarian (the first symptom of this is the administrative life of the community decays).

As always, your comments, questions, and criticisms are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: Confessing the Angry Penitent

The confessor, I think, has to bear in mind that anger is not simply rooted developmentally in earlier vices but in a profound shift in the penitent's self-understanding. To put the matter simply, the penitent had a relatively narrow, but functional, vision of himself that has now proven to be false. This sudden shift in awareness is frightening and in evokes in the person a profound and radically unsettling sense of betrayal. "The person I always thought I was," so a more self-aware penitent might say, "has now proven itself to be false. I am not who I thought I was. I don't know who I am. All I know is that I have been lying to myself about who I am. My life is a lie."

We ought not to underestimate the terror that the person feels as his accustomed frame of reference for himself as well as the world of persons, events and things, is shattered by a confrontation with the Gospel. It is a psychologically and spiritually simplistic of us not to hear the real sense of existential disruption embodied in St Paul's words in Ephesians:

This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. (4:17-24)

The change that Paul alludes to here is not like learning how to operate a new camera or trying to comprehend a difficult idea. No, Paul's words point to a radical transformation of how I view not only myself, but also God, my neighbor and creation. I am no longer in control, the world of persons, events and things are revealed as radically NOT at my disposal and NOT subjected to my own self-centered desires.

Or, to put it more simply, anger is my response to the realization that I am not God.

It is precisely this conflict that the proclamation of the Gospel provokes. And it is this conflict that the spiritual father must respond to in confession. How might he do this?

Again, Paul offers us an idea.

Therefore, putting away lying, "Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor," for we are members of one another. "Be angry, and do not sin": do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. (4:25-32)

The confessor, as he does with the regretful penitent, needs to attend to the traces of grace in the penitent's life. With the angry penitent, however, this means (1) pointing out as Paul does the comforting presence of God in the person's life and (2) being willing in word and deed to model with the penitent God's comforting response to his fear.

It is tempting simply to respond to penitent's anger and overlook the concrete fears that inspire the anger. But this, I think, is a mistake. Confessors have a unique opportunity to help people give voice to their fears. More than that though, we have the great calling of giving voice to God's comforting presence in life of the fearful person not only though sentimental sermonizing, but by embodying in word and deed a kind and gentle presence at that moment in a person's life when he least believes kindness and gentleness are possible for him.

In my next post, I want to reflect with you on what is for me the most challenging person to minister to, the indifferent penitent.

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: Understanding the Angry Penitent

You may be wondering why it is important to consider how spiritual fathers minister to different classes of penitents in confession. While it might be useful for clergy, why would lay people care?

The simple answer is this: Confession is an essential part of the spiritual life of the all the faithful—laity and clergy. While we ought not to reduce the spiritual life to our participation as penitents in confession, it is important to keep in mind that confession is one very important part of what we are preparing to do. Confession is in a real sense a goal or teleos of all of the Church evangelistic and educational ministry. We are forming people not simply for various ministry, but for confession. In fact I would argue that as an essential part of the Church's prophetic ministry confession is the ordinary context within which we all of us come to understand ever more fully what the Father in Christ and through the Holy has called us to do.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the angry penitent.

We are accustomed to thinking of anger in terms of affect, of emotion. But in the Church's spiritual anthropology, and I'm thinking here especially of St John Cassian, affect is only one possible manifestation of anger.

Before it is emotion, it is according to Cassian a vice, a habit of thought and action that he describes as a "somber disorder" in the soul. Just as "regret" is the absence of gratitude (and specifically, gratitude to God for one's life), anger (again according to Cassian) is the absence of "discernment of what is for our own good, . . . [ and of] spiritual knowledge." ("Eight Vices," Philokalia, vol I, p. 82)

When gripped by anger we unable to "fulfill our good intentions, nor [can we] participate" in divine life. All of is rooted in a blinded intellect that has become "impervious to the contemplation of the true, divine light." (p. 82)

The angry person then is not only ineffectual in his attempts to do good, he behaves in a manner that is ultimately, and sometimes proximately and even immediately, self-destructive. And all of this because "No matter what provokes it, anger blinds the soul's eyes, preventing it from seeing the Sun of Righteousness." The saint continues,

Leaves, whether of gold or lead, placed over the eyes obstruct the sight equally, for the value of gold does not effects the blindness it produces. . . . [Anger] whether reasonable or unreasonable, obstructs our spiritual vision." (p. 83)

As well as a description of anger, Cassian offers us an understanding of both its developmental roots and consequences. Cassian, as with many of the writers found in the Philokalia, holds to a dynamic understanding of the human person that anticipates in broad strokes the later finds of developmental psychology.

In "Eight Vices," we learn that anger is the rooted in gluttony, unchastity and avarice. Of these three, it is gluttony which is the developmental origin of anger. In a nutshell, what is for the infant a virtue, or at least a necessity is for the adult a vice. And it is from anger that there develops other, increasingly more serious vices: dejection, listlessness, self-esteem (less in the modern sense and more in the sense of autarkic self-aggrandizement of pathological narcissism or even sociopathy), and pride.

But it is anger I think that is the lynchpin between the (relatively) minor sins gluttony, unchastity and avarice and the increasingly more deadly sins which follow. At its core anger arise when the person's desires are frustrated. Anger is the announcement that I have encountered, and rebelled against, the limits of my own life and most now decide either to accept the limits imposed upon me or withdrawn into a life of increasingly deadly and death deal fantasy.

In my next post, I want to reflect with you briefly on how as a confessor I respond to the angry penitent (at least in my better, more grace-filled moments).

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Confession & the Evangelism of the Faithful: the Regretful Penitent

My last post spoke about the place of education in the evangelism of the faithful. I argued that in the pastoral life of the Church education is not merely intellectual, but at the service of helping people see the outlines of the Gospel in their own hearts. This in turn can lead to a moment of crisis that typically leads in turn to in one of three ways: regret (a global sorrow for one's life), anger (a spiritual blindness or some other negative emotion often directed at the spiritual father, and ultimately God), and indifference (in which the person ignores or minimizes what is heard). I also said that these three responses are, or at least can be, grist for the mill in Holy Confession. In this and the following two posts, I want to look briefly at how I handle each response as a confessor.

Again, just remind people, my response will not involve what people have told me in confession. And again as I said last time, I do not think that the information I will offer is only for priests. People are often better able to approach confession with a open heart, more trust and less anxiety if they have some sense of what is, and is not, expected of them. Especially when people first come to me for confession I will tell them what is going to happen and the "ground rules." Chief among these ground rules is that they are free not to answer any question I ask them and not act on any advice I might may offer. I respect the freedom of the penitent to reveal as much, or a little, of his or her struggle as they wish. But I address the character of the confessor in a later post.

Now, to regret…

The regretful penitent comes to confession lamenting his or her past. Note that what I said here was "past" and not simply "sins." Merely looking back on one's life with sorrow is not the same as repentance though it is certainly may be a part of repentance. But a global regret for one's past is (I think) fundamentally unhealthy.

In both the East and the West the final morning service is the Office of Lauds—of the praise of God. The Church's liturgical tradition embodies what is I think a rather wise point of spiritual psychology. Repentance, as distinct from simple regret, bears fruit in the praise of God. The ability and willingness to praise and thank God sincerely is one of the key signs that the penitent has repented from his or her sins.

The fruit of repentance is gratitude, joy, and a lively awareness of God grace and mercy even in the darkest moments of one's life.

Likewise, the absence of gratitude toward God and an unwillingness, or even hostility, to considering the hidden mercy of God in the midst of one's sinfulness is a sign that the penitent has come to confession not with repentance for healing but mere regret.

My understanding and subsequent response to the regretful individual—and make no mistake, regret is always part of living as an individual, living not in communion with God and neighbor but within a world of one's own making—is guided by something I read by St John of Kronstadt.

The saint reminds the priest, that when hearing confessions he is not a judge but a witness to God's mercy. This means that both in word and deed, the priest most first remind the person, as St John writes in his own preparation for confession, of "the abundance of the Mercy of God." The harshness, the lack of gratitude (and the fear that typically accompanies it) reflects a more fundamental lack of an awareness of God's mercy. It is this lack that the confessor is called to respond to by his own gentleness.

But why is this gentle witness necessary?

For better or worse, people draw their view of God from their experience of the priest. For person whose self-image is framed by regret, the priest, by his kindness and acknowledgement of the goodness of the person, offers to the penitent the possibility of a new way of understand not only God, but also self and others. The confessor is called to model in confession what it means to love God and neighbor with one's whole heart and mind.

Even when correction is necessary it is important that it be given gently and with a clear and sincere indication on the part of the confessor that what is offered is offered not to shame the person but to comfort and heal. It is important as well that the priest makes clear that the penitent is free to act or not on the advice. Advice, like an epitimia (penance), is best offered rather than imposed.

But the witness to mercy must be more.

Any witness in the Church is necessarily prophetic. It is here where I think that confession becomes most challenge for confessor and penitent. As a witness of mercy the confessor is called by God is called to discern the presence of divine mercy in the life of the penitent. Building on what I said a moment ago, this means going beyond merely reminding the person that God is merciful. Bearing witness to God's mercy builds on, but necessarily transcends, the confessor being kind and gentle.

With the regretful penitent, I listen carefully to the life story that is told in confession. What I am listening for are those moments in the person's life where they may have overlooked the mercy of God for them. (As an aside, and without prejudice to "divine grace, which always heals that which is infirm and completes that which is lacking," I think my own training in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis has been a great help. After all, what is the unconscious but all that which is in our experience and yet, paradoxically, unknown to us?)

Bearing witness to the hidden presence of God and His mercy in the life of the penitent not only helps the person move from regret to repentance, it is also I think (to return to our more general topic) essential for the evangelism of the faithful. While education, or rather the lack of education, is a problem in the pastoral life of the Church, as I argued yesterday this is much more than simply an absence of information about God. The regretful penitent makes it clear to me that I (and all of us) suffer from is the lack of awareness of the mercy of God for me (God pro me, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has it) in the concrete circumstance of my life.

In and through confession the discerning confessor, leaning as he does on the grace of ordination and his own personal talents and gifts, is called to give voice to the presence of mercy. Failure to do so in any confession, but especially in the case of the merely regretful penitent, leaves the penitent just outside the gates to the Kingdom of God.

It also robs the confessor of what I have found to be one of the great joys of priestly ministry—the transformation of mere regret into repentance (metanoia or a Godly sorrow) in which regret becomes thanksgiving for the gift of life and this not only in the penitent's heart but also my own.

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

The Evangelism of the Faithful: Education

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Earlier, I alluded to the importance in my own ministry of holy confession as a means of evangelizing the faithful. In this and later posts I would like to develop this theme somewhat.

After I finished my doctorate, I want back to work as a therapist and from there to ordination and assignment as a priest. Thinking back on this time, I realize that there were two very different "models" in the back of my mind about priestly ministry: didactic and therapeutic. Certainly both of these methods are found within the tradition of the Church. There are pastors such as St John Chrysostom or St Augustine, both extraordinary preachers who excelled in the didactic form of ministry.

But we have also had those who embodied a more therapeutic approach to ministry. I'm thinking here for example of St Silouan the Anthonite and his disciple and biographer Archimandrite Sophrony (pictured above at left). These monastics were extraordinary spiritual fathers who were able to heal others of deep spiritual pathologies.

The didactic and therapeutic are not mutually exclusive. Much less are they opposed to each other (There is an interesting look at this issue from the point of view of mental health counseling by Evan Hadkins, "Is Counselling Learning?" The post is short and worth a quick read.) For me at least, the struggle of those first years as a priest was finding the right balance between these two approaches to ministry.

What I had to do was learn two things. First, how to teach and preach in a manner that fostered in people a desire to lay aside their sins and be healed. Second, how to counsel in a way that fostered in people not only a rightly formed spiritual life but also a desire to learn about the faith in a humble, non-polemical manner.

At first I tended to lean toward a more educational method of evangelism. This certain was not a waste of time or effort on my part. Too many people want to live the Christian life but neglect the content of the faith. In a letter to Fr David Balfour, (a Catholic who converted to Orthodoxy), Fr Sophrony writes that "There are three things I cannot take in: nondogmatic faith, nonecclesiological Christianity and nonascetic Christianity. These three - the church, dogma, and asceticism - constitute one single life for me."

All of these three elements require from the spiritual father that he fulfill the role of teacher. But what kind of teacher should he be?

Especially in the beginning stages of the spiritual life Church, dogma and asceticism are more objects of intellectual inquiry than epiphanies of divine grace. Whether a person is raised in the Church or comes later as an adult, the faith, even if intellectually compelling, remain largely external to the person's own experience. Education for evangelism must present what I think of as the anthropological beauty of the faith, and especially of the Church, of dogma and of asceticism.

This requires a rather different style of teaching than what is typically done in graduate school. It requires that the teacher understand, from within his or her own experience, how the truth of the faith is inscribed in the human heart. Education for evangelism, even when done in a sermon or an adult education class, is not for the intellect alone. It is also for the heart and so information must be placed at the service of the heart. In a word, whatever the its content and style, education that is ordered toward evangelism must be evocative of the heart's longing and desire for God and in God for neighbor and the created order.

Because we are sinners, however, evocative teaching will also necessarily be provocative. Teaching that successfully shows how the Gospel is already written in the human heart will necessarily precipitate a crisis in at least some of those who listen to what is taught. Typically this crisis will take one of three forms.

First, and ideally, the person will respond positively to the crisis and desire to reform his or her life according to the Gospel. Second, and less frequently, the person will respond in a negative fashion. Unwilling to reform his or her life the student will instead blame the spiritual father accusing him of lacking in humility, of being arrogant or judgmental. Whether true or not such charges, especially when delivered in an angry or hostile tone, can undermine the spiritual father's confidence in his own ministry (this certainly was the effect that such encounters had one me at least). Third, and most typically, the person will try and minimize or ignore the call to change his or her life.

Whatever the immediate response, however, the material presented didactically becomes in time grist for confession. While this is clear in the case of a positive response, it is also is the case for those who respond in a negative or minimizing fashion. Of these two remaining responses, the negative is certainly more stressful for all involved, but it lends itself best to fostering repentance. It is the minimizing response which I have found most challenging to respond to evangelically.

In my next post I want to reflect with you on how I respond pastorally as a confessor to the three basic responses I outlined above. To anticipate questions and concerns, my response will not involve what people have told me in confession. Nor do I think that the information I will offer is only for priests. In my experience I have found that people are often able to approach confession with a more open heart and less anxiety if they have some sense of what is, and is not, expected of them. Especially when people first come to me for confession I will tell them what is going to happen and the "ground rules." Chief among these ground rules is that they are free not to answer any question I ask them—I respect the freedom of the penitent to reveal as much, or a little, of his or her struggle as they wish. But I address the character of the confessor in a later post.

For now, and as always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Missional Theology for a Missional Church « Missional Church Network

The church does not do mission, it is mission. By its very calling and nature, it exists as God’s ’sent’ people (missio = sending). Its worship, its proclamation, its life as a distinctive community, and its concrete demonstration of God’s love in acts of prophetic and sacrificial service are all witness to the good news whose sign and foretaste it is to be.

Such is the consensus of missio Dei theology — but it is hard to translate into the deeply rooted and long since defined classical patterns of western theology. It is equally difficult to translate into the structures of churches which are still shaped by the mindset of Christendom and which have not come to terms with the paradigm shift that surrounds them.

No area of theological work or churchly practice is untouched by the theological agenda of the Missio Dei. This is demonstrated by the ways in which the study of missiology has evolved in this century. From a rather narrow focus upon the expansion of western Christianity and it implications, the discipline today intrudes into every area of theological discourse.

It is still possible to find seminary courses on “the theology of mission.” But the global paradigm shift requires now that we do “missionary theology.” This is the missional challenge that confronts the biblical scholar, the church historian, the systematic theologian, and the practical theologian.

Darrell Guder is Princeton Theological Seminary's Dean of Academic Affairs
and the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology

Dialectical, Dialogical and Reconciliatory: The Evangelical Imperative

In his speech opening the recent gathering in Constantinople of Orthodox bishops His All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew stress at one point the importance of evangelizing not only those outside the Church but also those who are baptized.

My first though on reading this was, well, thank God!

The need to evangelize our own faithful is something that Orthodox priests often discuss privately when we gather together, but we are sometime less forthright about publicly. Add to this that it is not at all unheard of for Orthodox Christian clergy and laity to minimize the need for the evangelism of the faithful (including the clergy). Sometimes this argument takes the form not of dismissing evangelism out of hand. More often though it is argued (at least by example) that participation in the service of the Church is sufficient.

His All Holiness points out in response to the neglect of the evangelism of the faithful "that in contemporary societies, especially in the context of western civilization, faith in Christ can in no way be taken at all for granted." Our evangelism whether it involves us with ministering to those outside or inside the Church can only "be developed or expounded [in] dialogue with modern currents of philosophical thought and social dynamics, as well as with various forms of art and culture of our times." At least in my better moments as a priest, I have taken to heart the primacy of dialog as the means of bring the Good News to others and have found it to be the most fruitful and joyful part of my ministry.

That said, there remains a central and ongoing struggle in me: Remembering that the proclamation of the Gospel "cannot be aggressive." When it is, "as it often unfortunately is; [it is] is of no benefit at all." To avoid aggression in the proclamation of the Gospel requires from me a real ascetical effort. Respecting the freedom of others, trying to find the points of commonality and convergence between us, can only proceed by an act of self-emptying (kenosis) that seems absent in much of what passes for Orthodox outreach and evangelism.

At least within the American context, Orthodox Christians seem to have often adopted a triumphalistic style of evangelism. Much of the material that we publish and much of what we say publicly seems specifically directed at convincing Western Christians (and specifically Evangelical Christians) to become Orthodox. Add to this that we produce very little that is directed to the non-Christian and it seems hard to deny that we are more concerned with proselytizing than evangelism. His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew challenges us who are more inclined to proselytize Western to undertake instead the much more difficult task of entering into a conversation with those without any religious faith, or indeed even those among us who are only marginally committed baptized Orthodox Christians.

Unlike proselytizing (which begins not with proclaiming the Gospel but by undermining the faith of those we speak with) evangelism (whether internal or external in focus) requires that we "first understand other people and discern their deeper concerns." As Bartholomew points out "even behind disbelief, there lies concealed the search for the true God." Entering into the disbelief of others, seeing it sympathetically and with compassion as a search for God, is personally challenging and to many threatening.

The empathic approach to evangelism requires that I find in my own heart the strains of disbelief, doubt and despair that are the seed bed of what the late Pope John Paul II called in Evangelium vitae

the "culture of death" or what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) called in his 2005 homily the "dictatorship of relativism." Triumphalism, and all forms of intellectual and emotional manipulation of others, is itself a fleeing from the hard work of dialog grounded in accurate self-knowledge. Ironically, these and other forms of religious aggression (what His All Holiness calls "fanaticism") are themselves also symptoms of the very culture of death that the Church condemns.

What then are we to do? How are we to proceed in our evangelism in a way that avoids aggression and take seriously the concerns of those with whom we speak? Our evangelism, as with all of the Church's ministries must (and again I'm borrowing from His All Holiness) "dialectical, dialogical and reconciliatory."

Especially given the use of the intellectually loaded term "dialectical" is tempting to read the concerns of contemporary philosophy into the above. Given the openness toward modern thought that informs His All Holiness speech, this is not by any means an unwarranted approach. While it is certainly would be worthwhile to engage the different meanings possible in the term dialectical, I think it would be more profitable to understand the dialectical, dialogical and reconciliatory character of the Church's ministry in general, and evangelism in particular, by taking my cue from the text of the Patriarch's speech.

The vision of the Church's ministry outlined in the speech is one that reflects "the connection between the unity of the Church and the unity of the world, on which the Apostle to the Gentiles insist." This dual unity "imposes on us the need to assume the role of peacemaker within a world torn by conflicts." Precisely because we are called to be peacemakers, we "cannot—indeed, it must not—in any way nurture religious fanaticism, whether consciously or subconsciously." Certainly, "When zeal becomes fanaticism, it deviates from the nature of the Church," and so "we must develop initiatives of reconciliation wherever conflicts among people either loom or erupt." While I agree that "Inter-Christian and inter-religious dialogue is the very least of our obligations; and it is one that we must surely fulfill," I find myself wondering what such a dialog might look like. This is especially important, at least to me, when I wonder what such a dialog might look like pastorally.

In tomorrow's post I wish to offer one suggestion by returning to a idea I presented earlier. I would argue that we look to the Mystery of Confession as a model for a form of evangelism and ministry that is, as His All Holiness argues, is dialectical, dialogical and reconciliatory.

As always, I not only welcome your thoughts, questions and comments, but actively solicit them.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Be Doers of the Word

Fr. Jay Scott Newman, a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Charleston and pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina, has an interesting post on what he terms "Evangelical Catholicism."  While here and there an Orthodox Christian community might want to change a word or phrase, it seems to me that Fr Newman's description might be a good foundation on which to build, say, a parish mission statement.  I have included the whole of Father's post below and would invite constructive and appreciative comments about how what he says might serve to help clarify the mission of an Orthodox parish.  My emphasis is in bold, my comments in red.



In Christ,


+Fr Gregory

Elsewhere on this website, on the page called Catholics in the Bible Belt, I have offered a brief description of the term I use to unify everything we do at St. Mary’s. A fuller account of this concept is found in the Eight Principles of Evangelical Catholicism which I have drafted to help the priests and people of St. Mary’s think about the shape of our parochial life and guide pastoral practice. This list is not exhaustive, and I offer these eight simply as a catechetical tool in the service of living in its depth the dignity of our Baptism.

Evangelical Catholicism is not meant to be a movement within the Church, still less a sect or sub-set of Catholicism; it simply a way of understanding the vocation of every Christian and of thinking about the organizing center of the Church’s life. Evangelical Catholicism is a powerful remedy to the various counterfeit catholicisms (casual, cultural, cafeteria, etc) which afflict the Church in our time, and I offer these principles in the service of helping the people of St. Mary’s to follow the Lord Jesus ever more faithfully in the Way of the Cross through radical conversion, deep fidelity, joyful discipleship, and courageous evangelism.

The Principles of Evangelical Catholicism

1. The Lord Jesus Christ is the crucified and risen Savior of all mankind, and no human person can fully understand his life or find his dignity and destiny apart from a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. It is not enough to know who Jesus is; we must know Jesus.

2. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is divine revelation, not human wisdom, and the Gospel is given to us in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition which together constitute a single divine deposit of faith transmitted authentically and authoritatively by the Bishops in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. We must surrender our private judgments in all matters of faith and morals to the sacred teaching authority of the Church’s Magisterium if we are to receive the whole Gospel. (It is worth noting that while the Orthodox Church does not use the term "Magisterium" nor would we identify a single bishop as such as the locus of unity for the universal Church, nevertheless we would agree that there must be a willingness to surrender our private judgements in matters of faith and morals to Holy Tradition.  If our approach is somewhat more fluid--and it is not as fluid as many outside and inside the Church might think, we also teach that there is a communal standard to which all Orthodox Christians must hold.)

3. The seven Sacraments of the New Covenant are divinely instituted instruments of grace given to the Church as the ordinary means of sanctification for believers. Receiving the Sacraments regularly and worthily is essential to the life of grace, and for this reason, faithful attendance at Sunday Mass every week (serious illness and necessary work aside) and regular Confession of sins are absolutely required for a life of authentic discipleship. (Yup, what Father said.)

4. Through Word and Sacrament we are drawn by grace into a transforming union with the Lord Jesus, and having been justified by faith we are called to sanctification and equipped by the Holy Spirit for the good works of the new creation. We must, therefore, learn to live as faithful disciples and to reject whatever is contrary to the Gospel, which is the Good News of the Father’s mercy and love revealed in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

5. The sacred liturgy, through which the seven Sacraments are celebrated and the Hours of praise are prayed, makes present to us the saving mysteries of the Lord Jesus. The liturgy must therefore be celebrated in such a way that the truth of the Gospel, the beauty of sacred music, the dignity of ritual form, the solemnity of divine worship, and the fellowship of the baptized assembled to pray are kept together in organic unity.

6. Receiving the Sacraments without receiving the Gospel leads to superstition rather than living faith, and the Church must therefore take great care to ensure that those who receive the Sacraments also receive the Gospel in its integrity and entirety. Consequently, before Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, and Marriage are administered, there must be in those who request these Sacraments clear evidence of knowledge of the Gospel and a serious intention to live the Christian life. (In all honesty, I would have to say I think typical Orthodox pastoral praxis is at least as far from this as is typical Catholic practice.  Even among converts, in both tradition, there is often a magical quality in people's thinking and participation in the sacraments.)

7. Being a follower of Christ requires moving from being a Church member by convention to a Christian disciple by conviction. This transformation demands that we consciously accept the Gospel as the measure of our entire lives, rather than attempting to measure the Gospel by our experience. Personal knowledge of and devotion to Sacred Scripture is necessary for this transformation to occur through the obedience of faith, and there is no substitute for personal knowledge of the Bible. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.

8. All the baptized are sent in the Great Commission to be witnesses of Christ to others and must be equipped by the Church to teach the Gospel in word and deed. An essential dimension of true discipleship is the willingness to invite others to follow the Lord Jesus and the readiness to explain His Gospel. (Where I think many Orthodox, and Catholics for that matter, get anxious here is that they assume that witnessing to Christ and explaing the Gospel means some variation of "knocking on doors" or asking intrustive questions.  It isn't.  Our ability to fulfill the Great Commission comes first of all from a faithful heart.  Out of that fidelity comes the words and deeds--not in imiation of others, but in a manner which is unique and personal.  That is, a witness that is truly and wholly my own and not my attempt to be like someone else.)

More Thoughts On Orthodoxy in America

An interesting comment from Blogger Audra Wooten that many readers might have missed while I was trying to clean up the stray code on my blog.

Audra writes in response to my earlier post "American Orthodoxy?":

Father Gregory,

I had been pondering both the Ocholophibst post you reference and your comments on it, when today I opened the copy of The Word (publication of the Antiochian Archdiocese) and saw a related article: "Orthodox & American Ideals in Foundational Texts." I wonder if something like this is what you had in mind. At any rate, I thought you might enjoy reading it and might not have seen it if you don't subscribe to The Word.

Thank you Audra for your comment, I value them greatly. Thank you as well for bringing the essay by Gregory Cook to my attention. I took you advice and read Cook's essay in the May 2008 issue of The Word.

To answer your question, I would say that the article both was and wasn't what I had in mind.

To paraphrase Lincoln, historically we American have always seen ourselves as an "almost chosen people," committed fundamentally to an idea: "that all men are created equal." As Lincoln suggests both at Gettysburg and in his second inaugural address, this is an idea that will continually be tested even as it was tested by the Civil War.

The heart of this test, and the question that faces all American, including Orthodox Christians, is found in the last paragraph of the Gettysburg Address:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln's words are pointed challenge to not only his contemporaries, but to us as Orthodox Christians. America, for better and worse, is a work that we are invited to participate in. As Orthodox Christians we are no more called to consecrate or hallow this work this work today, then were Christians of Lincoln's era called to consecrate or hallow the battlefield at Gettysburg. This has been done by those "brave men, living and dead who struggled," not only during the Civil War, but in the wars that both proceeded and followed.

If America is an idea, it is also a gift and a responsibility.

Lincoln is squarely within the tradition of American political philosophy when he says that it is our task to dedicate ourselves "to the unfinished work" of "a new birth of freedom," a form of "government of the people, by the people, for the people." The American experiment is both a challenge and an invitation. The questions for us as Orthodox Christians is this: Are we willing to participate, personally and as a Church, in that common task of civil self-government? And what, if anything, do we as Orthodox Christians contribute to this common task?

It seems to me that many in the Orthodox Church have succumbed to what I see as a growing problem in many segments of American society. Whether we see ourselves as politically liberal or conservative, many in American society, and in the Orthodox Church, seem more inclined to use America, then to contribute to America and to the American Experiment.

Allow me to borrow from another inaugural address, this time from President Kennedy: "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." Just prior to making this oft quoted challenge Kennedy recounts the global social and scientific changes since World War II. He then says "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

He tells both sides of the differences that divide the human family that they all should "heed . . . the command of Isaiah—to 'undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free.'" This can, however, only be accomplished Kennedy tells us through "cooperation." It is only by our willingness to cooperate with one another that we "may push back the jungle of suspicion." The American project, the American invitation, to all people of good will including Orthodox Christians, is that we "join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved."

For all his optimism, Kennedy is also a realist. He knows that this endeavor "will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet." But even if we are being invited to something that necessarily awaits an eschatological fulfillment, he says nevertheless "let us begin."

There is a certain humility that is as deeply engrained in the American character as is our optimism. If we go wrong, either on the world stage or as Orthodox Christians it is when we forget the humility and wisdom embodied in Kennedy's speech if not always his life:

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

American culture is deeply collaborative—from barn raisings onward, ours is a culture that fosters all sorts of voluntary associations. Working together to face a common challenge is part of our character. And so Kennedy says, "the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."

An effective Orthodox witness to America, I would suggest, requires that we surrender our tendency to use America, and instead demonstrate by our actions our willingness to contribute to the great American project of promoting liberty in all facets of human life, physical, moral, political and cultural, both here and abroad. This might mean an explicit proclamation of the Gospel; but regardless of its theological and historical integrity our proclamation will be ignored by all but the most base in American society if it is not embodied in an active philanthropy which demonstrate to others that we hold ourselves (and to borrow from Kennedy's speech) to "the same high standards of strength and sacrifice" that we ask of them.

It is not sufficient, I think, for Orthodox Christians merely to be residences of America. We must be good citizens, even exemplary citizens, who are committed to bringing to bear all our resources, both personal and as a tradition, to the project of human freedom in all its many dimensions. In a word, our must be a witness not of judgment, but of cooperation and collaboration, "remembering" as Kennedy said, "that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof."

For all our theological erudition, as a Church we have failed in the most basic task of our witness to America. We have failed to be exemplary, or even, I fear, good citizens.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

The Spirit of this Age: Consumerism & Belief in God

Anthony Sacramone, managing editor of First Things, recently interviewed Pastor Timothy Keller, senior minister at Manhattan's Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Keller has recently published a book, "The Reason for God, currently No. 18 on the New York Times bestseller list, Keller offers what one might call his summa: the meat of his preaching, teaching, and confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior for a world of unexamined materialist presuppositions, genetic determinisms, and endless digital cross-chatter." I thought in light of our recent conversation of Bishop Fulton Sheen, G.K. Chesterton and the spirit of this age, the exchange between Sacramone and Keller of faith and doubt might be of interest.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Above: Icon of the Holy Prophet Job

You've always been very careful, both in your preaching and toward the end of The Reason for God, to remind people that they should examine their motives for embracing the Faith, to make sure that Christ is not a means to an end but that God is the end. But how many times have you had someone come up to you and say, "I tried Christianity but it didn't work. I still felt lost, I still felt depressed, it didn't make sense of the narrative of my life, and so I gave up on it." What do you say to someone like that?

"Be specific." There's almost no good answer to that if you allow a person to stay at that level of generality: "It didn't work. It didn't really make sense of my life." And, of course, that seems to contradict the book: The book says it will make sense of your life. Once I find out what the particular problems are, I can fix it. I mean, there's no way even to answer your question because it's so general. I can tell you the kinds of things I usually hear when I ask, "Be specific." In many cases, it's a short-term disappointment. Which is, "I really was sure that God was calling me to do this, and every door closed." You can always go to the "Evil and Suffering" chapter, chapter two, which says, "If you can't see any good reason why God let something happen, does that mean there can't be any good reason why God let that happen? The answer is no, so why are you acting as if there can't be any good reason? That's the motive problem. In other words, you got into this faith in order for God to serve you, not for you to serve God."

A second area, if I say, "Please be specific," is that they feel that Christianity is too hard. For example, a lot of times I'll have a young man say, "I know I'm not supposed to sleep with girls until I get married, but I don't have any prospects and I just can't do it. I just can't go without sex." Or something like that. You know, Christianity's too hard. That's a much better argument. But then you can always say what Lewis says about "is Christianity hard or easy," in Mere Christianity . . . In some ways, Christianity is for sinners and for people who do fail, not for people who are good. And yet at the same time you are going to fall down. Everybody's going to fall down at various points. But if you're actually addicted, as it were—if you say, "Here's something I shouldn't do but I just can't stop," then there's an addiction going on, there's something going on. You need to get in touch with that. Even if you weren't a Christian, you shouldn't be violating your conscience. There's something else going on, there's something that's too important to you, you have to deal with your heart. You need counseling.

It's not something I would imagine you heard a lot in the sixteenth century, though: "It didn't work for me."

No. But that's what I mean by saying, usually it's a disappointment. And that's where I can come back and start to say, "If there's a God, then you should relate to him"—and I do talk about this in the last chapter—if there's a God, you should be going to him because you ought to go to him, not because it works for you. I think, when I was a younger man, if somebody said, "It doesn't work for me," I think the right answer, as you just alluded, is "What do you mean 'work for you'? You should be doing this because God is God and you're not. And he's the Lord and you're his servant. What are you talking about 'work for you'? You're being selfish, you're being individualistic, you're being a consumer" Now, even though that's probably true (laughs), I'll try to find out what the specifics are, and usually the person's got some real—the individualistic culture's created this victim mentality and this feeling like God's gotta be there to meet my needs. It's created that and it's the background, but many people have had real disappointments, real sadnesses, real failures, real—

There are also real promises in the gospels for the healing of one's life.

That's also why I don't throw the consumerist thing at people anymore . . . Don't forget Job. I think the point of the Book of Job was that the only way he could turn into somebody great was he had to be profoundly disappointed. The only way for God to use him was he had to suffer. So at a certain point you do have to counsel the sovereignty of God, but before you get there, you have to be pretty thoughtful, pretty sympathetic, because people see those promises and they want to be healed. I can tell people a lot of stories, but you'd have to give me specifics, and there's no reason to go there . . .

At some point you have to get back to this consumerist problem that they have with it. But you have to be very very gentle on the way.

And the consumerist problem hasn't been helped by certain ministries, the health-and-wealth gospel, and other bestselling authors who shall remain nameless.

Yeah. It's the background for people's legitimate—I think people in the sixteenth century were asking questions like, "If God really loves me, why have four of my five children died of dysentery?" Surely they were struggling with that. But the background of "if there is a God he ought to be meeting your needs"—our consumerist culture makes that almost unbearable. Almost unbearable. But it does irritate me to hear people say, "I don't believe in God because bad things happened to me."