Posted on December 11, 2023December 11, 2023 by Eric Austin

Planting Orthodoxy into the Hearts of Our Children [During The Nativity]

If we expect our children and grandchildren to grow into adulthood as practicing Orthodox Christians, we must give daily witness to the importance of our faith. If we are lax in our fasting, church attendance, and piety, our children will see by our lack of seriousness, a compartmentalized religion that is ultimately of no value to them.

If they do not see us seriously practicing our faith, Orthodoxy will ultimately be rejected by them as something that is of no personal value. If they do not see us praying, they will not have prayer as a part of their lives. If they do not see us putting the divine services before entertainment, they will abandon Orthodoxy as irrelevant to them. If they do not see Christ in us, they will ultimately reject Christ for themselves.

If they do not see in their parents a Christian who is quick to forgive, quick to show mercy, and quick to give to the poor, they will not see Christ. If they do not see in the parent one who loves his neighbor, as Christ commanded, they will not see the Christ that changes and transforms lives.

Just as a child has to be educated in the art of poetry, reading, painting, and the sciences, so too must a child be taught by the example of his parents, the importance of faith. Saint Isaac the Syrian said, “Faith is the door to mysteries. What the bodily eyes are to sensory objects, the same is faith to the eyes of the intellect that gaze at hidden treasures”.

To educate a child in the humanities and the sciences, but to fail to implant faith by our example, is to ultimately cheat the child of the most important gift of all, the gift of faith.

With love in Christ,

Abbot Tryphon

What are we as Orthodox doing for the next generation as the world’s population grows. Orthodoxy is in no hurry but what is the next step. Yes we as Orthodox are more concerned with antiquity than modernity, but again, what is the next step. The next step is local missions. To learn more and or donate go to our homepage @ www.ocmamerica.org …What gift are we giving to the next generation this Nativity?

STF SMM Coordinator – Eric A. Tweten

Posted on November 28, 2023December 11, 2023 by Eric Austin

Beyond the Plateau: Is your parish focused on Mission or Maintenance?

Clergy and members of parishes that are beginning to decline will tend to notice something happening. At first, what begins to happen is very subtle, hardly noticed. It comes up during warm conversation, perhaps during coffee hour, and may even be, at the beginning of this period, something that is undertaken with joy and laughter as parishioners engage in it during their conversations with one another. It is nostalgia.

And it always begins with the words, “Remember when…?”

Nostalgia is a killer. Many people in our churches sometimes speak rhapsodically about those “good old days” in the forties, fifties, sixties, or whatever decade is in vogue. We reminisce about and yearn for full churches and full Sunday schools, but what we don’t realize is that society itself has changed. We no longer live in the “churched culture” of many of our childhoods. A “churched culture” is not so much characterized by the numbers of those actively participating in the life of the Church, but rather by a very noticeable feeling throughout society that the Church is important, that it matters. To an awful lot of people today, the Church not only does not matter, it matters less and less as the years go by. It’s not that they see the Church as harmful or hurtful; they see the Church as not really relevant or helpful.

Yet, many of us in the Church, at various levels of involvement and ministry, act as if nothing has changed. We continue to act as if the general population is seeking us out (churched culture, maintenance mindset) rather than acting like the Church we find in Acts, and seeking the world out (mission mindset). It is for this reason that we have as many declining and dying parishes as we do.

And why do we prefer to see one way over the other? Because the parish of a churched culture is calm, peaceful, organized. Think “Ozzie and Harriet.” (Anybody under 50 immediately is asking, “Who are they?” And that, in part, proves the point.) The parish of the mission mindset, however, is going to be none of these things. It is going to be hectic, challenging, disturbing even—not exactly everybody’s cup of tea, which is why many people don’t want it and why we have trouble seriously imagining what it would be like.

What the “maintenance” mindset leads to is a preoccupation with whether our churches are growing, rather than whether our mission to the world is flourishing; whether our churches are able to manage their accounts, rather than whether we can fulfill our God-given directives. We have been preoccupied with maintenance when we must be preoccupied with mission. But church growth is not about growth alone. As one church growth author has noted, “Our current problems cannot be conveniently reduced to whether the church membership statistics are growing or declining. Our current problems have more to do with mission than membership, more with service than survival, more with the planet than the church plant (i.e., facilities), more with the human hurts and hopes of the world than the hemorrhaging of a denomination…. We are called to share the Kingdom, not to grow churches.” We don’t grow churches, only God can do that. When we confuse the two, we get the problems with which we are now struggling.

So maintenance or mission? Which is it? It can’t be both; this preoccupation with maintenance, with census numbers, is self-defeating. The more we are concerned with maintenance, the less we focus on mission; the weaker our mission, the more we decline; the more we decline, the higher our preoccupation with maintenance. This downward spiral ends when the remaining remnant can no longer afford to keep the enterprise together.

Focusing on maintenance can be depressing, tedious, dreary, and discouraging. Focusing on mission can be uplifting, visionary, joyous, and inspiring. And, it’s not difficult to change the parish’s focus from one to the other: what’s needed is a little trust (in God—this is what changes mere “belief” to active and powerful “faith”), cooperation (between priest and parish leadership; one or the other alone cannot do this effectively, let alone powerfully), education (on what can be done, as well as what shouldn’t be done), and training and equipping.

The good news is that turnaround ministry is possible and can happen, but only if a declining parish’s priest and parishioners are willing to commit themselves to the effort of turnaround ministry. Such an effort will require the entire parish working together as a team to turn the tide and make a full comeback to healthy witness and ministry. While moving forward often requires reflective moments of looking back, pure nostalgia for times gone by can slowly grind to a halt any efforts to move a declining church forward. Those wishing to move their churches to full health and growth must remember that memory of the past must be coupled with vision of the future and real mission in order to achieve a holistic approach to real church growth.

-Originally Posted by Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff

Posted on November 27, 2023November 28, 2023 by Eric Austin

The “Silver Bullet” of Evangelism

the-silver-bullet-of-evangelism

by Father John Parker

In a single sentence, it could be said that evangelization is everyone’s business, since it is every baptized Christian’s vocation to bear witness to what he or she has seen and heard, to speak of all the good that God has done in his or her life, to share the “Good News” of the Gospel in word and deed with everyone who will listen.

Many well-intentioned people are looking for the “silver bullet” of evangelism. But there is no silver bullet for evangelization. No program will fix it. No bequest will buy us success. And, as His Grace, Bishop David of Alaska recently wrote, Saint Herman and his fellow missionaries had nothing but the Gospel—and look at what amazing success they had. The were able to convert non-Christians, village by village, across the vast expanse of Alaska, by word and deed, with precious few material resources.

What is needed for our continued evangelistic laboring, following in their footsteps? What is the root of evangelism? While there is no “silver bullet,” there are indeed identifiable characteristics or attitudes of both churches and individuals that indicate the way of evangelism. For starters, here are five.

A complete acceptance and belief in the Good News of Jesus Christ as we have received it.
A broken and contrite heart.
A new and right spirit.
A profound attitude of gratitude to God.
A genuine love of one’s neighbor.

We have to renew our understanding of what we believe and why we believe it. As Archimandrite Gerasim noted in a homily at the 18th All-American Council, what we need is “an unapologetic apologetic.” That is, we need to be confident and unashamed of our Orthodox Christian Faith. Further, we need to know what we are facing, just as the early Christians did. Today, one enemy of Christianity is cleverly called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism [MTD].”

Here are the five points regarding MTD that, FYI, were derived from interviews with roughly 3000 teenagers.

A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.

I once heard Father Stephen Freeman summarize this view saying, “God has come to make bad men better.” But (as he points out clearly) this is not Orthodox Christianity. The human problem is not a lack of goodness or an abundance of badness. The human dilemma is death. God has not come to make bad men better. He has come to raise dead men to new life.

Today, one enemy of the human person is related to what our society means by “orientation.” There is a lot of talk about orientation in the news today. Orientation can mean “facing a certain way.” But what it actually means is “east.” And “Orient” is a name we ascribe to our Lord Jesus Christ. The biblical imagery of Jesus being our “Sunrise” or “Sun” or “Anatoly” or “Vostok” is picked up in our Orthodox Hymnography. Here are two examples.

In the Nativity troparion we sing, “Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, has shone to the world the Light of wisdom! For by it, those who worshipped the stars, were taught by a Star to adore Thee, the Sun of Righteousness, and to know Thee, the Orient from on High. O Lord, glory to Thee!”
And in the hymn sung at weddings and ordinations we hear, “Rejoice O Isaiah! A Virgin is with Child, and shall bear a Son Emmanuel, both God and Man: and Orient is His Name, whom magnifying, we call the Virgin blessed.

So, “orientation” means “to face Jesus Christ!”

Much of what our culture calls “orientation” is actually what we would call in the Church “disorientation”—the dizzying death blows of living life facing west, with our backs to Jesus, according to the ways of the world. The three letter word for this is “sin.” At baptism, the healing of disorientation begins by facing the direction of that sin—west—the way of the devil, the way of the desert, the way of the world, renouncing it three times, and even spitting upon it, and the devil!

The Christian life then begins by “re-orientation”—“facing east again”—actually in the liturgical celebration and spiritually in our return to face Jesus Christ once again. Facing Jesus Christ, we can answer His invitation to draw near to him, however unworthy we may remain, even after renouncing our dizziness.

True orientation is facing Jesus Christ, on His terms with His gifts of grace. It is the beginning of New Life. This is the gift of illumination that each of us has been given, the road to which we are each called to share with everyone who will listen.

Orthodox Christians have been given the gift of heaven on earth. The Lord God Himself, Jesus Christ, has entrusted the vineyard of North America to each of us, city by city. Around us, people are dying in the streets—and in churches! They are killing one another. Our Supreme Court normalized the killing of children in the womb four decades ago. You have likely seen the videos in recent weeks of the trafficking of the body parts of aborted babies. The US Supreme Court recently normalized forms of disorientation. Additionally, pornography is absolutely destroying men—and boys (not to mention the ‘performing’ women and men it enslaves). The average first exposure to pornography among males is 12 years old. Christians are not exempt. These are all recipes for death. Add to these realities that our neighbors are lonely and largely unknown to us. Many elderly in retirement homes are neglected or abandoned. And prisons are full.

But at the Liturgy we regularly sing, “We have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly spirit, we have found the true faith worshipping the undivided Trinity, Who has saved us!” Do we believe this, or merely sing it? If we don’t believe it, it is disingenuous to sing it, and to call ourselves Orthodox Christians. If we do believe it, then we have an obligation of love and a debt of gratitude to pay by sharing the true light and the heavenly spirit with everyone who will listen. Remember my five pillars of evangelism:

A complete acceptance and belief in the Good News of Jesus Christ as we have received it.
A broken and contrite heart.
A new and right spirit.
A profound attitude of gratitude to God.
A genuine love of one’s neighbor.

If we believe this, we will cease to bicker as tight-fisted selfish people and begin to be open handed and generous. As His Eminence, Archbishop Mark of Philadelphia said in his profound opening words at the 18th All-American Council, we will start asking questions like, “How may I serve? How may I give? How shall we use God’s abundant resources? How can I make room for our neighbors in the church? To what is God calling us?” And to these I would add, “Do I really see myself as the first of sinners? How has God worked in my life? How is he saving me? Healing me? Changing me?” And the final question is, “To where shall we go to share the love of God and His salvation?”

Evangelization is saying “I love you because God first loves us. Let us find his healing and forgiveness together.” This is very Good News.

Priest John E. Parker III is the Chair of the OCA Department of Evangelization and Rector of Holy Ascension Church, Mount Pleasant-Charleston, SC.

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Eric Austin

Update From Fr John Cook with Reader Noah

Hello!

My name is Noah. I am one of the parish members who attends liturgy and services at St. Tikhon Orthodox Church. I can help share our mission testimony.

Prior to becoming Orthodox, or even knowing what Eastern Orthodoxy was, I found myself in a confusing state. I was raised in a very warm and loving baptist household but quickly fell into the atheist trap which is quite common among highschools and colleges. It wasn’t until the pandemic started, before I started questioning my previous presuppositions surrounding religion and different faiths. After looking into Christianity, it became quite apparent that, if I wanted an authentic belief, I would have to appeal to the Original Church and their understanding of the world. Much to my Baptist parents’ confusion, I began attending Russian Orthodox Liturgies and began adopting this outlook on life.

Theology and Authentic Prayer quickly became important. Fasting and Almsgiving became important. I started reading the Bible and the lives of the saints. I began to reorient my life around God and to love Truth.
It is quite remarkable how the mindset can change when confronted with the original interpretation of the Church.

At St. Tikhon Orthodox Church, we have had consistent additions of new parish members and icons that surround us. Many of these parish members have the same experience I have had growing up.
I have grown to appreciate and love the community, which helps strengthen me spiritually.

On May 1st, 2021, I was baptized into the Eastern Orthodox Church. This year, I was also tonsured as a reader by the Eastern Orthodox Church in October while at the Western Rite conference in Sarasota, Florida and have been assisting in the services provided by St. Tikhon Orthodox Church.

Since returning from the conference, we are continuing with the Catechism classes Fr. John is providing. We have been increasing the number of fun community activities to communicate fellowship amongst the fellow parish members.

A Monastery Bookstore will soon be visiting our Church to help increase the spiritual life of its members. Additionally we are gathering donations for families this Christmas season as well as supporting ongoing food drives for Caroline County.