Month: October 2008

In light of the recent exchanges on The Observer about converts, cradle Orthodox and the future of American Orthodoxy, we are republishing Terry Mattingly’s essay that touches on these important issues. This article was adapted from an address titled “So What Do the Converts Want, Anyway?” given at the 2006 Orthodox Christian Laity conference in Baltimore. Terry Mattingly, an advisor to AOI, is director of the Washington Journalism Center, editor of the www.GetReligion.org website, and a weekly syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service.

What Do the Converts Want?
By Terry Mattingly

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies to tell the difference
between a Southern Baptist church and an Orthodox church. You can get some
pretty good clues just by walking in the door and looking around. But there
are some similarities between the two that might be a little trickier to
spot. For instance, let me tell you about what life is like on Sunday
nights in a Southern Baptist congregation.

Baptists worship at several different times during the week — at least
they did in the old days when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist
pastor’s son. One of those times is on Sunday nights. Back in the early
1980s, I was active in a church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in which the
typical Sunday morning crowd would be about 200 to 300 people, which is
rather small for a Baptist church, but fairly normal for an Orthodox
parish. Then the crowd on Sunday night would be from 40 to 45 people.

Now, that ratio should sound familiar to many priests who lead Vespers
services. But the similarities don’t stop there.
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Fr. Thomas Hopko, an advisor to AOI, delivered an address in late September for the 40th Anniversary of the Consecration of the Chapel at the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration, a monastery for women in Ellwood City, Pa.

Fr. Tom observes that while a “sprinkling” of Orthodox Christians in academic circles have been known to the wider American public, “hardly any other practicing Orthodox Christian has been publicly recognizable in American society in the past forty years.” Among the clergy, the late Archbishop Iakovos is singled out for social witness in the civil rights movement. “Things are not much different today,” Fr. Tom says. “But there are some notable exceptions.”

He opens with a sobering assessment and then explores the accomplishments of the Church in recent decades:

A Spiritual Springtime for American Orthodoxy — Reflections on the last 40 Years

Membership in the Orthodox churches in North America in the past forty years has radically decreased. There are probably about half as many people in the churches today as there were four decades ago. It also seems that most adults who attend services in Orthodox churches today are “holding the form” of Orthodox Christianity while “denying the power of it” (2 Tim 3.5) as they ‘pursue happiness” according to “the American dream” as devotees of “the American way of life.”

Concerning the churches’ clergy during the past forty years, I believe that the task of finding, educating, appointing and supporting suitable candidates for the clergy, especially the episcopate, remains the greatest challenge in all Orthodox churches in North America today just as it was four decades ago when (as my friend, the late Fr. John Psinka would say), “few were called and all were chosen.”

Having stated the “negatives” — greatly reduced membership, inept leadership, nominal participation and widespread use of the church for secular purposes – the spiritual achievements in North American Orthodoxy during the past forty years are amazingly many and spectacularly significant. They were accomplished by a relatively small number of people, mostly converts to the Faith, people born abroad and clergy children. They are so remarkable that I am persuaded to call the past forty years a “spiritual springtime” for Orthodoxy in the United States and Canada.

I will comment on the accomplishments as I see them. They are not yet a bountiful “blossoming.” But they are a promising “planting” capable of producing, in due time, a rich harvest of spiritual fruits, including, we may hope, a company of committed and competent bishops, priests, deacons, monastics, church workers and lay leaders for the coming generations.

Read the full address on the Web site of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, the President of the Department of Foreign Religious Affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate, has written a prologue or introduction to “The Ethics of the Common Good in Catholic Social Doctrine” (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2008) by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. The article by Metropolitan Kirill was translated from the Italian and into English for the first time by Paola Fantini, an intern in the Rome office of the Acton Institute.

Considering the Orthodox concept of the common good, it must be noted that this concept refers not only to material well-being, not only to peace and harmony on earth, but most of all to the aspirations of man and human society to eternal life, which is the ultimate good of every Christian. For this reason, according to the Orthodox conscience, the debate on the common good will always be incomplete if it considers earthly life exclusively, while the highest good – life in Christ – is ignored by the preachers of radical secularism and vulgar materialism.

This does not mean, however, that the Orthodox Church denies the material aspects of human existence or considers them of little importance to the cause of salvation. The Orthodox Church limits itself to identifying correct priorities and to remembering the words of the Gospel: “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mark 8: 36) Good hard work and the production of material goods can be justified only if they are meant to ensure man a dignified standard of life which will allow him to help others and develop to his spiritual potential. In following such teachings, the individual can actively serve God and his nation. At the same time it must be noted that material goods are not a necessary condition for salvation and therefore their attainment must not become an end in itself, which would destroy the person and the foundations of human society.

Read the entire prologue. Read the review of Cardinal Bertone’s book.

The Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute, based in Berkeley, Calif., has released what it is calling “the first national survey based study of the laity, ordinary church members, in the two largest Orthodox Churches in the United States: the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (GOA) and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).”

To a significant degree, PAOI said, the study reflects the profile of an entire Orthodox community in the United States.

“The Orthodox Church Today” study addressed four broad questions:

— What is the “image” of the Orthodox clergy in the eyes of the “people in the pews?”
— To what extent do the social and religious attitudes of the ordinary parishioners reflect those of their parish priests?
— What do church members think about patterns of Church life in their local parishes?
— What do laity think about various issues dealing with “Democracy and Pluralism in the chirch,” “Changes and Innovations in the Church,” and “religious “Particularism’ and Ecumenism?”

PAOI also compared Orthodox Church life to Roman Catholic and various Protestant Churches in the United States.

From the highlights summary:

1) The common stereotype is that the Orthodox Churches in the USA are “ethnic” Churches of certain immigrant communities. The study shows that this not the case anymore. Nine out of ten parishioners in both GOA and OCA are American-born. Further, today, more than one-quarter (29%) of the GOA and a majority of OCA (51%) members are converts to Orthodoxy – persons born and raised either Protestants or Roman Catholics.

2) Not all Orthodox are equally “Orthodox.” The study found that the gaps between the “left” and the “right” wings in American Orthodoxy are wide and that American Orthodox Christians are deeply divided among themselves in their personal “micro-theologies.” Answering the question “When you think about your theological position and approach to church life, which word best describes where you stand?” the relative majority (41%) of church members preferred to be in the safe “middle” and described their theological stance and approach to church life as “traditional.” At the same time, quite sizeable factions identified themselves as
being either “conservative” (28%) or “moderate-liberal” (31%).
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Terry Mattingly looks at the most recent battles, from the left and the right:

If you could erase one moment from Sen. Barack Obama’s White House campaign, which would you choose?

That’s an easy question for evangelicals, Catholics and other religious believers who back Obama. Most would happily erase all evidence of his speech last spring to a circle of insiders behind closed doors in San Francisco. For those who have ignored national news in 2008, Obama talked about meeting voters in rural Pennsylvania, where hard times have crushed hopes and fueled resentments.

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter,” he said, that “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them … to explain their frustrations.”

Welcome back to the “culture wars,” all you politicos who hoped and prayed that talk about “values voters” and “pew gaps” would disappear. Instead, Republicans have been chanting this mantra — “bitter,” “cling,” “God” and “guns” — for months.

Read “Culture wars 2008” on Terry Mattingly’s Web site.