The Catalog of Good Deeds

By Fr. Dimitrius Basalygo

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (cf. Matthew 16:24). Where shall we go, O Lord? The Lord replies, “I will lead you into My Kingdom, into the eternal life, into your resurrection.” The Lord leads us to our resurrection and into his Kingdom. We must not doubt it. However, it always means carrying our cross, although it doesn’t always imply extreme suffering and temptations.

The path of following the Gospel commandments is already the path of the cross in this world that lies in iniquity and follows a totally different set of rules. The laws of the Heaven, the commandments of Christ are always a cross. “Let him deny himself” – that is the beginning of our journey, the journey according to the Gospel, the journey into God’s Kingdom. When we are born in this world, we inherit the pathology of self-centredness, egoism, egocentricity, self-promotion and rejection of others. We are living in the survival mode. This eat-or-be-eaten approach is emblazoned in our minds. However, the beginning of a new life lies in self-denial. The cross of Jesus Christ, his death and Resurrection have given us the opportunity to live a different life, a life that adheres to different rules – the rules and laws of the Heaven. It is hard to discard one’s own self. Even if we come to the Church, even if we turn to Jesus, even if we find a different way of life, we can still be infinitely centred on ourselves, on our own spiritual issues, and fail to notice anyone else, fail to attend worship and therefore be unable to drink from the source of Life. This focus on our own spiritual life is also a fallen path. We are saved in the Body of Christ. It is thanks to his wounds that we are healed. This is what we should discover. This is what we should experience. We claim this victory every time we enter a church. This is the victory that we partake of when we attend the Divine Liturgy and take communion. This is what every holiday, every divine office, every Liturgy is about – the Cross of Jesus Christ, combined with his victory and his permission for us to enjoy the fruit of that victory.

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You can waste your entire life sleeping. Your rank or post doesn’t matter: you can waste your life by walking past Christ even if you keep doing something all the time and don’t even have a moment to spare. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on April 11, 2017)

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St John Climacus writes in the beginning of his book The Ladder that it is not because we didn’t make miracles or didn’t raise people from the dead or didn’t heal the ill but because we did not repent that we will be judged on the Judgement Day. Repentance is available to everyone but it is not like we often imagine it to be – a formal description of our sins or circumstances of our lives. It is an inner transformation, when we are terrified at how bad we are. It is thanks to this realisation that our lives and thoughts are transformed. Repentance is a change of mind, and thus, a change in our actions and relationships with God and other people. Meanwhile, we would like to purify our souls easily just by listing our sins. We have turned our relationship with God into a mere formality, a mere bureaucratic procedure. It is easier this way, indeed. It is easier for us to look for guarantees in the Sacrament of Repentance, in the absolution prayer, instead of transforming our lives, changing our minds, and starting to look at ourselves, our neighbours, and the entire world differently. We may never do anything great but repentance is something every one of us can do. (Sermon after the All-Night Vigil on March 25, 2017)

***

Christians nowadays are afraid of the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgement, and the end of the world. The very things that used to bring us joy and hope, the things that made people excited, are perceived very differently. Yes, Lord, we believe and anticipate the Kingdom of Heaven, of course, but not here and now. We don’t want to experience everything that precedes it – the sorrows, the suffering, and the agony of this fallen world. This can be attributed to the fact that we Christians have lost the sensation that the Kingdom of God is coming, and that it has already come into this world, and it is in our midst, as we become its members each time we partake of the Sacraments of the Church. The Church is the Kingdom of God that comes with power and might. The Good News is that the Kingdom of God is not just anticipated but that it is the meaning and the main value of our Christian life. The Kingdom of God is already in our midst. (Sermon after Vespers on April 10, 2017)

By Fr. George Glinsky

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh told his audience about a conversation that he had had with a young army officer in Moscow in Soviet times. The young man asked him, possibly not fully aware of what he was saying, “Please tell me: you believe in God but who does God believe in?” Metropolitan Anthony replied, “We believe in God; and He with all his omnipotence believes in us. He believes that we will become the kind of people that we must become, that we will really be his children, that we who carry his image will also grow into his likeness, like children who grow and gradually take after their parents both in their appearance and behaviour.” Similarly, we who call ourselves Christians should also become like God in our life one day.

We should learn to become merciful and compassionate. If one can show compassion; if one is not afraid to admit his weaknesses; if one supports the rejected and those who are in extreme life situations, those who are oppressed; if one risks becoming unpopular by helping such people – in so doing he demonstrates great power and wisdom. This is the wisdom of Christ. Suffering for the sake of the rejected is a great feat for God’s sake. If we alleviate the suffering of the people around us just a little, we will accomplish something that is greater than all fasts, prayers, and everything else. This is because our Christian asceticism is entirely rooted in our neighbour whom we are to see in spite of the obstacles of our daily routines, our own personalities and everything that blocks our eyes and prevents us from seeing God. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on March 29, 2017)

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If you read the Gospel attentively, you will see that the Lord tells us that we should do our best to lay our souls for the sake of our neighbours. It means that we should devote our lives to serving people around us. The Lord says that whatever we do for one of these small people, we do for his sake. If we devote our entire lives to helping the light of the Resurrection of Christ to shine in the people who are around us, at least those who are especially close and precious to us, we will do it for the sake of Christ Himself, who died for our sins, rose from the dead, and granted us the Heavenly Kingdom and the eternal life. (Sermon after the All-Night Vigil on March 28, 2017)

***

The Church reminds that the purpose in the life of a Christian is to strive for inner changes. It is impossible to live in the past. Sure, you may and should remember the past. You should remember who you used to be, or, more precisely, who you used to turn yourself into when you disfigured yourself with sin. However, you must realise what God calls you up for, go forward and trust God without doubt or fear. There must not be any obstacle on this path. (Sermon after the All-Night Vigil on February 9, 2017)

By Fr. Valery Zakharov

Why is despondency such a terrible sin? It is because it amounts to not trusting God.

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We repent but remain unsure if the Lord forgives us or not. We call upon God but we still doubt whether God can hear us. The miracle is not that the Lord is capable of everything. Regardless of how much we doubt his love and question his actions, He keeps showing his mercy, his trust, and his boundless patience to us time and time again. Having endowed us with the right to choose, He expects us to start using it properly and to lay our cares upon him at last; He wants us to submit our lives into His hands, and, seeing his attitude towards us, feeling his love, to try and respond to it with gratitude. The road to God has to be more than just an effort but also give us an opportunity to enjoy meeting him even here, on Earth. (Sermon after the Divine Liturgy in the Boarding Home for Children with Special Needs on April 8, 2017)

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Suffering makes our road to God shorter.(Sermon after the Divine Liturgy on March 21, 2017)

By Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok

We should build our lives on love but what do we build it on? We build our lives on human knowledge and experience, which cannot be used for building our innermost temple and the eternal life. Our knowledge and skill is not enough to defeat the devil and to be free. This is why of course, we need Christ. Yes, He is always with us but we are not always with him. He is always waiting for us and is always calling, “Come to Me.” Unfortunately, we do not always want him to be so close and we hide from him. This is because we want to justify our sins, we want to insist on our own way of doing things, even though the love of Christ admonishes us, and we understand that if we accept him, then we will have to deny our own opinion, our own desires, our own plans, and to say, “Lord, my life is in your hands, instead of mere chance or luck. It isn’t in my plans that I make, especially given that I make them totally wrong.” Therefore, my dear parishioners, we learn to live this new life, and the Lord gives us this new life in abundance. We must accept it and tend to it with care, keeping it deep inside our hearts.

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A human being is just a creature but it is God’s creature. It is in the Creator, in God, that we find the new life, the fullness of life. It is thanks to him that we realise that all our problems can be attributed to the fact that we lack peace, we do not trust God and we doubt and hesitate.

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We often tell God, “We’ve got no time, we are tired, we have so much to do in our lives. See you later.” God keeps waiting and waiting for months and years. He waits for the time when a person eventually says, “Lord, save me, help me, make me wise, teach me.” This is when his life certainly changes.

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The Convent is not a brick and mortar building. Neither is it the gold on the domes and crosses. The Convent is love, which we must experience. Unfortunately, we do not experience it today, and this is our problem. However, we’ve got some time for repentance, for correcting ourselves and changing our lives. We have a lot to change, rebuild, and refurbish in our current life. The Lord will always help us. (Sermon after the All-Night Vigil on April 8, 2017)

May 18, 2017

St. Elisabeth Convent

The V. Rev. Fr. Peter Gillquist, Chair of the Antiochian Archdiocese Department of Missions and Evangelism and the publisher of AGAIN, was interviewed by the magazine for their thirtieth anniversary issue.

AGAIN: Fr. Peter, tell us what things looked like back in 1978. What was going on in terms of the early Evangelical Orthodox Church? Who were the early leaders? Give us a feeling for what life was like back in those exciting days. How much of this was hype and how much was a genuine movement of the Holy Spirit?

FP: Well, as far as we were concerned, the whole thing was very genuine. After having served together with people like Fr. Richard Ballew, Fr. Jon Braun, Fr. Jack Sparks, and Fr. Gordon Walker in Campus Crusade during the sixties, at the beginning of the seventies we began to try to find what we called the New Testament Church. In other words, knowing that we needed to be church and not just parachurch or independent, we began a study through history to try to find where that New Testament Church went. By ’78 we were pretty convinced that that Church was the Holy Orthodox Church—the church Rome had left in the eleventh century. Historically it was very clear to us that the Orthodox Church was that Church we read about in the pages of the New Testament.

By 1978 we had formed an order called the New Covenant Apostolic Order, which was a base of fellowship and a working relationship between those of us who were on this pilgrimage. At first we had tried not to be a denomination because we knew the world didn’t need another denomination, so we settled for an order. By ’78 a number of other men and women had joined us who did not have our common background in Campus Crusade but had the common yearning to find the New Testament Church.

AGAIN: Do you ever miss those early days, the fervor and excitement?

FP: You know, I don’t. We sure had some great times both in Campus Crusade and in the early days of what became the Evangelical Orthodox Church, but those were also days of frustration. All of us were highly committed to evangelism, and yet in being on the pilgrimage we would change, we would accommodate what we were doing to make sure it was consistent with the historic Church, which meant we were in a fairly regular state of flux. It was almost impossible to invite new people on board with us because all we could guarantee them was that ultimately we would be part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. But because of the flux it was very difficult to ask them to make a commitment to go on that journey with us. So the seventies really were a decade where we didn’t do a lot of evangelism, but mainly did our study of church history to find the fullness of that New Testament faith.

AGAIN: What was the thought behind AGAIN magazine and Conciliar Press some 120 issues ago? Why start another publication? What were the goals?

FP: That’s an easy one to answer. Purely and simply our goal was to have a publishing arm that would help teach our people what we were learning about the ancient Christian faith. The magazine started out as a tabloid-size newspaper—not many pages, maybe 16 or 24—and then later became more of a magazine, and if I remember right, we had two colors, then later four-color print. That was the pure and simple purpose behind the whole thing—to be able to put into print the things we were learning to better instruct our people in the midst of this journey.

AGAIN: Some of the folks who were part of the journey in the early days aren’t a part of it now. Others appeared interested for a time, but dropped away. What happened?

FP: It’s a sobering thing. A man who was very close to me personally stayed with us on the journey until we came to the place in our study where we saw that the Church viewed the bread and wine of Communion as the body and blood of Christ in a mystery. He simply could not handle that it was anything more than a symbol. So he took his leave in the late seventies. I remember a short time after that I was reading John 6, which is where Jesus teaches extensively that “unless you eat My flesh and drink My blood you have no life in you.” At the end of that chapter it says, “Many of His disciples left Him.” They simply couldn’t handle that bread and wine could be a mystery of the body and blood of Christ. I think that’s likely what was the situation here.

Then others left over fear. Some who left us in the early eighties said, “If we become Orthodox they’re going to clip our wings, we can’t do Bible study, we can’t do evangelism,” and nothing could be further from the truth. Fast-forward now 21 years after we’ve been in the Church: we’ve brought out the Orthodox Study Bible New Testament and now just recently the full Old and New Testaments. We’ve added over a hundred churches to the archdiocese since we’ve come in, and seen probably thousands of people embrace the Orthodox faith. So if anything, rather than the Church clipping our wings, we’ve been working overtime with the blessing of our metropolitan and our other bishops to get this job done. So we’re gratified by all that God has done, and by the same token we’re very sorry there were those who left us.

By the way, one other thing that will probably be encouraging to pastors and people. That is, Jesus had people leave Him, notably Judas and others. St. Peter lost Ananias and Sapphira. The last letter St. Paul ever wrote was 2 Timothy, and at the end of that book he says things like, “Demas has left me, having loved this present world,” “Alexander the Coppersmith did me much harm,” and then that really sad verse, “Only Luke [the apostle Luke] is with me.” So as he was under house arrest in Rome, Luke was there and that was about it; and though the vast majority of his disciples continued on faithfully, some had left him. It’s never a happy thing, but it’s seemingly the way life in the Church is. You win a lot of battles and you lose a few.

AGAIN: If you had a time machine and could go back to 1978, what would you say to this group of 2,000 evangelicals who were moving toward Orthodoxy? If you were preaching to them, what encouragement would you offer? What warnings would you give them?

FP: It’s impossible to look ahead, but in 1978, as I say, we were convinced that the Orthodox Church is that Church we read about in the New Testament. We simply encouraged each other to stay the course. There were things we had learned by ’78 that were fully Orthodox, and things we hadn’t yet learned.

Looking back, I would say the thing we need to stress today with the converts is the need to learn how the Orthodox Church works—the fancy name for that is ecclesiology. As evangelical Protestants, we were so used to doing our own thing, exercising our independence—a favorite slogan was, “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do or what to believe.” You just can’t live that way as an Orthodox Christian. Because number one, we’re all under the lordship of Christ, and secondly, within the Church, as scriptures teach, He has established apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. In other words, there is authority in the Church, and we are under those God has set in oversight over us, namely our bishops. As early as AD 107 St. Ignatius of Antioch warns us, “Don’t do anything in the Church apart from the bishop.”

I would have to say this is the hardest thing for a modern-day Christian to understand: that the Church is not some kind of twenty-first–century holy democracy, it’s a theocracy. Things are to be done as St. Paul exhorted in Corinthians, “decently and in order.” We’re not a bunch of independent, isolated Lone Ranger Christians. And again I think that is the single hardest thing for a modern-day Christian to learn.

AGAIN: Let’s go in the other direction. If you stepped into that time machine thirty years ago, returned to the present and spent a week worshipping, evangelizing, sharing in community life in the average Orthodox parish of today, what would your thoughts be on the return trip? Is this what you envisioned it would be in 1978?

FP: Well, of course the answer is yes and no. Yes in the sense that in the Church we found those doctrines, those precious biblical truths we held dear, many of which we knew as Protestants, many of which we had to learn as Orthodox. But we hadn’t yet immersed ourselves, and I use this word advisedly, in the culture of the present-day Orthodox Church. It’s interesting the word “culture” comes from the Latin word cult or cultus, which means worship. What shocked us was the way the Orthodox worshipped. Sitting in 1978 looking out, we found the doctrine and the truths that we held dear, but we were blown away by the difference of the worship. Most every Christian views “normal” worship as what he or she is experiencing. Of course what we were experiencing in 1978 was a lot of spontaneity, very little sense of liturgy at that point, so consequently we felt that was normal. Then, when we opened the doors of the modern-day Orthodox Church and walked in, we were amazed at how intricate, how overwhelming the worship seemed to us, how ancient, how otherworldly—and that’s a good word, “otherworldly,” but that was the big thing we had to learn that we couldn’t have anticipated in 1978.

AGAIN: What would you say are the greatest contributions of the EOC to Christianity at large today? To Orthodoxy?

FP: It’s always hard to evaluate yourself, and in fact there are warnings both in the scripture and in secular writings against that. I would have to say the number one contribution that we made to Orthodoxy in particular, and to Christendom in general, would have to be the publication of the Orthodox Study Bible. It’s the first time ever that there has been an Orthodox English translation in print of the Septuagint version, the Greek version of the Old Testament, which is the version the Orthodox Church has always used and which is favored by some Christians who are not Orthodox. The text itself is a gift. The notes that accompany the text I think are a significant help to both Orthodox and non-Orthodox, and there are quite a number of people who have become Orthodox through reading the Orthodox Study Bible [New Testament, published in 1992].

A second thing we’ve been able to bring to the Orthodox Church is the spirit of evangelism. It’s interesting that in each of our Divine Liturgies on Sunday morning we pray for prophets, evangelists, teachers, martyrs, and so on. The gift of evangelism had largely been lost in the twentieth-century Orthodox Church. And now as we’re in the twenty-first century, that gift is being rediscovered. I honestly believe the reason it was in large part lost was the incredible persecution the Orthodox Church has been under, especially for the last 400 years or so, much of it by the Muslim Ottoman Turks, and more modernly by the communist regime in Russia, in which conservative estimates tell us probably 40 million Orthodox believers lost their lives. These things do not make a good context for aggressive, godly evangelism. Thus in our early days of being Orthodox, let’s say in the late 1980s, people would say, “Evangelism, that’s Protestant.” You never hear that anymore in the Orthodox Church, so I think the second gift would be the whole area of evangelism.

Thirdly, I would say Bible teaching-oriented sermons. For a number of reasons—a lack of education of the clergy in some of the old countries; the threat of enemies being present in the church; and the whole phenomenon of immigrants trying to communicate effectively in a new world—these factors and probably others have contributed to preaching getting the short end of the stick. I think I see this changing now in the church of the twenty-first century; I think we’ve rediscovered the gift of preaching. I thank God for that.

AGAIN: What mistakes were made along the way? If you had it all to do over again, what would you do differently?

FP: I would say we probably were not good at communicating some of the things that we learned about Orthodoxy that were different from what we knew as Protestants. Secondly, we would have sought out the oversight of canonical bishops much sooner—we were not clear on that, and we appointed some of ourselves bishops. Yet I would have to say that had we not taken that move, we probably wouldn’t be in the Church today. St. Paul said, “We see through a glass darkly,” and if that’s true of that enlightened apostle, how much more is it true of a handful of ex-Campus Crusade guys who were trying to find their way to the Orthodox Church? Those would be a couple of areas that I’d say we could have done better, though honestly, we operated on the insight we had, and therefore I don’t see how we could have done these things much differently than we did do them.

AGAIN: One more trip in the time machine. Let’s say you’ve traveled to the year 2038. What do you hope to see when you get out? What would be your greatest hope for the Orthodox Church in North America? Be realistic, but dream a little.

FP: Well, I don’t say this to be funny. The greatest dream I could imagine would be to be seated with the saints at the right hand of God, the Lord having come and received us into His Holy Kingdom. I just can’t think of anything greater than that.

If the Lord tarries and does not return by 2038, I would first of all love to see the Orthodox Church worshipping in the language of America rather than the language of the mother countries. I fully understand the frustration of immigrants who get here and don’t know English. But the lion’s share of worship by then really needs to be in English, and not just for the sake of the Americans who aren’t Orthodox, but for the sake of the children of the Orthodox people who are clueless when it comes to the language of the mother country. That would be one thing.

Secondly, I remember when we first discovered the Orthodox Church, before we were even in, and all six of my kids were at home, we’d go on family vacations—we’d drive, maybe on a two-lane highway, through several small towns, and then we’d get back on the freeway. We’d pull through a town and my kids would say, “Dad, there’s the Catholic church, there’s the Lutheran church, there’s the Methodist church, the Baptist, where on earth is the Orthodox church?” And I’d have to say, “Kids, we’re just starting out on the job of evangelizing here in America.” But you know, thirty years from now, if we could take that same trip, hopefully you wouldn’t have to ask that same question. That would be my goal for the year 2038: that not only would we expand in the cities we’re already present in, places like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and LA, but that we’d be able to have a number, maybe scores of churches in towns that no one’s ever heard of. We’ve done a few of those, and to be honest, they’ve done well, but we need to get out into the towns of 50,000 to 100,000 people where there’s no Orthodox church, and build communities and see them thrive. This would be my other dream for the year 2038.

AGAIN: Years ago you wrote a book called Why We Haven’t Changed the World. Why didn’t the parachurch movement of the late sixties and seventies change the world? You left that movement in order to be a part of the movement to Orthodoxy. Do you think the Evangelical Orthodox movement has changed the world?

FP: It wouldn’t have done anything, I don’t believe, had it not been received into the canonical Church. Because you can’t exist apart from the Church of Christ and His apostles and expect to thrive. Even then, “all that live godly in Christ will suffer persecution.” When I say “thrive,” I don’t mean a thrill a minute with the devil asleep, but rather that we’re out there in the battle, we win more than we lose.

The reason the parachurch movements haven’t changed the world is that the gift of evangelism, as with all spiritual gifts, was a gift given to the Church. Any time you take a gift of the Spirit and try to put it to work outside the care and covering of the Church, you run into difficulty. We all remember back to some of the weird stuff that happened in the charismatic movement, some of the excesses, in the seventies and the years that followed. Also in the area of evangelism. In our parachurch days we were as committed to evangelism as any group of men I know. But if you remember back to the seventies, as we and so many others were out there trying to evangelize, the world not only didn’t get better, it got worse—it became less Christian. What we were doing was like the guy who runs around town fathering children and just leaving them on people’s doorsteps. The norm is for the local parish to engage in evangelism, and then the fruit of that work becomes a part of the parish. In the parachurch scheme of things you don’t have that.

I would say again, 21 years after we have become Orthodox, we don’t see the great numbers of decisions for Christ on the front end that we did back in our parachurch days, because that’s all we did. It just isn’t very hard to get a college kid to pray a prayer to give his life to Christ. We had them by the thousands. But here I am, all these years later. I love my days in Campus Crusade, but I’m only in touch with a handful of those people (and thank God for those who did go on). But now, operating as an Orthodox parish, while we don’t see the front end numbers, we see an incredibly better rate of the fruit remaining than we did in those parachurch days. So percentage-wise, we’re way ahead, though numerically we don’t see the volume of those initial decisions. Of course also as Orthodox we tend not to count decisions, we count disciples. Again, you can get a person to pray a prayer, and I’m not the judge of whether that prayer is sincere or not—but what I’m really looking for today is not who started the race, but who’s finishing the race. To me that’s crucial.

AGAIN: Do you think anything like what happened in the seventies will ever happen again? Do you see any chance for a group of Christians to come alive to Orthodoxy and to pursue it all the way to the finish line?

FP: I do. I say to people, we’ve learned how to bring individuals into the Church, we’ve learned how to bring families into the Church, we’ve learned how to bring entire non-Orthodox parishes into the Church, we’ve brought one denomination in (that’s ours, the Evangelical Orthodox Church), and I look to the day when we begin to bring other denominations in. But so far that hasn’t happened. I was just talking to an Orthodox priest in the Midwest today who had just been invited by a group of traditional pastors within a fairly liberal denomination to come and work with them. They were writing a manifesto to their denomination, saying, “These things have got to change or we’re gone.” This is happening more and more.

You’re probably aware that one entire diocese of the Episcopal Church has pulled out, and two or three others, I’m told, are in the wings ready to pull out. So it may be that before we bring a denomination in, perhaps we can bring in a diocese or some other body, and then work toward the day when an entire denomination will come. A hundred years ago, a lot of people, both in the Episcopal Church and in the Orthodox Church, thought that a natural marriage would be the Episcopal Church in the US with the Orthodox Church. Men like St. Tikhon were at the forefront of this movement. But with the Episcopal Church today moving further and further away from the apostolic faith we read about in the New Testament, probably that dream is more of a nightmare, and it won’t happen.

Out there, both within some of these huge denominations and also within the newer communions and the independent churches, there are so many people who are biblically oriented, who are Christ-centered, whose hearts are given toward outreach and help for the poor and so on. These are the people we’re picking up today, and I’m very thankful for that, but I really hope there will be again more than one larger body of churches that will come and be a part of the Orthodox Church.

AGAIN: You cited as an example a couple of Episcopal dioceses that are leaving the Episcopal Church. Have these shown any indication that they are seriously considering entering the Orthodox fold?

FP: I would say not at this point. If I’m correct, they are struggling to find out just exactly what to do. Sometimes they look overseas, for example to Anglican bishops in Africa, as a possible place where they could come and live under their oversight. I have written one of these diocesan bishops who’s left and offered to be of help, but to date have not received an answer, which doesn’t surprise me. I’ll stay available and see if perhaps something doesn’t happen down the line.

AGAIN: What would you like to add to this interview? What final words would you like to say to the contemporary readers of AGAIN magazine?

FP: First, I’d like to say thanks for your support over the years. It’s really been gratifying that a magazine that started to serve basically a small group of pilgrims is now reaching out not only to hundreds and hundreds of Orthodox here and throughout the world, but also to a fairly large segment of subscribers who are not yet Orthodox, and we’re grateful for that.

Secondly, take heart. God is continuing to bring people into His Holy Church. I would like to see more non-believers come and be converted to Christ within the Orthodox Church—that seems to be picking up, albeit slowly.

Besides that, I would just add one thing. Over the years non-Orthodox people have asked me, as they’re considering becoming a part of the Church, do the Orthodox people really mean it? Are they really sold out to this Orthodox faith, or are they simply Orthodox because their parents and grandparents were? Of course that’s for each Orthodox Christian to answer for himself or herself. I would say the greatest favor we can do to help those who are not Orthodox is to fully live this spiritual life. Instead of nominal Christians who worship God when it’s convenient, we need to be people who pull out all the stops and, as we say at the end of our great litany, to commit ourselves and each other and all our life to Christ our God.

Source: http://antiochian.org/content/becoming-orthodox-being-orthodox-again-interviews-fr-peter-gillquist

By Father Andrew Lemeshonok

We came to the church to escape from captivity, from the hollow and darkness and to start a new life. This is where everything will be with God: our health problems (instead we rely on doctors, prescriptions and medical procedures), our salary (for we constantly want to know about the exchange rate) as well as all our relationships (does he really love me? Will he accept me or will he drive me away?) – all these things will seem childish and miniscule to us if we enter a different life. If there is the grace of the Holy Spirit in you, if there is love of Christ in you, if you have compassion for any living thing, especially for God’s creations, if you feel you are thankful, then what else do you need? Which relationships? What do you expect? The fullness of life is within you, for you have found God, you bowed down to Him, you serve him and you put your life in His hands because you are ready to trust Him until the end. The sin will disrupt you: look here, look there, what will tomorrow bring when get old and what pension will you get...

Even though we are all just small grains of sand in the universe which is in God’s hands, we still do not trust Him: “You did not give me enough. You removed me from something, and I lost something…” We act childlike trying to organize our world on our own, trying to be the architect Himself. This is wrong! A person lives like this and when the moment of truth comes, he says: “My whole life was meaningless…”

This is why today we need to start changing something. Otherwise, God can tell us: “I have told you! I came into the world for your sake! You have been forgiven a million times, you have confessed…” We have necessary food, we just need to accept it, to perceive it. In this case, there will be no questions left. It was Hamlet, who wavered: “To be or not to be? That is the question”. But to us the answer is clear – to be!

Christ defeated death, what else do you need? Why are we getting confused out of nothing? We know everything we need to know in advance: today we are here, on the earth, but tomorrow we will go to heaven. We need to prepare for this moment. But time is on going. It seems that yesterday we celebrated the Forgiveness Sunday, then the Great Lent ended, then Pascha, Ascension of the Lord – and we are going to celebrate the Nativity of Christ again. The trees are blossoming now, but I see that the leaves have fallen down already. What temporary thing are you going to take hold of?

This is why we need to understand simple ideas: we need to serve God and our neighbors. Do your best, try to find an opportunity to serve. These are your spiritual savings. This is the very way to attain the Holy Spirit, which every person needs to enter the Kingdom the Heaven.

May 29, 2017

St. Elisabeth Convent

There have been seven Ecumenical Councils in the true Orthodox Christian Church: 1. Nicea; 2. Constantinople; 3. Ephesus; 4. Chalcedon; 5. the second at Constantinople; 6. the third at Constantinople; 7. the second at Nicea.

The first Ecumenical Council

The First Ecumenical Council was convened in 325 A.D., in the city of Nicea, under the Emperor Constantine I. This Council was called because of the false doctrine of the Alexandrian priest Arius, who rejected the Divine nature and pre-eternal birth of the second person of the Holy Trinity, namely the Divine Son of God the Father, and taught that the Son of God is only the highest creation.

318 bishops participated in this Council, among whom were St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, St. James, bishop of Nisibis, St. Spiridon of Tremithus, and St. Athanasius, who was at that time a deacon.

The Council condemned and repudiated the heresy of Arius and affirmed the immutable truth, the dogma that the Son of God is true God, born of God the Father before all ages, and is eternal, as is God the Father; He was begotten, and not made, and is of one essence with God the Father. In order that all Orthodox Christians may know exactly the true teaching of the faith, it was clearly and concisely summarized in the first of seven sections of the Creed, or Symbol of Faith.

At this Council, it was resolved to celebrate Pascha on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, after the Jewish Passover. It also determined that priests should be married, and it established many other rules or canons.

The Second Ecumenical Council

The Second Ecumenical Council was convened in the year 381, in the city of Constantinople, under the Emperor Theodosius I. This Council was convoked against the false teaching of the Arian bishop of Constantinople, Macedonius, who rejected the deity of the third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit. He taught that the Holy Spirit is not God, and called Him a creature, or a created power, and therefore subservient to God the Father and God the Son, like an angel.

There were 150 bishops present at the Council, among whom were Gregory the Theologian, who presided over the Council, Gregory of Nyssa, Meletius of Antioch, Amphilochius of Iconium and Cyril of Jerusalem.

At the Council, the Macedonian heresy was condemned and repudiated. The Council affirmed as a dogma the equality and the single essence of God the Holy Spirit with God the Father and God the Son.

The Council also supplemented the Nicene Creed, or "Symbol of Faith," with five Articles in which is set forth its teaching about the Holy Spirit, about the Church, about the Mysteries, about the resurrection of the dead, and the life in the world to come. Thus they composed the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which serves as a guide to the Church for all time.

The Third Ecumenical Council

The Third Ecumenical Council was convened in the year 431 A.D., in the city of Ephesus, under Emperor Theodosius II. The Council was called because of the false doctrine of Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, who profanely taught that the Most-holy Virgin Mary simply gave birth to the man Christ, with whom then God united morally and dwelled in Him, as in a temple, as previously He had dwelled in Moses and other prophets. Therefore, Nestorius called the Lord Jesus Christ, God-bearing, and not God incarnate; and the Holy Virgin was called the Christ-bearer (Christotokos) and not the God-bearer (Theotokos).

The 200 bishops present at the Council condemned and repudiated the heresy of Nestorius and decreed that one should recognize that united in Jesus Christ at the time of the incarnation were two natures, divine and human, and that one should confess Jesus Christ as true God and true Man, and the Holy Virgin Mary as the God-bearer (Theotokos).

The Council also affirmed the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and strictly prohibited making any changes or additions to it.

The Fourth Ecumenical Council

The Fourth Ecumenical Council was convened in 451 A.D., in the city of Chalcedon, under Emperor Marcian. The Council met to challenge the false doctrine of an archimandrite of a Constantinople monastery, Eu-tychius, who rejected the human nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. Refuting one heresy and defending the divinity of Jesus Christ, he himself fell into an extreme, and taught that in the Lord Jesus Christ human nature was completely absorbed in the Divine, and therefore it followed that one need only recognize the Divine nature. This false doctrine is called Monophysitism, and followers of it are called Monophysites.

The Council of 650 bishops condemned and repudiated the false doctrine of Eutychius and defined the true teaching of the Church, namely that our Lord Jesus Christ is perfect God, and as God He is eternally born from God. As man, He was born of the Holy Virgin and in every way is like us, except in sin. Through the incarnation, birth from the Holy Virgin, divinity and humanity are united in Him as a single Person, infused and immutable, thus reputing Eutychius; indivisible and inseparable, reputing Nestorius.

The Fifth Ecumenical Council

The Fifth Ecumenical Council was convened in 553 A.D., in the city of Constantinople, under the famous Emperor, Justinian I. It was called to quell a controversy between Nestorians and Eutychians. The major points of contention were the well-known works of the Antiochian school of the Syrian church, entitled "The Three Chapters." Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Ibas of Edessa, clearly expressed the Nestorian error, although at the Fourth Ecumenical Council, nothing had been mentioned of their works.

Nestorians, in argument with Eutychians (Monophysites), referred to these works, and Eutychians found in them an excuse to reject the Fourth Ecumenical Council and to slander the universal Orthodox Church, charging that it was deviating toward Nestorianism.

The Council was attended by 165 bishops, who condemned all three works and Theodore of Mopsuestia himself, as not having repented. Concerning the other two, censure was limited only to their Nestorian works. They themselves were pardoned. They renounced their false opinions and died in peace with the Church. The Council reiterated its censure of the heresies of Nestorius and Eutychius.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council

The Sixth Ecumenical Council was convened in the year 680 A.D., in the city of Constantinople, under the Emperor Constantine IV, and was composed of 170 bishops.

The council was convoked against the false doctrine of heretics, Monothelites, who, although they recognized in Jesus Christ two natures, God and man, ascribed to Him only a Divine will.

After the Fifth Ecumenical Council, agitation provoked by the Monothelites continued and threatened the Greek Emperor with great danger. Emperor Heraclius, wishing reconciliation, decided to incline Orthodoxy to concession to the Monothelites, and by the power of his office, ordered recognition that in Jesus Christ is one will and two energies.

Among the defenders and advocates of the true teachings of the Church, were St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and a monk from

Constantinople, St. Maximus the Confessor, who for his firmness in the faith had suffered having his tongue cut out and his hand chopped off.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council condemned and repudiated the heresy of Monothelitism, and formulated the recognition that in Jesus Christ are two natures, Divine and human, and in these two natures there are two wills, but that the human will in Christ is not against, but rather is submissive to His Divine will.

It is worthy of attention that at this Council excommunication was pronounced against a number of other heretics, and also against the Roman Pope Honorius, as one who acknowledged the teaching of one will. The formulation of the Council was signed by a Roman delegation, consisting of Presbyters Theodore and Gregory, and Deacon John. This clearly shows that the highest power in Christendom belongs to the Ecumenical Council, and not to the Pope of Rome.

After eleven years, the Council again opened a meeting in the imperial palace, called Cupola Hall (in Greek, Trullos), in order to resolve questions of primary importance pertaining to the Church hierarchy. In this regard, it supplemented the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils, and therefore is called the Fifth-Sixth (Quintsext) Synod.

This Council established canons by which the Church must be guided, namely, 85 canons of the holy Apostles, canons of the six Ecumenical and seven local councils, and canons of thirteen Fathers of the Church. These canons afterward were supplemented by canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council and another two local councils, and comprise the so-called "Nomocanon," in English, "The Rudder," which is the foundation of Orthodox Church government.

Here several innovations of the Roman Church were condemned as not being in agreement with the spiritual decisions of the Ecumenical Church, namely, the requirement that priests and deacons be celibate, a strict fast on Saturdays of the Great Fast, and the representation of Christ in the form of a lamb, or in any way other than He appeared on the earth.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council

The Seventh Ecumenical Council was convened in 787 A.D., in the city of Nicea, under the Empress Irene, widow of the Emperor Leo IV, and was composed of 367 fathers.

The Council was convened against the iconoclastic heresy, which had been raging for sixty years before the Council, under the Greek Emperor Leo III, who, wishing to convert the Mohammedans to Christianity, considered it necessary to do away with the veneration of icons. This heresy continued under his son, Constantine V Copronymus, and his grandson, Leo IV.

The Council condemned and repudiated the iconoclastic heresy and determined to provide and to put in the holy churches, together with the likeness of the honored and Life-giving Cross of the Lord, holy icons, to honor and render homage to them, elevating the soul and heart to the Lord God, the Mother of God and the Saints, who are represented in these icons. After the Seventh Ecumenical Council, persecution of the holy icons arose anew under the Emperors Leo V, of Armenian origin, Michael II, and Theophilus, and for twenty-five years disturbed the Church.

Veneration of the holy icons was finally restored and affirmed by the local synod of Constantinople in 843 A.D., under the Empress Theodora.

At this council, in thanksgiving to the Lord God for having given the Church victory over the iconoclasts and all heretics, the celebration of the Triumph of Orthodoxy was established on the first Sunday of Great Lent, which is celebrated by the Orthodox Church throughout the world.

Source: https://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/law_of_god_slobodskoy_3.htm#_Toc36163878

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