Ancient Faith Talk, part of the family, will be airing my Sunday homilies on Mondays at 4:45am and 4:45pm and on Fridays at 2:45am and 2:45pm do tune in if you get a chance. There are some great shows on Ancient Faith Talk and great music on Ancient Faith Radio. You can tune in here.
So I have just been hanging around this week and trying to get over this cold. Last night I met with one of my Spiritual Children. I was going to cancel but we have been trying to meet for a month and we finally settled on a date so I thought I should stick to it. I am glad I did. I need to get back in the swing of things.
So I watched the Obama infomercial last night. Good concept, I don’t think anyone has ever done that before I am not sure it changed any minds but you gotta do what you gotta do as they say.
In Massachusetts we have three questions on the ballot. I am thinking of writing something on them over the next few days so look for that as well. I have my show to record today and get off to the radio stations and some reading to do. Tomorrow I am on the air at 7am so that will be fun. We have the principal of the High School coming in for a chat. He is a great guy and pulls no punches so it should be interesting.
Okay gang thanks for reading!
Today I had a meeting with the station manager and we talked about expanding my radio ministry. I am going to have my own show starting in a few weeks on WESO 970am in Southbridge. The format will be a call in type of show called something like Soul Mending or Mending Souls. I hope to chat with folks about what is bothering them and see if I can help them as a Spiritual Guide.
Any thoughts on a title?
So let’s back up a little. Wednesday night Fr. Greg and I celebrated the Liturgy of St. James in honor of his feast day the next day. This is one of the oldest liturgies that the church has and it is very different from what we Orthodox are used too on Sunday morning. We had about 35 people there, not bad for a week night.
Friday morning I was at the radio station at 6:45. I am now a regular on the Friday morning show on WESO 970am in Southbridge. This is a fun little diversion and give me an opportunity to reach an entirely different audience. I kind of like doing drive time radio. Friday night was the annual turkey party here in the Village. Great crowd and a great time was had by all. We need to have more events like this to bring people here. Thanks to all the workers.
Saturday, well Saturday is the day I get the bulletin ready and sermons, laundry, etc. That’s when I started with this cold and I spent most of the day on the sofa watching the idiot box. Saturday night I joined my fellow fire fighters for the annual steak supper at the fire house. Small crowd this year but the food was great. Excellent turnout from St. Mike’s and we all sat together and enjoyed some laughs.
Sunday morning is routine. Up at 5am put the finishing touches on the sermon and get ready for Liturgy. Shepherd of Souls goes on at 8:30 and I like to listen a bit to see how the edit went. The new show is up at www.shpherdofsouls.com so give it a listen if you have a chance.
Well that brings things full circle. I am off in a few minutes to get to the station. I solo today and I am a bit nervous so say a little prayer for me if you get a chance.
“There is no reason to make any minor concession to the Yankee imperialism. I have an impression that His Eminence shares my opinion,” he says in his article published by Granma – the paper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.
“He is not anti-Muslim, he respects this religion. In frames of his ecumenical conception, he believes that the Catholic Church can solve its problems with such countries as China and Vietnam,” Castro said.
Fidel Castro confessed he had an “agreeable and edifying” meeting with Metropolitan Kirill who is visiting the countries of Latin America.
“His Eminence is no enemy of socialism and doesn’t condemn to the eternal fire those like us basing on Marxism-Leninism to fight for just world. When he speaks to the UN Human Rights Commission and other organizations, they listen to him with great respect. In his enormous country, he often speaks on a 15 minute TV program and dozen million people follow him with interest,” the article went on to say.
Speaking about recent consecration of the first Russian Church in Cuba conducted by Metropolitan Kirill, Castro noted that the capital of his country “has been enriched with a church worthy of a prestigious Russian Orthodox Church.” According to the Cuban leader,
it is an irrefutable proof of Cuba’s respect to “one of the fundamental principle of human rights, which is consonant to the profound and radical socialist revolution.”
At dusk, two mothers, their children and an elderly couple sit on the front porch and explain to an aid worker that the rest of the families have gone to the authorities to protest their living conditions and to demand that they be moved to Tbilisi. “We feel cut off up here,” says Nanna, carrying her small son on her lap. “It is cold and we cannot properly care for our children.” She and her husband were farmers in the village of Kemerti in South Ossetia, and like many who were displaced by this summer’s fighting between Russian and Georgian forces, they fled with little more than the clothes on their backs.
The group that had gone to Tbilisi return, and seeing the visitor immediately launch into a litany of complaints. They have no kitchen utensils. Blankets were delivered but the mattresses are no good. Above all, the building was formerly used as a summer camp for children and there is not enough insulation from the cold. “We may be blocked up here from other areas in the winter and our children have to go to school,” says one woman.
Inside the building there is a strong smell from toilets that are backed up. In the hallway, there is a list of government phone numbers such as “how to find a missing relative.” The hallway leads to a series of bedrooms with thin walls and blankets draped over windows.
The group moves from room to room, eager to show the aid worker mattresses atop rusty springs and thin blankets that were delivered in August. Some speculate about their neighbors, Ossetians who fled to Russia. “We had good relations with them because of the mixed families,” says one woman. She believes that those families got an offer to go back to South Ossetia, where Georgians can no longer return.
International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) has been providing continuous assistance to thousands of displaced people who fled to other parts of Georgia, as well as Russia, since the August conflict began. Through a new $200,000 grant by the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), IOCC will help 2,000 individuals get through the winter by providing stoves, fuel for cooking and heating, bedding, winter clothes, and cooking supplies. IOCC is cooperating with the Georgian Orthodox Church and local authorities to identify and assist families in 20 displacement centers in and around Tbilisi, including the families of Tskvarichamia.
These families want to return to their villages in South Ossetia, a hope that is fading as the months pass on. “The hardest feeling,” says Elsa, a 32-year-old mother of two, “is to not know what has happened to everything that we built and worked for.”
To help in providing emergency relief, call IOCC’s donation hotline toll-free at 1-877-803-4622, make a gift on-line at www.iocc.org, or mail a check or money order payable to “IOCC” and write “Conflict in the Caucasus” in the memo line to: IOCC, P.O. Box 630225, Baltimore, Md. 21263-0225.
IOCC, founded in 1992 as the official humanitarian aid agency of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA), has implemented over $275 million in relief and development programs in 33 countries around the world.
Father John Peck kept hearing other priests pour out their frustrations on the telephone. Some, like Peck, were part of the Orthodox Church in America, a church with Russian roots that has been rocked by years of high-level scandals. But others were active in churches with “old country” ties back to other Eastern Orthodox lands.
“These men really felt that their churches weren’t getting anywhere,” he said. “They kept saying, ‘What am I giving my life for? What have I accomplished?’ I kept trying to cheer them up, telling them to look 20 years down the road. … I told them to try to see the bigger picture.”
Eventually, the 46-year-old priest wrote an article about the positive Orthodox trends in America, as well as offering candid talk about the problems faced by some of his friends. He finished “The Orthodox Church of Tomorrow” soon after arriving at the Greek Orthodox mission in Prescott, Ariz., and sent it to the American Orthodox Institute — which published the article in late September on its Web site.
Bishops, priests and laypeople — some pleased, some furious — immediately began forwarding Peck’s article from one end of Orthodox cyberspace to the other. I received some of these urgent e-mails, since I am an Orthodox convert whose name is on several public Web sites.
While his article addressed several hot-button topics — from fundraising to sexual ethics — Peck said it was clear which theme caused the firestorm.
“The notion that traditionally Orthodox ethnic groups (the group of ‘our people’ we hear so much about from our primates and hierarchs) are going to populate the ranks of the clergy, and therefore, the Church in the future is, frankly, a pipe dream,” he wrote. The reality is that many American clergy and laity — some converts, but many ethnic leaders as well — refuse to “accept the Church as a club of any kind, or closed circle kaffeeklatsch. No old world embassies will be tolerated for much longer.
“The passing away of the Orthodox Church as ethnic club is already taking place. It will come to fruition in a short 10 years, 15 years in larger parishes.”
Church statistics are, as a rule, almost impossible to verify. However, experts think there are 250 million Orthodox believers worldwide — the second largest Christian flock — and somewhere between 1.2 million and 5 million worshipping in the 22 ethnic jurisdictions in North America. That huge statistical gap is crucial.
The problem is that Orthodoxy is experiencing two conflicting trends in America. Some parishes and missions are growing, primarily due to an influx of converts — especially evangelicals — from other churches. Meanwhile, many larger congregations are getting older, while watching the children and grandchildren of their ethnic founders assimilate.
Thus, many Orthodox leaders are excited about the future. Others are just as frustrated about their problems in the here and now.
Thriving American parishes, said Peck, are finding ways to blend some of the traditions of the old world with strong efforts to build churches that welcome newcomers, whether they are converts or the so-called ethnic “reverts” who rediscover the church traditions of earlier generations.
The best place to see the big picture, he said, is in America’s Orthodox seminaries. One study found that nearly half of the future priests are converts and that percentage is sure to be higher in the evangelistic churches that emphasize worship and education in English.
“When I talk about the churches of the future, I’m not talking about churches without ethnic roots,” said Peck. “What I’m talking about are churches in which there are no barriers to prevent people from working and living and worshipping together. It doesn’t matter whether the people inside are Greek or Hispanic or Arab or Asian or Russian or Polynesian or anything else.
“All of these people are supposed to be in our churches, together, if we are going to get serious about building Orthodoxy in America. It’s no longer enough to have folk dancing and big ethnic festivals. Those days are over.”
A new study of Orthodox Christians in America has found a larger-than-expected number of converts, mostly from Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant backgrounds.
The report, released by the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, Calif., surveyed 1,000 members of Greek Orthodox or Orthodox Church in America congregations, which represent about 60% of America’s estimated 1.2 million Orthodox Christians.
Although Orthodox churches were historically immigrant communities, the study found that nine out of 10 parishioners are now American-born. Thousands of members had converted to the faith as adults: 29% of Greek Orthodox are converts, as are 51% of the OCA.
“I would not have expected this many,” said Alexei Krindatch, the Orthodox Institute’s
research director. “My sense was that in Greek Orthodox, it would be around 15%, and OCA maybe one-third.”The study also found unexpectedly high numbers of converts among clergy – 56% in the OCA, 14% in the Greek Orthodox church. In both cases, the higher OCA numbers reflect that group’s use of English in its worship services, he added.
These findings could mean that Orthodox churches are growing in America, assuming there aren’t equal or greater numbers of Orthodox Christians leaving for other faiths; researchers won’t know until they conduct a 2010 membership census. The findings, however, indicate that other Christians are increasingly seeking a more traditional worship experience, Krindatch said.
“In the case of Roman Catholics, those are mainly people who are not quite happy with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council; they are looking for the Catholic Church as it used to be in the past,” he said. “In the case of evangelical Christians, those are people who have very strong personal beliefs, they know the Bible very well, they are frequent churchgoers, and eventually they want to join an established church with deep, historical roots.”
Compared to a 2005 study of American Catholics, the survey found more Orthodox Christians responding that they could not imagine belonging to another faith group, and fewer agreeing that how a person lives is more important than his or her religious affiliation.
“In all possible measures, belonging to a church is more important to Orthodox than Catholics,” Krindatch said.
The study’s other findings showed a majority of Orthodox Christians would support allowing married bishops, but not female priests. They also want their clergy to work with their Catholic and Protestant counterparts to coordinate a common date for Easter, which typically falls several weeks later for the Orthodox due to their use of an older liturgical calendar.