Posted by rjklancko
on 11/21/2007, 4:43 pm, in reply to "Baptists Target the Orthodox"
sorry to say this is old news - i shared this document, which is on the internet, with clergy before and the response was ho-hum.
here are a few points to consider -- we get hung up on what is orthodox and let what is christian escape us. many of us consider ourselves to be christian orthodox not orthodox christian and miss what being christian is all about --- but of course we are orthodox
we get hung up on what is russian, what is greek, what is ukrainian etc and that 'our kinda of people don't do it like that' again we loose christ's message - we do it christ's way for there is no other
but most of all we still do not get it - clergy, laity, and bishops - that we have become fodder for all the others --- while the oca leadership plays games with hiding their scandals - we all know what happened but no one has the fortitude to came out and sy it - they are loosing droves of young people to the protestants who are ripe to accept us, while we throw ethics out the window.
while we adorn our churches with costly embellishments and the bishops wear costly vestments we do not consider the simplicity of the early church and divert the monies to feed the poor and house the homeless -- when did a bishop sell his vestments to give money to the poor, I know of one who demanded that each of his deaneries to supply him with different sets - when did a church not accept a costly chalice set ( even thought they already had 2) and house the homeless etc --- we are too much involved in the externalities and not on the internalities.
do we really walk our talk? i fear not, so we can easily be analyzed and our weaknessess discovered and we loose our young - as we have
Kindradtch ( sp?) in his study for Hartford Seminary stated that we expect to grow by immigration not by assimilation and not by keeping our youth
we need to open our eyes, this is why i truly beleive that all new bishops need a mba from harvard so that they can recognize what is going on in the real world and how they are being threaten by themselves and their leadership style or lack there of.
unless we stop living in the byzantine empire and begin to live in the 21st century, we will become an artifiact of history here in the good ole USA
a blessed thanksgiving to all, how many of our parishes are having a thanksgiving liturgy and how many are sponsoring a thanksgiving dinner for the poor and homeless? annddd how many Baptist churches are? and which one of us is doing the work of the Lord?
very sorry for laying it out in this manner, but we need to recognize what we must do to not only survive as a viable church entity, but what we must do to enter the kingdom of heaven.
amen
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