Posted by Tom Kanelos
on 5/10/2009, 8:50 am, in reply to "Real #'s- Metropolitan Jonah's Russian Interview - "It is Time to be Direct""
Christ is Risen!
Father,
I do think you are being generous with your numbers. I don't think it gives an accurate picture of membership but I do believe it is an acurate number of faithful participating members.
In the Chicag area we have approximately 250,000 people of Greek ancestry. I believe that it would be safe to say that most are baptized into the Orthodox Faith. Simple math tells me that this means 250 parishes which could seat 1,000 people. We have about 26 parishes with maybe an average seating capacity of 500 ea. This is just the GOA. Add in the OCA, AOCA, ACROD, UOC etc and we can all see what the reality is.
Perhaps we are no different than other faiths, but obviously we are not as concerned with other faiths. In fact if the other faiths are experiencing the same phenomenon, we can see how many unchurched there are to be reached.
Speaking about the GOA, I don't doubt that there may be 2,000,000 baptized Greek Orthodox out there (and it seems like every one of them is coming to my parish from 11:45 pm to 12:15 am on Holy Saturday/Pascha) but they are certainly not faithful parishioners.
We certainly have our work cut out for us.
Tom Kanelos
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