At a recent meeting of my home church we got into a discussion about participation in the larger church. Some members wanted to remain aloof from the larger. If they could be members locally only, they felt they could dissociate themselves from the things they didn’t like in the larger church. But someone who felt differently got up to say, “The church is a mess. That’s the nature of the church. We don’t help it by separating ourselves from it.” He might have added that by doing so we will likely be deceiving ourselves about our own true nature as well.
I’ve been thinking along these lines as I’ve observed and heard the folks who are moving from evangelicalism into Orthodox churches. The stories they tell are of disappointments with the thin gruel offered in evangelical settings or the mushy theology of more liberal denominations. They set those against the rich doctrinal, liturgical, image and incense-laden tradition offered by Eastern Orthodoxy. As a convert commented in these pages recently, “I really liked how it engaged all the senses.” I can understand the feeling, but I think a little humility would be in order.
Orthodoxy worldwide carries with it a tremendous amount of baggage. In Russia, much of the opposition to the people labeled “sectarians” (we would mostly call them evangelicals here) comes from the Orthodox Church leadership. Now it may be that those of evangelical background in America who’ve moved into Orthodoxy may choose people like the assassinated Moscow priest Alexander Men as their heroes, but the reality is that in many places the Orthodox leadership is very different from Father Men.
At the moment, for example, the highest level of Orthodox leadership in Greece is embroiled in controversies alleging trial-fixing, drug dealing, money-laundering and wild sex escapades. In mid-March reports appeared in the media that accused Archbishop Christodoulos, the 66-year-old leader of the church, of working with a convicted drug smuggler. Earlier, Bishop Theoklitos of Thessaloniki resigned after accusations surfaced of trial-fixing. Four high court judges and several politicians were alleged to have been paid large sums of money to clear the bishop and his associates of charges involving drug dealing and homosexuality, according to a story in the Globe and Mail.
In Jerusalem, church officials released a notice stating that Patriarch Irineos had been set aside because of his involvement in a controversial land deal. In many countries where Orthodox Christianity is strong, it has found the temptation virtually irresistible to use its power to gain privilege for itself and to marginalize and exclude those who follow Christ in other communions. And because its hierarchy has such great power, it has resisted reformation as few churches have.
After the celebration of a millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988, Father Men noted that “there was not a single word of repentance, not a single word about the tragedy of the Russian Church, only triumphalism and self-congratulation.” This despite a history in which Russian Orthodox leadership had made huge compromises with the Soviets, effectively disowning thousands of its priests, monks and nuns who perished in prisons and labour camps and accepting the closure of three-quarters of its nearly 60,000 churches.
In his recent book about renewal movements in the Ukraine during the mid to late 19th century (Russia’s Lost Reformation), Sergei Zhuk says corruption in the Orthodox Church was a prime reason why many people looked for alternatives within evangelical Christianity.
Many priests lived dissolute lives, charged dearly for the rites they performed, cared little about the illiteracy and poverty of the peasants and kept the Bible away from their members. “All the governors of the Ukrainian provinces noted that local peasants were dissatisfied with their parish priests,” Zhuk writes for the period around 1900.
Alexander Men never ceased to be a loyal member of the Orthodox Church, even though the suspicion exists that his assassins were somehow linked to the church. And while he may have loved his church, he also vigorously challenged it for its shortcomings. His profoundly Christocentric faith had the wideness to embrace all believers who confessed the resurrected and living Christ. And he practiced a Christianity that was nurtured by a daily pursuit of the presence of Christ.
That pursuit he expressed in a formula that might serve well any follower of Christ. He spoke about “four spiritual legs” that can help anyone who wants to overcome “spiritual flabbiness.” It consists of “prayer, at least 10 minutes a day, the reading of the Bible, [and participation in] the Eucharist and church services.”
Wherever the Orthodox Church owns up to its history and cultivates the kind of evangelical Christianity that Alexander Men espoused, we can certainly praise God!
