| Priest Denis Kostomarov gives newcomers six tips. Almost every day I come across stories of how a prolonged contact with a certain, often famous, priest led to most disastrous consequences, disappointment, and different forms of life catastrophe. Unfortunately, the existence of sectarianism within the Church has not been news for a long time. This problem was also discussed by the Holy Synod. However, everything written bellow is relevant at the moment. How does the problem of unhealthy groups formed around a certain priest arise? Many factors contribute to it, but it seems that the most important one is a completely unhealthy reverence for a young priest, who faces it during the first days after his ordination, which often occurs quite early. The young man of 22-23 years old is addressed by people who are often several times older than himself. They trust him. They r eveal their secrets. Moreover, they frequently thank him for something that happened supposedly by his prayer. To put it briefly, we often transfer our respect for the dignity to its carrier in an entirely superfluous way. It may deprave some of the fathers who are not prone to perceive themselves critically and ironically. Based on my church life experience, I will list some tips for a person who starts attending the Church. I think following them would help avoid a priest, who deceives himself and, involuntarily, his congregation: — Cautiously treat unhealthy expressions of love and reverence. For example, when a priest leaves the altar and people rush to him to get his blessing, ignoring everything around them, or when “our father” is discussed more in the parish than God. — Do not go to confession to the one inclined to tell you about the only right way, direct, and forbid (“not bless”) one thing or another, while that thing does not imply direct violation of virtue or morality. — Do not make your confession to the one who pries in your relationship with your husband/wife with unsolicited advice and who takes (especially passionate) interest in your sex life. |
| You’d better watch what you say about God if you live in the Middle East or North Africa, where seven in ten governments criminalize blasphemy. In 2014, Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh was convicted of blasphemy by a Saudi Arabian court. Facing four years in prison and 800 lashes, Fayadh appealed the ruling. He was recently retried, and the court upped the ante. He’s now contending with a death sentence for apostasy. In Egypt, TV personality Islam El-Behery appealed his blasphemy conviction. Though he escaped punishment in one case, the court upheld his five-year prison sentence in another. The same thing happened to Egyptian author Karam Saber. Last year a court upheld his five-year sentence for penning Where is God? , a book of stories some Muslims deemed offensive. Honest with God Theodicy, a regular exercises in Western theology, is essentially banned in Islamic countries like Egypt. Say the wrong thing—be careful, the line is fuzzy—and you’ll pay the price. Egyptian law, according to one report, “gives all Muslims the right to file lawsuits in cases where an exalted right of God has been violated.” Such cases, often supported by rumor and hearsay, have been on the rise in Egypt since 2011. And the 2015 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom indicates this punitive defense of God’s honor is a widespread problem in many Muslim nations, a claim for which the report offers plenty of examples. But let’s venture something here—maybe God can take people’s anger, questioning, and criticism. That’s what Ian Punnett argues in his book How to Pray When You’re Pissed at God , a title that could spark predictable offense in predictable quarters. But why? Punnett says we’re just fooling ourselves if we think God’s offended. “I’ve never quite understood people who profess a faith in an all-knowing, all-loving God who think that if they just ‘pray nice’ then God will never know how pissed they really are,” he says. The undeniable truth is that we are sometimes angry and afraid, beset by doubts and confusion. “The Bible is full of heroes who took their relationship with God seriously enough to honor their Creator with honesty.” Moses comes to mind. Then there’s Job. David, too. Definitely David. The words of my groaning |
| A Staggering 11 Christians Are Killed Every Single Day for Simply Believing in Jesus Source: Faithwire The Christian persecution we read about in Scripture and history books is not a thing of the past Photo credit: Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP/Getty Images When we talk about Christian persecution, it is easy to get lost in the vast array of facts and figures. We say we know that, across the world, many people are dying for their faith in Jesus, but do we truly understand the scale of it? New data taken from the latest Open Doors World Watch List indicate that some 11 Christians are martyred for their faith every single day. The shockingly high death toll was taken from the top 50 countries ranked on this year’s World Watch List and demonstrates the incredible level of religious persecution that continues to plague the planet. “Today, in the 21 st century, we are living in a time when persecution against Christian believers is the highest in modern history,” the persecution watchdog explained in an update . “The Christian persecution we read about in Scripture and history books is not a thing of the past.” The top five Currently, the top five most dangerous countries in which to live as a Christian are: As is the case in all of these countries, Christians remain in grave danger for simply choosing to believe in Christ. In North Korea, believers are forced into dangerous underground congregations, the discovery of which can result in persecution, arrest and even execution. In Afghanistan, Christianity is completely outlawed, with the country’s constitution asserting Islam as the state religion. Open Doors notes that to “convert to a faith outside Islam is tantamount to treason because it’s seen as a betrayal of family, tribe and country,” adding that “very often, there is only one possible outcome for exposed and caught Christians: death.” Pakistan has made headlines in recent years due to the protracted case brought against Christian mother Asia Bibi. Bibi, who has five children, was convicted under the country’s notorious blasphemy laws over a decade ago, and was swiftly sentenced to death. However, last October Bibi was acquitted by the Supreme Court in an unprecedented ruling that gave hope to many within the marginalized faith community. |
| Patriarch Kirill Warns Clergymen Against Preoccupation with Social Media A priest should not turn into a personal growth coach or a psychologist. Photo: patriarchia.ru Clergymen should not indulge in social media at the expense of liturgical and parish activities. A cleric should not turn into a personal growth coach or a psychologist, said His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia at the annual Diocesan meeting of Moscow, held in a video conference format on December 24, 2020, reports Ria.ru. As the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church noted, not every priest can be a preacher on social networks: the use of these communications for a mission presupposes “a good education and a generally high cultural level.” Also, a priest engaged in preaching on the Internet should have many years of experience in pastoral work and not forget that his goal is “to bring people to Christ, and in no case is it ‘putting’ himself in the center of their lives.” “Immersion in social media should not be detrimental to liturgical and other parish activities. If the number of subscribers surpasses the number of real parishioners, a blogger priest can have a feeling that the actual parish is secondary. And thus: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” said His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. If the virtual community becomes more important than the real one, the priest will direct more strength and the most of his attention to serving this virtual community, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church warned. “And he, indeed, becomes a blogger talking about spiritual life, and ceases to be a pastor and a confessor. And there is perhaps the most dangerous thing: the most important thing – the celebration of the divine service and officiating the Sacrament of the Eucharist – will take a secondary place. To overcome this illusion, a cleric needs a sober assessment of his activities, perhaps he needs to seek advice from a more experienced and knowledgeable fellow priest or an archpastor. After all, the consequence of being carried away by such an illusion may be a decision to stop performing regular services,” said His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. |
| While baptism exorcises sin and the devil from the baptized, the Church of England has exorcised the language of sin and the devil from its baptismal rite. Instead of rejecting “the devil and all rebellion against God” and “repenting of the sins that separate us from God and neighbor,” the baptismal initiate now simply “rejects evil, its many forms, and all its empty promises.” A woefully deleterious change which one of the members of the General Synod rightly denounces as being “more like a benediction from the Good Fairy than any church service.” Removing sin and the devil from the rite is not a matter of a slight alteration of emphasis or using new language to say essentially the same thing—it betrays something more serious: acquiescence to a cultural, secular rationalism. This is the sort of thing that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently playfully mocked in an interview by revealing that he, as a Roman Catholic, even goes so far as to believe in the devil! In some Christian circles, imbued with a certain worldly element, believing in the devil has come to be seen as superstitious. A predominant alternative interpretation being that ‘the devil’ is metaphorical language for evil acts, sinful desires, temptations, and the like, but not an actual, personal being. This, of course, flies in the face of the Bible and all of historic Christianity, as fitfully represented here by the language of ancient baptismal rites. In an increasingly godless England (and Europe), there are presumably pressures to make the faith more palatable in a hostile culture. Meanwhile, speaking of sin and repentance too much—or at all—is similarly unfashionable. Late-modern, western culture so prizes individual self-determination as the ultimate good that the language of ‘sin’ itself comes into direct conflict with such ‘good.’ Of course, in some sense, it was always this way: the gospel is an offense to the world (1 Cor. 1:18). What’s somewhat novel here is the extent to which the worldly has infiltrated the putative Christian. |
| Patriarch Kirill: Papism is Dangerous Because it is Much Easier to Influence One Individual than a Group of People Source: DECR Photo: S. Vlasov/patriarchia.ru On November 4, 2019, after the Divine Liturgy at the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin, a fraternal repast took place at which His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia addressed the gathering. Speaking about the crucial developments in the world Orthodoxy, His Holiness said in particular: ‘Today we are going through certain difficulties, in the first place in the relations with Constantinople. However, unlike Constantinople – which violates canonical rules by invading into others’ jurisdiction by granting ‘autocephaly’ to those who did not ask for it and insists on other privileges that have never been appropriate to it – our Church does not strive for power at the pan-Orthodox level. We only wish to preserve the canonical order and we cannot allow that a likeness of papism, a ‘quasi-papism’, should emerge in Orthodoxy. I will say perhaps a somewhat unexpected thing. Why is papism dangerous? – Certainly because papism does not follow from either the Word of God or the Tradition of the Church. I will still offer another, completely different argument: papism is dangerous because it is much easier to influence one individual than a group of people. A pope and a patriarch who wants to become the pope become a very attractive target to the powers that be, and an outside influence made on one individual may ruin the Church. When the system of synodal governance of the Church was developed, the holy apostles were well aware what they were doing. It was impossible in the context of the Roman Empire that only one individual should have borne responsibility for the whole Church – indeed, he could be arrested, he could be persuaded to cooperate, he could be scared. However, all these dangers come to naught when the Church is governed collegially, synodally. Therefore, in our time too, it is necessary to uphold the synodal governance of the Universal Church. We do not challenge the Patriarch of Constantinople’s primacy in honour, but we disagree with any encroachments on the universal power. The Patriarch of Constantinople, who resides in the territory of Turkey, is very vulnerable personally, and for this reason it remains for us only to pray that the Lord may save him from influences that could have a pernicious effect on the life of the whole Church’. |
| Exposing Christian hypocrisy is one of our culture’s most beloved pastimes. The game works on several levels. For one, outing Christians as hypocrites supposedly proves their faith is phony—or, depending on who’s playing, that the faith itself is phony. For another, it somehow validates the exposer’s own position. You’re wrong, so I’m right . For unbelievers, it might justify their own lack of faith, resentment, or sinful proclivities. But Christians can play too. Look at what some religious conservatives do with, say, Martin Luther King Jr. Or progressives do with Constantine. Finally, and best of all, it provides cause for glee. Spot a Christian doing something sinful—especially someone of ample notoriety—and people practically dance at the news. Few joys beat proving the prejudice that Christians are somehow phony. But feeling better about oneself by exposing someone else is the flimsiest of fig leaves. The problem is that the whole game is flawed. It assumes a disconnect between beliefs and actions is a shock, an outrage! But it’s not. It’s more like finding out people wear socks. Pardon me while I yawn Say believers are hypocrites and you bore with the obvious. Some are sanctimonious. Some are manipulative. Some are even mean. Most are like me, garden-variety moral losers. But can it be any other way? Jesus tells his followers to be perfect. Ever succeed at that? Me neither. For Christians to fall short of Jesus’ standard is as normal as breathing. It doesn’t mean these people are phony—much less the faith they profess. More likely, they just struggle like everyone to clear the bar. And it’s tough being human no matter what you believe. One response is to lower the bar. If losing one’s temper, gossiping, coveting, lusting, lying, or drinking to a stupor are suddenly acceptable behaviors, then one needn’t let them bedevil the conscience. It’s an easy thing to do. Our self-gratifying culture has a knack defining morality by convenience. As Christians drift with the culture—something for which we have quite a knack ourselves—the larger concern is not churches full of strident but hypocritical moralists. It’s churches full of people that shrug off traditional Christian morality. |
| Photo: MyMind Samuel Wells in an article called “ Rethinking Service,” asks a very fundamental question: What if the essential problem of human beings is not death and limitation, but loneliness? Wells is particularly concerned with Christian mission and its focus on saving people physically and spiritually from impoverishment, death and hell. Such a focus, however, manifests a kind of arrogance on the part of the missionary–who may only have the best and most noble intentions. The missionary assumes that he or she knows what will save the other from death. And, if you look at what most missionaries actually do (even most Orthodox mission endeavors), saving people means providing them with technology, knowledge and resources so that they can “have what we have.” Even spiritually speaking, overcoming death may not be the most important thing. Maybe overcoming death is only a means to a relational end. That is, perhaps the goal isn’t to avoid death and hell so much as it is to gain relationship with God and one another–relationships that only grow and never end. If indeed loneliness is the problem, salvation (both physical and spiritual) is found in being with one another, attending to one another, and not to fixing problems for others. (Wells makes a big deal about the distinction between doing for versus being with.) In fact, Wells points out, perhaps loneliness is hell. Perhaps hell, or a species of hell, is to spend one’s life and enter into eternity selfishly isolated, consumed with fixing problems and solving puzzles for the betterment of others–others whom we keep at an emotional, social and physical distance, others whom we assume we know all about, but whom we don’t really know at all because we are never actually or fully with them. Being with people may also involve doing for (and with). But when being with is the aim, then what is actually done for (and with) is something that emerges from actual relationship, relationship that is enhanced by what is done for (and with), not relationship that ends as soon as the project is done. |
| Presbyterian Church Criticizes Israel, Ignores Christian Persecution Source: The Christian Broadcasting Network Days before the recent Israel/Hamas conflict erupted, the Presbyterian Church in America withdrew million worth in investments from Israel because, as spokesman Heath Rada put it, the Israeli government’s actions “harm the Palestinian people.” Soon after, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and was asked if he was “troubled” by the Presbyterian Church’s move. Netanyahu responded: It should trouble all people of conscience and morality because it’s so disgraceful. You know, you look at what’s happening in the Middle East and I think most Americans understand this, they see this enormous area riveted by religious hatred, by savagery of unimaginable proportions. Then you come to Israel and you see the one democracy that upholds basic human rights, that guards the rights of all minorities, that protects Christians—Christians are persecuted throughout the Middle East. So most Americans understand that Israel is a beacon of civilization and moderation. You know I would suggest to these Presbyterian organizations to fly to the Middle East, come and see Israel for the embattled democracy that it is, and then take a bus tour, go to Libya, go to Syria, go to Iraq, and see the difference. And I would give them two pieces of advice, one is, make sure it’s an armor plated bus, and second, don’t say that you’re Christians. It’s difficult—if not impossible—to argue with Netanyahu’s logic. Indeed, several points made in his one-minute response are deserving of some reflection. First, the obvious: why is it that self-professed Christians completely ignore the horrific Islamic persecution of fellow Christians in the Middle East, while grandstanding against the Jewish state for trying to defend itself against the same ideology that persecutes Christians? And he is absolutely right to say that the persecution of Christians in the Mideast has reached a point of “savagery of unimaginable proportions.” Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the atrocities Mideast Christians are exposed to—the slaughters, crucifixions, beheadings, torture and rape—is the absolute silence emanating from so-called mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. |
| I’m grateful to The New York Times for highlighting the Syrian rebel attack on the ancient Christian town of Maaloula . From the NYT’s report: Some of the rebels, apparently aware of their public relations problem, said in interviews that they meant Christians no harm. They filmed themselves talking politely with nuns , instructing fighters not to harm civilians or churches and touring a monastery that appeared mostly intact. They said they had withdrawn from most of the town, posted videos of shelling there by Mr. Assad’s forces and argued that the government had given the fight a sectarian cast by sending Christian militiamen from Damascus to join in. But the damage was already done. Most of the town’s residents have fled, and Maaloula, one of the last places where Aramaic, the language of Jesus,is still spoken by Christians and some Muslims, has become a one-word argument against Western support for the rebels — at the worst possible time for Mr. Obama and the opponents of Mr. Assad. Syrian-Americans lobbying against the proposed American missile strike flooded Congressional message boards with appeals for Maaloula. A common refrain was that Mr. Obama was throwing Syria’s Christians “to the lions.” It was a powerful accusation in a region where a decade of unrest and rising sectarianism, from Iraq to Egypt, has threatened and displaced large sectors of the Middle East’s Christians, a population that had already shrunk significantly through emigration over the past century. Read the whole thing. Note this, from the abbess of a Maaloula monastery and orphanage: “If Maaloula survives, it will be a miracle,” Mother Sayaf said. “Maaloula is empty. You see ghosts on the walls.” Why are the rebels targeting Maaloula, a town where Muslims and Christians have lived peaceably for generations, and a town where even Muslims go to pray at the monastery? There is no obvious strategic reason for the little village to suffer rebel assault. For one, the NYT article points out that the rebel faction leading the assault on Maaloula is foreign. For another, a knowledgeable Orthodox Christian source tells me that it’s well known locally that President and Mrs. Assad come to Maaloula every Pascha to spend time with the orphans. |
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