The Orthodox Church is the mystical community founded by Christ and expanded by the Holy Spirit, through the ministry of the Apostles throughout the world. It is the place of salvation, which he worked in the flesh, in the body, bringing the healing power of God to the very heart of humanity. As St. Paul tells us, the Church is the body of Christ formed by the Spirit to manifest Christ’s presence in the world. We believe that Christ is present in the mysteries passed down to us, especially the mysteries of baptism and the “New Testament” in the blood of Christ, the eucharistic communion. Through these, and the other mysteries of the faith, the Gospel is proclaimed and lived, and the members of the Church are empowered to carry the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit into the world.

The Church carefully keeps the fundamental revelation of Christ and the Holy Spirit, not just by reading the scriptures and the books of the New Testament, but by preserving a pattern of teaching and living. This is known through the practice of the Holy Mysteries, or sacraments, and the “rule of faith,” which is the traditional teaching of these things. It is kept by the community which is headed by those who are a succession of ministers: priests and Bishops, that trace their lineage back to the Apostles. The traditional patterns of prayer that we see in the Church services, help to shape our lives according to Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and to the joy and Glory of the resurrection. If these are “empty repetition,” then so is reading the Bible.

The Church is a community in the risen body of Christ. Within that body, the body of the “God of the living, and not of the dead,” the great heros and heroines of the faith are alive, and standing in the “court” or “council” of God. They are made divine by holy lives which reflect and echo with the proclamation of God’s holiness. This is why we call them “holy” or “saints,” and depict them in icons, just as God commanded the depiction of the Cherubim who formed the place, the seat on which he appeared to the Israelites as unapproachable Glory. It is because we believe we act rightly (“ortho”) with these these traditions of approach to God’s Glory (“doxa”), that we call ourselves “Orthodox.”

The Church proclaims that Christ came in the flesh, and saved the whole human being, body, soul and mind. He did not save us as disembodied spirits, or by means of abstractions. He came to our eyes, our hearing, he was touched and touched us, he is even tasted in communion and smelled in the incense that represents his transformation from death to life, “through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.” We honor all the senses and use them in song, in icons, in incense, in touching and greeting the saints and Christ with a kiss through their images. We are in the body… the body of Christ. Christ’s body is a temple raised again after three days. After it is raised it manifests an even more miraculous and mysterious power in extending to the apostles and the saints. And so, is it a surprise to see his body, a temple, made up of the images of the saints in the Church? If we take seriously the incarnation, the resurrection and the participation of the believers in our Savior Christ, none of these potent actions and practices should surprise us.

So we see that the Church is the place of an awesome experience of Christ, one that should be mirrored in our hearts and carried with us at all times. The experience should go out with us and, through our humble and faithful lives, transform the world.

God creates the visible and invisible world.
This means that God is not a part of the natural world. He makes it, as something else than himself. However, as Creator, God is omnipresent, God is present in all things, sustaining and upholding the universe. The Bible provides us mysterious images to speak about God as Creator. The Bible veils the act of creation behind the depiction of seven days and the things that are made on those days. The “architecture” of the cosmos is made on the first three days, and worshiping creatures on the next three days, culminating in the human who is made in God’s image. These are veiled way of saying that God creates the world and time as a structure of worship, which then takes place on the seventh day, the day of “rest,” the Sabbath. The human is made “according to,” or “in” the Image, which itself is never said to be created. St. Paul tells us that the uncreated Image is Christ, the Son who is the Image of God the Father, “the Glory of Christ who is the likeness of God,”(2nd Corinthians 4:4) “the Image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15)

God makes the world out of love
It is a radical thing to understand both that God is not just an epiphenomenon of nature, as many of the old polytheistic gods were, but that God is beyond creation. God’s mysterious “apart-ness” is bridged by also being intimately connected to his Creation through his representative Image and Son, the second person of the Trinity. Fundamentally God makes things out of personally expressed love for something and someone other than himself. We, as creatures, are “other” by nature, but we also dwell within the relation God has: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We reside in the place of the Son and the Spirit through their identification with us in both the act of creation and in the work of salvation.

The spiritual world
The modern world also forgets that there is an invisible Creation. The cosmos is not just what we can describe in the material universe, but also includes an even greater and more awesome spiritual world, a part of the creation which is within the very order which God sets up. The spiritual world is a part of the laws of nature which transcend the physical world, which contains only a part of God’s laws. According to these laws the universe in its totality transcends the material laws of the physical creation, and is not observable to us with our more limited physical senses, even at their most scientifically and technologically heightened. The spiritual realm is only open to us, in our present existence, through special revelations, or transcending and ecstatic visions or communications. In these revelations, we find the model of worship that we see in the Scriptures and we are taught the goal of union with God. Earthly images are used as a structure for something that transcends our life in its present limited expression, where spiritual things are hidden. The spiritual is hidden both by the fallen opacity of material needs and concerns, and by the underdevelopment of our spiritual senses when we are disconnected from the union with God—a union that we were made for. Our love also is limited to things which are graspable and present to us materially and for a short time. True love experiences a touch of the eternity that cries out for the higher experience of God that surpasses our present limited state. So it is, that we seek the invisible cause beyond all things that we can see, understanding the miraculous gift of knowledge of God, and desiring to find, through the love of God, the meaning of our existence, both physical and spiritual, both seen and unseen. Eventually the question is no longer about ourselves, but about our love for God.

The Holy Trinity
We believe in the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are the names God gives us. God has a Son, not because God is a large super-man with a large super-son, some sort of cosmic male-ness. Using terms of the time of revelation, terms that we cannot change, God expresses the idea that the Son is an image of himself, the Father. They are intimately connected. They reflect each other in love. Like, but not reducible to, the human form of the family. The Spirit is a name that expresses that God communicates something of his inner being and knowledge to us. There is no distance between God and us when the Spirit is revealed—the inner mystery of God is known in the mysterious inner being of the human. We return to the creative act where God imparts his own Breath to us, to give us life and to give the human “in the image,” the ability to take in the likeness. What God wills for us in his inner being is communicated to our inner being.

The Theophany: Christ and Trinity revealed in the Gospel
Both the Trinity and the coming incarnation of the Son of God are indicated in mysterious expressions in the Scriptures, when God takes counsel with himself, when God is described by multiple names, when God appears by means of different sometimes even anthropomorphic forms, when God both represents himself and also conceals himself, when God reveals all the worship elements that make up the theology that the Gospel uses. In the Gospel, at the event which initiates Christ’s ministry, his Baptism, we see the very same place where the Trinity is revealed. The Orthodox Church has always celebrated this as a great feast, and indicates its importance by calling it the “Theophany,” or the manifestation of God. Jesus is revealed as the Messiah, but the Trinity is revealed in the event which becomes the entry point, the rite of initiation, for the Christian.

Salvation and Church: the Temple of Christ’s body
The mystery of the Trinity is also worked out in the New Testament by the movement from the revelation of Christ in the Gospels, to the revelation of the life of the Church in the work of the Holy Spirit after Christ’s ascension. Christ comes in the body, then hides his body, in order to reveal it again in us as the Church. Christ reveals his body as the temple which must be destroyed and then rebuilt in the resurrection. In the resurrection, the temple/body of Christ is no longer to appear apart from us, but in and through us, his body, the Church. Christ, the bridegroom, unites to his bride the Church through his death and resurrection. In this event of salvation, the Bridegroom and the bride are made one body, as St. Paul explains in his letter to the Ephesians, “‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” The Spirit forms and shapes us in this, into the body of Christ. This is the way in which God manifests and works out our salvation while revealing himself to us.

Revelation as a law and boundary for boundless experience of God
Within the Trinitarian life we understand only what God allows us to see through revelation. We cannot reason our way into God and make our own names for the Trinity or “describe” what God is. We are limited to the canonized revelations from God: words and images. The Scriptures and the Gospel have set boundaries. They were set within human history with its particular difficulties and fallibilities. So it is that we have the names which the Gospel has given, by which we are baptized: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Our prayer and theological truths using these ideas are firm, however, to try to express anything in human language requires a divine condescension to our weakness, even the weakness of language. This means that even if the terms and their referents outside of their sanctified use can be seen as flawed, we must use them because of obedience and the power that has been given to these terms used scripturally and liturgically as words that work wonders and are a sign of God’s presence. Human fathers, sons and spirits fail, but the God we call on through these names does not. We cannot fully understand what the names mean, only how we are to experience them. The Father is hidden, except in the Son. The Son becomes more fully known to us in the incarnation. The Holy Spirit is known in the way that we relate to the Son—
“because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!"” (Galatians 4:6)

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.” (Romans 8:11)

“no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3)

The Holy Spirit comes to us to shape us into Christ, not to be known separately, but as the one making us in Christ.

Within the Trinitarian life all we can understand is telescoped in the terms “Father,” the one who begets; and the “Son” who is begotten (beyond all time); and “the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father” (John 15:26)

We understand that God is at once unapproachable in terms of trying to comprehend and grasp what God is, but at the same time known in his “coming down” to our limits and being known through his Glory, his activities, his energies, his “reasons” which partake of the greater Reason (the Logos, Christ), and the images which manifest him that go back to the great Image—the Son. Though the terms naming God may seem limited, they open up the boundless experience of creation and salvation, in a way that is greater than any system of thought.

Paradoxes of Orthodox Christianity
Tradition yet living experience
We are a community which is constantly alive to the new or renewed experience of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Tradition means that this very experience is tangibly passed on to us as we become members of the Church, or rather are re-created as the body of Christ. One can say that tradition, which literally means “passing on,” is actually the reception of the Holy Spirit that does the re-fashioning. At baptism, when one enters into the community, the priest breathes both on the person to be baptized and on the water on which the presence of the Holy Spirit is called down on. This mirror the very breath or Spirit of God that hovers over the primordial waters of creation in Genesis 1:2. Yet, for us, something specific has to be learned, to be practiced, to be spoken, to be lived out and to be appropriated within our inner being for this to be truly received and also to be truly passed on. For this reason, we look to the way the experience of God is communicated and expanded in the life of the community and to each person via Holy Writing, Holy Practices, and Holy Lives. Holy means that it is shaped differently, beyond the mundane, the ordinary, and the cheapened things of this life, towards a life that is seeking to approach and to even be likened to God, and even filled with divine joy, light and life that transcends the limits of this world.
So it is that Tradition is far from something dead. By nature it is alive and given meaning by the very act that hands it on to another. Each person brought into the Church’s Tradition becomes one with the God that is the content of that experience which shakes us and opens the holy things that re-make the world and bring to an even truer experience of what it is than it begins with. And so also with every human person.
Experience for all yet hierarchy
How can we say all get to experience God, when the experience of God is “mediated” through the ministry of a priest and submission to the rules of a community? Doesn’t this mean that someone controls things and maybe has some privileged access to God? No—the very fact that we are in a Tradition means that even the most authoritative people in present Church life are only recipients, as we all are, of the Tradition. They don’t make a new Bible, invent services, or get to preach things which do not match Tradition.
Strangely enough, when we thirst for the new invention in religion, we open ourselves up to either a totalitarianism of another person’s invention, or an untested, untried, and communally unmoored solipsism of our own experience. Or we open ourselves up to seemingly new and untested hypotheses in religion.
The priest stand at the head of the congregation in a position that implies years of sacrifice, labor, and study. The priest himself is a sign, an icon of Christ’s presence as a living sacrifice that we participate in. The hierarchy of the Church, a term first invented by Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, is fundamentally a moving, liturgical icon that uses its central practitioners, those at the head of the congregation (the bishops, priests and deacons) as means to unite and to call all to see Christ. The focus is not on the ministers, it is on Christ. The Christ seen externally in the service is the Christ seen internally by the humblest person who truly prepares a place in their heart. All believers are priests in that they assist Christ to dwell within them. Yet it is necessary to have the external depiction, the priests, showing discipline and a beautiful ritual order that serves to pass on this experience to each believer.

Freedom yet obedience
What makes us free? People use this term carelessly without thinking it through. Even what seems obvious, political freedom, is qualified to the point where our freedoms may sometimes be a sham. We can vote, but what real choice? We can say what we want, but often to no effect. Maybe even our words and ideas are conditioned by and not free from slavery to ignorance and emptiness. We can choose many things in a way that ends in our loss of freedom: when we choose passions that become habits, we end up losing control of ourselves to forces that enslave, rather than the God who makes us free and shows us who we really are before God our Maker. This is the paradox of obedience: if we obey commands which are really in accord with what our human nature is in the eyes of God, with the full potential God has planted in each of us, then we gain freedom. If we follow commands that teach, then we are free to grow straight and tall in spirit, into paradise, and not declining and binding ourselves down into the place of fallenness. We obey the God who gave us freedom. God does not take away our freedom; he even allows us to reject him. God, beyond our comprehension, limits himself by our freedom. Doing this is a gift and sacrifice of love towards us. In response, we learn to offer ourselves up to him sacrificially, through obedience to him—listening to his words, and approaching him through faithful following of the Tradition handed to us by those who have followed him in obedience.

How does one Enter into the Experience (Become a Member) of this Church?

Attending services

To be Orthodox meaningfully, is to enter the full experience of our liturgical life. Orthodoxy is defined by the approach to God’s Glory—something that, from the earliest scriptural accounts onward, was a liturgically mediated and mediating expression of God’s presence. The experience of God is not mere abstracted ideas, nor is it individualistic practices to build up one’s self-helped willpower. It is something that needs long formation by shared practices done with a community of people that commit to the same process of transformation. That transformation is not into proud and strong-willed righteous people, but into those who learn the humility to be meek (a virtue that consists of rejection of self-privilege and anger) and repentant. In fact, the point of worship is to learn, rely on, and be saved by God’s justice and righteousness, not our own. Worship services teach us patience. They are a place where we battle with our inattentive and careless mind and our body that itches with distraction. They are situations which cause a direct confrontation with the “noonday demon,” or accidie/akedia. They are solemn times when we enter the fast flowing river of the Spirit, or are caught up by circling stars of heaven; we enter into the very counsel of God, the place where his throne is and his whole court throng in attendance. The “Communion of the Saints” is present, those who we see alive now, and those who are alive in God’s love, the saints of all generation who now rest in the Lord.This approach to the earthly participation in the heavenly liturgy is the context for the engagement with all the senses. Orthodox worship can be seen as very sensual, but this is all in services of training the mysterious “spiritual senses,” or the higher faculty of the human: the spirit, which desires God with all its being.When one enters Orthodox worship, one should quietly observe, not rush to demand a place or think that all is understandable and graspable. It is not! Such a mentality is impatient. Quiet observation and meditation is a form of participation. To think that one must participate without quiet observation and humble reception of the experience is presumptuous and self-privileged. “It is better for a man to be silent and be |a Christian¦, than to talk and not to be one.” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians 15:1) Don’t worry about doing what everyone else does, just be polite and attentive, quietly listening for the Word of God to resonate in us. Form questions in your mind and ask. Asking questions should be a sign of desire, as in the case of the Samaritan woman (John 4) who, without shame over her social acceptability, asks Jesus probing theological questions.

Learning

Christianity is fundamentally a religion of education, not in its institutional and worldly form, but in its spiritual expression. No matter how humble one’s work, one is free and responsible for a constant growth in knowledge—the knowledge of God. The means of learning is prayer. One can be scrubbing a toilet and learning about God—not because of that work, but because of the focus on God in prayer and meditation. One can be forced into a sinful and distorted life, but if one knows repentance, one can mysteriously grow and learn toward eventual freedom from sin. Learning about God through books and reading is extremely helpful in preparing the heart. However, in the end, all this striving and labor is for the sake of learning to love God and grow in knowledge of his goodness and kindness that saves humanity. So eventually all true Christian knowledge is marked by the cross in its difficulty and the Glory of God in its exaltation in Christ.

Re-reading the Scriptures, Apostles and Gospel

If one has learned the Scriptures before, often much has to be re-learned—always, to enter into its deeper and inner meaning. Learning, even more when it involves correcting mistakes or mistaken ideas, is a form of ascesis. The Scriptures are one of the important places where we become Israel: we wrestle with God until he gives us a new name and blessing: “Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob's hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. And He said, "Let Me go, for the day breaks." But he said, "I will not let You go unless You bless me!" So He said to him, "What is your name?" He said, "Jacob." And He said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed." (Genesis 32:24-28) The wrestling to understand God as he appears and reaches out of the scriptures to take hold of us, ends up in prayer where we can demand of God a blessing—here even like an all-night Vigil. It is also through understanding the Scriptures that, through baptism, our body is even touched by the struggle of the cross and thus enters into the community of struggle in the Church, the Israel that sees and lays hold of Christ our God. The Scriptures begin with creation, made in the image of liturgy—a temple and the temporal order that is the time of worship. This is why the Creation is completed by the priestly imprint of the image of God, the human, and thus is made to celebrate the liturgy of the Sabbath (the day of completion) on behalf of the whole creation that is encapsulated and microcosmically mediated by us as the bond and midway point of the material and spiritual worlds and all their creatures. The Fall of humanity is a story that leads us to repentance. The call of God’s people is a pathway to the incarnation of Christ. The gift of the Law is revelation of God’s Glory and an introduction to the pattern of heavenly worship. The Covenant looks to its unmediated, unsubstituted completion and our participation in the Blood of Christ. The prophets teach us humble and faithful righteousness. The Davidic promise ends with returning the kingship to God who becomes his Son and Lord, Jesus Christ the Son of Man (Daniel 7:14). After a long-suffering endurance of the ups and downs of their own fallible and inconstant human faithfulness to God, the people of God expect the revelation of God’s Wisdom, his purpose in creation. They realize that the heavens must open to reveal God’s righteousness, the justice of God known when one sees the long historical perspective that comes from patiently enduring. Toward the latter end of the development of what becomes the canon of the Scriptures, we see the apocalyptic literature that shows this dramatic, God-centered overview of history and the cosmos. The people of God seek God to stand in their midst and rule them. As Christians, as Israel, we have wrestled with this long view and found Christ as that one who make the world right and saves it. He is God-with-us.The New Testament is completion of the truth of the Old Covenant. Christ is revealed as the mystery hidden within the worship of Israel. He dwells with us, teaches us, and shows the miracles of the resurrection—the destruction of death and the power of evil to bind us. He brings us into his body through baptism and nourishes us in communion with him. He is our life and our hope and a power to overcome evil and the limitations and hopelessness of death and what seems like the erasure of the human. Acquiring mystical community beyond boundaries of time and space, life and deathCommunion of the saints means that we are living with not just those we see with our physical eyes, but that we are constantly in dialogue with those before us. They lived, prayed, struggled, thought, and worked before us. They still are in prayer as the summit of all work and contemplation—they with God. Past is not past. Future is now. Eternity is breaking into the present. God enters our limitation not just through the incarnation of his Son, Word, Image; but also through the inspired work of his Saints, and now also their rest in him. Because they are alive in Christ, we can affirm that Christ’s resurrection has truly affected human life. Their life in him is a foretaste of the final resurrection.This means that we ask their prayers, just as we would a friend standing next to us. They are standing next to us when we are in Church. They are there in our remembrance, if we allow ourselves to be empowered by God to really remember and see.

Conforming Life Practices

Our life is constantly re-considered and reworked as Christians. We are not complacent, just staying in a place of stasis and entropy as Christians. We improve on at least our repentance. This is why we alternate our life practices. We fast, restricting our diet, as we look toward certain days that we particularly celebrate. We remember various events in the ministry of Christ and in the life of the Virgin Mary and other saints, feasting in celebration of them. We receive communion regularly and confess our sins before the priest regularly in Confession. We pray regularly at home and we pray quietly to ourselves during our daily work and engagements. We practice vigilance: we avoid mentally and morally distracting things with great care. We quiet our words and minds, so that we live peacefully both within ourselves and externally with others, yet we also courageously allow God to confront our failings and accept the challenge to grow as individuals and as communities. We allow ourselves to be troubled by the desire for God and our own shortcomings. We always try to grow in our desire for God.Item description

Fasting is a ubiquitous practice in the Orthodox Tradition, as it is in most world religions. We have continuously held to the early Christian practice. In the Didache, a 1st century guide for ethics and liturgical practice, it says to “fast on Wednesday and Friday,” as we do (8:1). Christ does not say, “if you fast,” but rather “when you fast” (Mat.6:16-7). I addition we have seasons of fasting, some of which go back to ancient pre-baptismal fasts, as mentioned in the Didache: “But before the baptism let the baptizer fast, and the baptized, and whatever others can; but you shall order the baptized to fast one or two days before” (7:4).

Fasting is sometimes total, as in the hours of preparation for communion. It can also consist of dietary restrictions, as in the (“Lenten”) fast before Pascha, as well as before Christmas, and before two other feasts. Much of the year, Orthodox people are called to a vegan, antediluvian, paradisial diet.

The purpose of fasting is to clear the mind of the self-will that ate, against the command of God, and fell. We are to push back against the deceit of the tempter who distorts our perception and convinces us to misuse God’s things. We regain our light that comes from hearing the word of God (Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path” Ps. 119:105) and get rid of the eyes that open upon shame (“the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” Gen 3:7); as well as distraction, self-justification, and dissension. Our eyes are opened to spiritual things by stinting the physical appetite. We can thus come when God calls us out of hiding and admit our mistakes, and seek the mercy of the Creator and Savior. So, the fasts are also times of joyous repentance: “the fast. . .  shall be joy and gladness and cheerful feasts” (Zech 8:19). They are feasts of repentance, made out of love for God, like the joyful repentance of a child, or that of the prodigal son in the parable. Our repentance and the tears that come with it, aided by fasting, are a pentecostal gift, it is the true speaking in tongues: “Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Rom 8:26).

Fasting, though, above all, is about desire: “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God” (Ps 42:1). Fasting is the pursuit of what makes us healthy and alive, not from worldly food or our own power and effort, but from God’s goodness: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Mt 5:5). We learn to rely on God, like the Israelites receiving manna. We seek Christ as our daily bread. Fasting is to hope in the bread from heaven, Christ himself: “Taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man who hopes in him (Ps 34:8). Fasting helps us to open the heart and the eyes to prayer. In the end, it is simply a means to focus on God with love and receive him.

How People are Received into the Orthodox Church from other Denominations
If one comes to the Orthodox Church from another Christian denomination, there are two potential ways one might be officially received into the Orthodox Church. If one is not properly baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; or baptized in a denomination whose beliefs we cannot accept as Christian and Trinitarian; then one must be baptized into the Orthodox Church. If the Church considers that a prior baptism is correct, one is received into the Orthodox Church by chrismation, the conclusion of the baptismal service in Orthodox practice, where one is “sealed” with the “gift of the Holy Spirit.” This happens after a time of catechesis and attendance at services, experiencing the liturgical and festal cycles of the year. The person interested in joining the Orthodox Church first spends time as a catechumen, in preparation for entry into the Church. Praying, fasting, preparing for confession—basically entering into the liturgical order of the world structured for worship—these constitute the basic framework for a life in the Church; a soul, mind, and body prepared for an authentic participation in the Church.

Unnecessary Controversy over Rebaptism
The most traditional practice of the Orthodox Church is to accept Trinitarian baptism, even if done outside of the canonical Orthodox Church. That practice has followed St. Basil the Great’s canons laid out in Letter 188. Some promote a more blanket practice of rebaptizing all who come from outside of the Orthodox Church. This practice is not as traditional within the Orthodox Church. It applies less well-reasoned and less pastorally sensitive principles of the Latin father, St. Cyprian of Carthage. St. John Damascene in his 82nd chapter of the Orthodox Faith, very sternly warns us not to rebaptize. There is a lot of unhealthy noise on the web about this issue. The practice at our parish follows norms of most of the canonical Orthodox Churches, that of chrismating those who enter the Orthodox Church.

Membership and Involvement
When you become a member of the parish it is good to gradually implement more and better practice, prayer, and learning in the faith. We don’t have set membership dues, but if one can afford it, a tithe is a basic starting point for giving. Charity should be added on top of this, and assumes also a generous life in which one does not oppress others with debts.
Further, one should slowly and humbly discern what ministries in the Church one would like to give time and energy to, in consultation with the priest as confessor and spiritual guide. If one has talents, humbly offer them for the needs of the Church. Talents with arts, construction, cleaning, cooking, gardening, social connections, financial knowledge, general organizational skills, etc. all can be of use to the Church.
Consulting the priest first is not a pious extra, or a decorative aspect of our parish life. The priest is the confessor of the whole community and the one who listens to our own soul’s concerns and needs. Every ministry in the parish is guided by the one who has pastoral responsibility for the whole community and takes into consideration the balance of its needs and the challenge of its calling to higher things. Things done without the priest’s blessing end up in difficulties for the community. The members of a parish are members of a body, which works together with its head.

Coming from Another Orthodox Parish?
Welcome! If you are coming from another Orthodox parish to visit, please let Fr. Elijah know that you are visiting and which parish you normally attend. If you are moving into the area and considering attending our parish, please talk to Fr. Elijah.

Requirements Around Communion
According to established Orthodox practice, one should fast during the fasting seasons and on most Wednesdays and Fridays. Prior to communion, one should confess (at least within the last two months if one is communing regularly, or right before communing if one has not been to communion for a few weeks), say the prayers before communion, and fast from all food and drink from at least midnight and all conjugal relations from the night before. It is necessary to commune to be an Orthodox Christian. If one does not commune as a baptized Orthodox Christian, one is saying that the spiritual life and approach to God is for other people, not myself—it is a form a clericalism (where communion is just for the priest) and a false sense that piety is made up of many practices which I can’t or don’t do, because they bar is set too high. It is a very serious thing to approach communion. It is even dangerous and fearful, as St. Paul warns us:
”Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” (1st Corinthians 11:27-32)
This is not said in order to scare us off, but rather to tell us that communion is necessary to our souls, as we exercise and practice our appeal to the Judge of all, Christ. Communing is a matter of life and death to us, once we have entered the Church. To neglect to come, is to neglect the very body of Christ that sustains us. To treat it lightly, without proper practice, is to treat the holy things—the very body of God—in a profane and disrespectful way. So we, if we are in the Church, are required at the table of the Master. All things that go with that approach to Communion are required of us, too.
We are also required to repent of things we have said, fights we have engaged in, grudges we may hold. We must also be careful about words we speak that go against the unity of the body of the Church and that witness poorly to Christ’s presence in us. Similarly, we have to repent of actions, distractions and all kinds of spiritual problems in our own life.