The Americanization of Orthodoxy

Much is said, year after year, about the process of making the numerous jurisdictions now working independently of one another in the New World into an "American Church." Inculturation will eventually move, as if by a force as relentless as gravity, the clergy and laity of this country into a unified and distinct Orthodoxy body.

I travel a bit and make a point of visiting whatever parishes my schedule allows throughout the days I'm journeying about. What I've found is that time is different from ambition. Simply existing as a parish in America is no guarantee that it will become more "American"... ever.

Case in point: I just returned from a business trip where I attended Sunday Orthros and Liturgy at the nearest available parish. It didn't reside in an ethnic area nor was it in such a heavily Orthodox-laden city that the landscape was dotted with golden domes. From the moment I walked in the front door to my eventual stepping out of the fellowship hall almost no English was spoken. Besides those few times where I needed directions or when people wondered after who I was, everything was said in the jurisdictional tongue. The church was well over a hundred years old.

Time does a lot of things, but in the parish setting anecdotal data tells me that the run-of-the-mill parish is more likely to remain insular than it is to choose to do things to make it more accessible to outsiders. It is the ambition of the parishioners that determines which route a given church will take. The soft phyletism of a parish that doesn't announce its service times online (or in English), that performs those services almost entirely in another language, etc. has no methodology for taking in new members and few parishes have enough young children in attendance that they can replace their aging members as they pass on much less grow. Oddly, the same people who acknowledge they have something wonderful (e.g. the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church) are also befuddled by visitors.

Let me recount an experience I had some years ago while visiting a Greek parish during coffee hour (though this could and has happened in non-Hellenic settings as well):

Yiayia: Hello. How do you like our church?

Me: Thanks for having me. Great coffee and I liked those sweet things [pointing at tray].

Yiayia: You are not Greek. Why did you come here?

Me: I'm on a business trip and your church was close to my hotel.

Yiayia: Since you not Greek, maybe next time you can go to OCA church?

Me: Ok. Maybe I will. I've never been there before either.

She was at once proud of her church and confused as to why I had come. This is not rare.

We as a people united in faith will not become more visibly and meaningfully unified in a shared life as one Church by time alone. This will only happen if there is pressure from the top-down and action from the bottom-up. As a Southerner currently living in the North (Prayers, please.) there are several things I think the South is better at than their Yankee counterparts, but I cannot say that this problem is a distinctly Northern one. Missions are being planted all over the South and Southwest, but that has little bearing on the many existing parishes that function in the isolation I've described above.

So a plan sounds good, right? Plans always sound good, but when not paired with verve and actual action, plans differ not an iota from what you line your hamster cages with. I once wanted to start a mission near me and called a well-known mission-planting priest for pointers. His advice: "Plans are fine. Everyone has them. But boots on the ground actually gets things done." The sentiment holds true here as well. If you want to build an "American Church," you have to get out there and do things and you have to get other people excited about doing things as well. Time is wonderful for wearing things down. If you want sharp edges softened or holes slowly bored into huge rocks, time is your tool. But, if you want to build something and work against the momentum of decades, ambition is the implement of choice.