Whitewashed Faith

It’s an amazing thing. I live near two Orthodox mega-churches. They’re even on the same side of town as the other mega-churches. And they actually work the same way. There are a gazillion programs for people 20-40, for teens, for feminists… you name it, there’ a committee or a program for it. I think they have well over 2 dozen committees alone. But matins, served once a week, draws 3 people, 2 of whom are the reader and most junior priest. At the 20-40 group meetings, they eat and have cocktails, but there is no prayer, none at all. And if anyone tries to talk about Faith, they either get nowhere or are greeted with such misunderstanding of the doctrines and attitudes of the Church, that it’s almost better not to bring it up. Vespers, and other such services are similarly unattended. On Sunday, everyone sits in pews and watches the service. The choir sings invisibly from the sides, but most people don’t pray with them, or realize that’s a tradition – they seem to think it would be interrupting, or that they would miss the singing if they prayed. There are no icons except on the iconostasis. Even in the gigantic eating hall, there was only recently a single icon installed. The interior is whitewashed – whitewashed of the Saints. There are numerous windows, but far fewer Windows to Heaven.

During the substantial meals/buffets served after sunday morning liturgy, an aged junior priest has to run over and quickly say a blessing, so that it can be done before most people have started eating, but no one pays him any mind. There’s a general sense of the absence of God as a daily reality in our lives. There’s little prayer. There’s every manner of religious or atheistic theory from the culture, from heterodoxy, but very little understanding of Orthodox thinking. Enquirers classes for prospective converts focus mainly on the externals of how one gets received (Chrismation, etc. Almost never baptism.). What holds it together is the activities and groups, which provide social interaction for the members, but certainly not the services and vigils of the Church. There’s no sense of the basics going on; one may easily be invited out for steak dinners during Lent, etc. Eventually, tho, despite continual well-attended inquirers classes, chrismations, and new members, they reach an apex of their maximum size, because likewise there’s a steady stream of people that can’t figure out why they’re there, and attend less and less, and eventually drop off. Somehow, it doesn’t sustain them. So despite the huge influx that their size, programs, and marketing creates, their size remains fairly constant. You can determine size, incidentally, either by attending, by reading the headcount figures, or by the number of cars in the parking lot being ushered in or out by security guards on Sunday.

Now typically, if someone were to say all the above, …