Something Old, Something New

Well, after a couple of months of reading and listening to a variety of people talk about the Orthodox Church as a whole, tonight I took the plunge and went to a Greek Orthodox Vespers service. I had been eyeing it off online for some time. I had purposed to go the week before last, but then the day after I’d made up my mind to go, I was asked if we could host a connect group at our home. I obliged and thought that maybe this was God’s way of directing me… Maybe we are meant to stay at the church we are at and not leave? I don’t know, I’m finding it difficult to tell.

At any rate, a week after hosting our connect group, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to bite the bullet and go to the Orthodox Church. I had hoped my whole family would come, but I went alone. My first impressions were that I couldn’t get over how beautiful the inside of the church was. It was hard to take in all of the beauty because there was just so much to see. Paintings of Jesus and saints adorned the walls and even the ceiling. It was so, so beautiful. The service started about 10 minutes late. There were only about 10 people there and when the priest emerged, he instantly noticed me. He said, “I can see we have a new person!” He warmly walked towards me, introduced himself, shook my hand and asked me my name. It was very surprising!

The service was very different to what I’m used to. One young woman intermittently said some amens, while a younger man sang scripture a cappella and the priest would sing as well. A couple of times the priest took something with incense and bells and moved it around to disperse the incense.  If you happen to be more familiar with these types of liturgical services, then please forgive my crude descriptions. When he walked down dispersing incense down the aisle, everyone bowed their heads and I kept a close eye on the other congregants to take cues on what to do and when.

I was hoping to escape out the back without talking to anyone. I know that’s not a friendly disposition to have, but I felt at the time that I didn’t want to start potentially hitting it off with new people without my family, and without having any real sense of if this will be a church that we will in time come to call home. My plans for a quick exit failed, as the priest called out to me on my way out to chat briefly and introduce me to the other parishioners who were in attendance. He asked me if I was interested in Orthodoxy, and I replied yes and briefly told him about my faith walk to date - namely that I am a Christian and go to a Pentecostal church. He made a comment that God should never be worshipped in a factory, which if I’m honest I don’t completely agree with, but that really was beside the point. He gave me his number and invited me to come to the English Divine Liturgy the next day. I did already have legitimate plans for the next day, but I thanked him and took the piece of paper he wrote his number on.

The priest introduced me to the other parishioners and I stood in a circle with them as they happily and humbly allowed me to ask them questions about their faith backgrounds prior to Orthodoxy and why they were converts. When I tell you that after they finished talking I was fighting back tears, I am not exaggerating. There was something about their willingness to share their experiences with me, with such honesty and grace that deeply moved me. When I think about it, it was such a sharp contrast to my current church culture. The ability and availability of people to simply connect with one another in an unpretentious and dare I say un-hyped manner stood in sharp contrast to what I have sadly become accustomed to. I gulped and held back my tears as I thanked them for their time and willingness to talk with me. How sad that time has become such a prized commodity that in my own church, it is not often given away that freely.

I need to backtrack to earlier in my day before I went to the Vespers service when I had been in contact with another priest of sorts. I was rostered on to lead worship at my church on Sunday morning, and earlier on Friday, I attempted with some degree of success to contact the speaker for Sunday morning to see if he wanted the worship team to sing/play a specific song for the ministry component of the service. This is a time when the congregants are asked if they would like to come forward to the altar in more of a symbolic sense because there is no actual altar— and receive prayer. It just so happened that said speaker for the weekend was the head of my entire church movement, and this would be the first time that I would see him preach in the flesh at my home church. Using our church’s communication app, I sent him what I felt was a very polite and professional email/direct message, being careful not to sound too casual and wanting to convey my respect (despite whatever misgivings and general questions I am having about church in general).

To my surprise, I did not receive a reply from him personally. Approximately a couple of hours later, a message appeared in our music team’s group chat for Sunday morning, from a church admin staff member advising us of the song he would like us to do. I read the message and paused. Was he really that busy that he couldn’t have responded to me? Maybe. Did he deem me not important enough to reply to personally? Perhaps. Could he somehow mysteriously sense that I’ve been internally wrestling with his church structure and somehow wanted to avoid me? OK, maybe I’m overthinking and analysing things on overdrive. It is a bad habit of mine after all.

As I exited the church and journeyed home to my family, I couldn’t help but draw another striking comparison. I had just encountered a priest who was not from my church tradition, and for all intents and purposes didn’t know or know of me from a bar of soap. Yet, he generously handed me his phone number and welcomed me to the point of stepping down from his platform and delaying the start of his service, for my benefit. On the other hand, my other ‘priest’ could not even personally reply to a message (admittedly for reasons I’m not privy to), regarding the service that he was leading and of which I was assisting to serve in.

These observations and comparisons are sad and thought-provoking, and I think they bring me to the heart of what this season is really about for me.What is the church, and what is it meant to look like? Clearly, I’m not talking about aesthetics. What does real beauty mean in a church building if you don’t have beauty in the honest and authentic exchanges between parishioners/congregants and their priests and pastors?