Orthodox Reunion & the Curse of Jurisdictionalism

T he following excerpts are from a talk given by Archpriest Josiah Trenham at last year’s Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America Parish Life Conference in El Paso, Texas, entitled Orthodox Reunion: Overcoming the Curse of Jurisdictionalism in America.

If you’ve time, you can link to the whole talk: HERE.

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!”

The Church is a miracle of unity for it is the New Man, and as such is the only miracle of unity in the cosmos. In confronting the Church all men are to witness a living organism that defies and transcends human divisions. Sadly today, when most outsiders encounter the Church and hear we are Orthodox Christians, a question immediately follows, “Are you Greek? Are you Russian?” and so by our divisions we have fostered an earthly identification of ethnicity and nationalism that leads the observer to conclude our Church is designed only for particular groups of people, and not for them.

We might well recite the antithesis of the Psalm 132:

Behold how evil and miserable it is for brothers to dwell in division! It is like a sulphuric stench in the nostrils, coming down upon the eyes. It is like the odor of Babylon, coming down upon the parched plains of Sodom; for there the Lord commanded the curse- everlasting death.

The thought is ludicrous and grotesque, but has many parallels to contemporary Orthodox Christian life in America. Allow me, dear brothers and sisters, to apply Psalm 132 to our present ecclesiastical miseries in America. We do not presently know the blessings of the unity described by Psalm 132. We do not enjoy the unity for which our Savior shed His precious blood. We do not experience the unity inspired by His Holy Spirit, established by His Holy Apostles, required by the Sacred Canons, and defended by the Holy Fathers. We have a measure of unity- for sure, but incomplete, mangled, and intolerable. We call the unity we possess by various names – a unity of faith sometimes we say, or a eucharistic unity. Some clergy even suggest that the only unity that matters is that various Orthodox in America can commune together. But this compromised and deficient unity does not satisfy our Savior, and is positively dangerous, threatening by its very inconstancy and instability to shatter the unity of faith and chalice that we do have. Orthodox Christians have never imagined historically that a unity of faith or communion could co-exist with a disunity of synod, praxis, and interchange. Two Sundays past we celebrated the Sunday of the Holy and God-bearing Fathers of the First Ecumenical Synod in Nicea. We celebrated a common Orthodox faith defended and confessed by a common Orthodox synod. In our present experience we have only half of the equation. We share a common Orthodox faith with our fellow Orthodox Christians throughout America, but we have no common synod. As a result nothing is defended or confessed as it should be, and we are weaklings in the face of encroaching secularism and heresy. Without a common synod we are sitting ducks to lose even our unity of faith.

The Trivialization of Disunity

We trivialize our disunity but calling it simply a disunity of jurisdictions or an administrative division — as though the division we sustain is not a matter of the heart or essence or faith of the Orthodox Church. Jurisdiction and administration ring in our ears as merely external and relatively unimportant divisions, and so the tragedy of our division is belittled. As though our present divisions are merely the unfortunate turns of history, which we must benignly endure until they naturally go away. I beg to differ from such an appraisal. Such tamed and pacified descriptions of Orthodox disunity in America are untrue, inconsistent with Orthodox theology, mask the very serious nature and consequences of our present division, and steal the sense of urgency that the Spirit of God births in the hearts of the faithful in the face of disunity.

And make no mistake. The Spirit of the Living God does not tolerate disunity, which is the un-doer of His divine work and the spoiler of His mighty wonders …

The Mormons may have a theology worthy of disdain, but their unity has made them a powerful force in the world and they increase mightily. American Muslims, Shia and Sunni, have forged a unity in this country that has brought them great strength. American Muslims, by their desire for unity, have overcome far greater obstacles than any two Orthodox jurisdictions have with each other, and have established significant cooperative ventures such as ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), AMC (American Muslim Council), the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Alliance, the Islamic Circle of North America, IMANA Islamic Medical Association of North America), the Muslim Student Association, some 1000 Islamic academies to insure their Muslim children remain Muslim, and a host of Islamic journals and magazines. By their unity these non-Christians without the Holy Spirit have accomplished much. We Orthodox Christians ought to compare our respective numbers closely with American Muslims. There are approximately 1,600 mosques in America, just as there are approximately 1,600 Orthodox church temples in America. They are fairly united. We are significantly divided. Let us see who does the growing in the next decade. And why is it that the Roman Catholics in the United States have been able to care for the pastoral needs of its multiple ethnicities in this country, while on the whole maintaining episcopal and synodal unity? In the face of these examples we are without excuse …

The division of American Orthodox Christians in what we call jurisdictionalism is not just unfortunate, or an unenviable quirk of modern church history. It is a heinous sin, and a lamentable grieving of the Holy Spirit, Who is the divine cement of our unity …

A sin and a tragedy … and the divisions are worse today in 2006 than they were thirty years ago in 1976. Far worse. We are not moving forwards. For at least 12 years, since the failure following Ligonier, we have been moving backwards …

[Perhaps you have heard] of Orthodox unity by saying things like, “It will happen, but not in my lifetime” or “When God wills” or “We are not mature enough for it yet.” Fooey and ix-nay on all those statements.

Fooey and ix-nay?

That does it — go H E R E — read it all.

Fr. Josiah Trenham is pastor of St. Andrew Church in Riverside, California.