An article from Orthodox Biz (complete post here). It brings up the interesting subject of the impediments resulting from the sheer size of American dioceses.
My parish is in the Diocese of the South, and does not have a bishop at present. When we do have a bishop, that bishop covers an area the size of Western Europe with over 70 different parishes. The fact is that a bishop presiding over the South could spend every Sunday away from home, and still not be able to visit all of his parishes in a given year.Now, of course, the situation is worse. There is no bishop in Dallas, and the Metropolitan is trying to run the whole OCA and deal directly with 70 plus parishes strung out from Texas to Florida and as far north as Virginia. To say this is a bad situation is to put it mildly.
So, in the best of times we have church governance centered around a man we hardly see. At this point, our church governance is centered around a man most of us will never see.
Our bishop is supposed to be the head of our Eucharistic assembly. He is supposed to be a teacher and spiritual physician. The bishop is not supposed to be someone who just shows up periodically and then disappears for another 18 months.
This fact was forcibly brought home to me last year when I was talking to a young woman in her second year of being Orthodox. She asked me about Archbishop Dmitri. I had the honor of knowing him personally, because I had spent time in Dallas attending his cathedral while on a professional services contract. (I'm a Florida native.) I described him in glowing terms as a wonderful teacher."So what," she responded bitterly, "When none of us will ever attend any of his classes?"
We almost lost her to the faith. She is doing much better now after weathering a severe personal crisis, but had she fallen away, her bishop would never have noticed. She would have just been a statistic on some report that landed on someone's desk concerning membership trends in our parish.
This is where we are, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. The men who are leading the faithful don't really know who we are, as the Orthodox Church in the United States is organized around a model of remote leadership. The bishop is not integrated into the lives of his parishes. Instead, he is an outsider that appears to know very little about what is happening in most of the parishes operating under his authority...
Complete article here.
Posts
For whatever it might be worth, this is not the case in every diocese. In my diocese, our parishes all see our bishop at least once a year (some more often), and our clergy are in constant contact with him (email, cellphone, etc.). Most of our laity could probably tell about personal experience with our bishop, as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's my experience that some jurisdictions and some bishops see episcopal service as more "remote management" than others do. Some of this stems especially from inherited culture from the more northerly places in the old countries, where dioceses were so massive and many parishes so remote that they never saw their bishop, ever. By contrast, many of the dioceses clustered near the Mediterranean are little bigger than large neighborhoods.
Agreed. The size of a Greek diocese versus the size of a Russian diocese is substantial.
ReplyDeleteI think, for the purposes of his comments about the US configuration, there is a bit of cart before the horse in his mentality. The answer is not simply more bishops. The answer is to grow the church and as a result more episcopal division will come. The "normal" process right now is to set up a diocese for the entire country. Then when there are enough parishes split it in half. Then split it again when necessary. If he wants more bishops he needs to put boots on the ground and evangelize. :)
I don't view it as a 'cart-before-the-horse' at all. If you read the article, the primary gist is that the office of bishop is a local office. Instead of evangelizing and then calling in a bishop, how about evangelizing with a bishop present? That was the model of the New Testament Church which spread Christianity to all corners of the Roman Empire. Many famous bishops had flocks of less than 20. The idea that somehow you must grow the church in the absence of a bishop in order to need one is backwards in my opinion. That makes the office of bishop a nice-to-have or an option.
ReplyDeleteIt is neither. The office of the bishop is necessary for the proper functioning of the church. As parishes are formed, the most successful model is that bishops are chosen to lead those flocks. If you go to the original post, I added a comment in which I quote Fr. Emmanuel Clapsis on the confusion in our current ecclesiology.
Glen
Maybe when there is clarification on the American church there will be a more clear path to evenly spaced bishops.
ReplyDelete