Abbot Tryphon on keeping children in the Church

As always, the blue sections are my own commentary (and in the case of this post, the image is mine as well).

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(The Morning Offering) - When parishes are forced to close, it is not just because the children have moved away, and the old folks have died off. The problem is much greater than this. With increased numbers of immigrants joining parishes, often with the expressed desire to preserve their Russian identity, we can easily fall prey to believing our churches are on solid ground, and will thrive into the next generations. In our collective joy at seeing our churches packed for Sunday Liturgies, we forget about previous influxes of immigrants, whose children, upon growing into adulthood, became so Americanized that they saw the Orthodox Faith as relevant only for their parents and grandparents, but meaningless to themselves. It's really a trapeze act of flying through the air out of the hands of one person into the hands of another. How do you take Orthodoxy so tied into the cultural context of your elders and carry it into your new American identity? My answer is to be Orthodox because of Christ and not because of a heartstrung connection to the past. Sentimental feelings do not hold people, Christ however is an inexhaustible spring that you keep coming back to. Is the focus of coming to church to reconnect socially, or speak with God. If the answer is primarily the former, you will find it difficult to hear God's words at all.

The remedy, I believe, in forestalling another great exodus of our youth, is to wage a concerted effort to help our youth embrace Orthodoxy as their own. This means they must be able to understand the services, and since they are unlikely to learn Church Slavonic, or liturgical Greek, we must admit that it is time to serve in English. The Ancient Church saw the language of the people as the vehicle for teaching the faith, and passing Orthodoxy on to the next generations. Saints Cyril and Methodius helped to Slavic people receive Orthodoxy by translating the services into a language the people understood. Thus the Greek language did not remain the liturgical language of the newly illumined people of the Slavic lands. How many of our churches are actually performing services entirely in those languages? Is the impediment of some Greek or Slavonic so daunting that it is insurmountable for our youth? I think the disconnect has more to do with parents not instructing their children in the faith at home than it does with language. A child who is engaged with his faith at home is going to find resonance with it in church. A child who hears nothing about God or the saints and never sees his parents pray, will see no connection between getting up early on Sunday and the rest of his life. Fix that problem and a few litanies in a foreign language won't even be noticeable.

I believe Church Slavonic has it’s place, for as a common language it can be a point of unity, especially when used during joint services among Slavic peoples from different countries. Church Slavonic, as well as Liturgical Greek, are both lovely languages, and have their place in the life of the Church. However, that most lay people do not understand these languages (beyond the parts that are used during each service), should be a wakeup call. If the changeable parts of the service are not understood by life-long Orthodox faithful, what does this mean for our children, and for visitors who might be looking into Orthodoxy? The romantic attachment to an ancient language is just not sufficient if we want the Faith to be delivered to both the heart and the mind, and become the mainstay of our life. The Roman Catholics discovered this truth when they dumped Latin as the normal language for Mass, in favor of the vernacular, and the move has worked very well in those places where the Mass is served with the dignity and tradition of the ancient Western Rite. It served the Roman Church very poorly. The "rupture" (as they call it) of radically reformatting the mass and throwing out Latin has devastated the Catholic Church. The baby went out with the bath water and they know not how to find him again.

The early missionaries knew the importance of teaching the faith so as to accommodate the local population, and allow newly converted people to really know the Orthodox Faith. Just as was the case when Saints Cyril and Methodius brought Orthodoxy to the people of Kievan Rus, our children must be able to understand the services, and be taught the faith. Our children must understand why we do the things we do, why we fast, and why we worship the way we have worshiped for almost two thousand years. If these changes are not implemented by the local parishes, our youth will see Orthodoxy as nothing more than a quaint religion of a bygone age, meaningless to their own lives as modern Americans, and they will depart from the faith. Again, we have to equip parents to make this connection and reinforce it in our churches. Language is important, but you have to keep children at church into adulthood for them to press for this change. In most parishes that are holding onto liturgical languages it is influential (read: wealthy and outspoken) parishioners who adjure the parish to changing nothing.

Since a priest is allowed to celebrate only one Liturgy per day, the introduction of English Liturgies could be gradually introduced, with one Sunday given over to English, and the second Sunday to Church Slavonic. Another option, in the beginning, might be to balance the service by using both English and Slavonic in equal amounts. This is an uphill battle without the parish and the bishop requesting it. Priests are often seen as contract labor that shouldn't go "messing about with what we have always done here."

With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon