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Invariably when a Priest is asked about his parish people say “And how many members does your parish have?”

Now people aren’t looking for nuance in this, thoughts about faithfulness, the stage of life a parish is in, or the historical development of things. They want a number and the higher the better. Everything hangs on the number.

If the number is low it must be about the Priest not measuring up or the parish being dysfunctional or some other dark secret that keeps it from being higher. When Priests talk to Priests the issue is the same and even when we offer the nuances and they are listened to with the appropriate and well practiced techniques the one speaking and those listening know that only the number matters. The rest is small talk.

And there is a certain truth in numbers. Numerical growth is normal in the church and when it is not happening there really does need to be an analysis of the situation. Sometimes the answer is simple and there are conflicts or attitudes that have driven people away or closed the doors to people coming in. Language still is one of the largest and it remains an amazing fact that so many Orthodox parishes, even those that have been in this country for decades, still cling to languages and customs that they never use outside the walls of the Church. But there are more and sometimes its not about desire or struggles or ethnicity but about lack of support and direction for growth, the failure to plan that means the Parish has planned, sometimes without knowing it, to fail. Some parishes, too, need to die but no one has the desire to say that let alone act on it. Its never as simple, despite our wish, as the number.

Numerical success, too, has to be examined. Is it an accident of immigration where a large community of people was already present and the church simply filled? Has it been about the movement of converts from other Christian communities into the life of the Church? Is it a generational thing, a burst of fertility from years past that has now come to fruition? Success numbers are complex too and may not actually reflect a vital congregation but one that fate, rather than ministry, has favored with the numbers that shape our idea of success.

A few points here, for a digression regarding the growth of Orthodoxy.

First certain areas of Orthodoxy in the United States have experienced growth but the context has to be examined. Orthodoxy, when placed against its own context of ethnic isolation in this country is experiencing a growth and flowering, but when placed in the larger Christian context of this culture is still a minor player. We speak, for example, of the growth of 200 plus new parishes in the Antiochian Archdiocese in the past few decades which is admirable given the ethos of American Orthodoxy but miniscule in comparison to say, the Assemblies of God, who will probably put up 200 new parishes this year alone. Our will to evangelize and build is still in its infancy.

Second we have to understand that we still are not doing a substantial job of reaching the unchurched. So much of our “growth” is really a reshuffling of the deck as other Christians leave thier churches for ours. While that, from our point of view (and thiers) is a movement from something less to something more it hardly marks an actual growth in the Kingdom. We’re just swapping folks around and frankly there are Orthodox who have left the Church for other Christian communities as well. There are few, to my knowledge, models where hard core unchurched are being brought in from the streets into the communicant life of the Church.

And although we have taken great strides, for us, in relearning and remphasizing evangelism and growth in our parishes and clergy we are still a long ways from recovering the Orthodox vision of proclaiming the Gospel in word and deed as an integral part of what it means to be a normal Parish and parishoner. Imagine where our churches would be if half the energy spent on festivals was spent on evangelism?

Where should this lead?

Perhaps the hope should be that one day numbers will matter as they truly should, within the actual history and life of the parish and as a tool to help us direct the life and ministry of our churches. Not numbers for the raw impact and idea that a lot means things are going well, but numbers that tell us where we are strong, where we are not so strong, and where God still wants us to change and become what He desires us to be.

In the end, after all, its the “why” of the numbers, that middle place between worshipping them as indicators of success and ignoring them in the pretense of piety, that matters most of all.

An interesting article from First Things regarding hypocrisy.

A little history on the song of a million Bible camp fires.

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith. Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

The sun is shining this morning but they say that rain and snow are on the way. So I’ll take advantage of the moments to write a bit about the days past and those to come.

On the longest scale of things I remain, like Christianity, optimistic. The shining city of God with the beauty and purity of a bride remains within my sight and the political junkie riding the emotional roller coaster with every newscast has long ago slipped away into the night. I slept well on November 7th and last night as well.

I’m not naive or locked in some pious delusion. I read the papers and know it’s a troubled world. I’m tempted sometimes, like everyone else, to seek refuge, to hide away, to go to some far away place where the world can’t get at me but I know it’s no use. I feel bombarded sometimes and sometimes I even envy those who are already asleep in the Lord. But that never makes what is here and now less then what it is and somehow I and we have been providentially ordered to be in this time and place.

I know, too, that the world has always been troubled. It is our lot since the first broken day of exile from Eden and only the technology, and not the human propensities, have changed. The Romans would have used tanks if they had them and the Babylonians would’ve have had porno movies in hotels if they could. The biggest difference, I suppose, is that in our modern media age we are force fed a bigger portion of it all and find less and less of what is good and right and pure in the cultural hog wallow.

As the larger and superficial supports in this society that have propped our vision of the world up in at least some lip service sort of way are weakening and collapsing I wonder if God is asking us a simple but profound question in all of this. “Do you believe in me?”

Sometimes all the passing things in which we have placed our hope need to be taken away, or at least threatened, before we see what matters most. And in thier departure we see ourselves as we really are and whether what we claim to believe really matters or was all just fluff.

The ascetics knew this, those holy people of long ago who left the world to pursue God. And perhaps this time, this epoch of history, is a time of asceticism for the Church, a time when God is making for us the choice the desert fathers and mothers made for themselves, and bringing us into the wilderness so we, stripped of everything else, have only God and in realizing that come to understand that we have everything we need, aways did.

Just a thought from a sinner pondering things to vast for him to understand.

For the past day, and for many more to come we will hear pundits and pollsters, spin doctors and bureaucrats, politicians and columnists, experts and insiders, winners and losers, and a million more voices on every little piece of everything.

They don’t matter.

What is God saying in all of this?

That’s what matters.

Thoughts on hypocrisy…

In a few hours we here in the United States will know who we’re referring to when we pray for the “President of the Unted States, all civil authorities, and our Armed Forces everywhere…”

And pray we will even as St. Paul admonished his fellow believers to do for people as dark, pagan, and corrupt, as the Roman aristocracy. We do this because we only see moments but God sees the whole span of history and so we believe.

Only those who have forgotten that our national motto is “In God We Trust” will succumb to fear today.

I’m suspicious of the timing, of course, but the news of the possible involvement of Rev. Ted Haggard, pastor of a large evangelical church in Colorado and a leader in the National Association of Evangelicals, with a male prostitute has been front and center in the news.

The media love this stuff and a lot of readers/listeners/watchers do as well. If a prominent person seeking to speak out on moral issues falls (and there is no final word yet on whether or to what extent this may have happened) it allows people to justify themselves and avoid answering the questions posed by those speaking out about the moral decay of our culture. If every accusation provided to date is 100% true how would that affect the truth of the problems associated with the “do everyone you want” sexual mores of this society? Would it make the disease and death go away? Would the broken homes vanish? Would it mean that somehow the attitgude and actions which are making this all a reality are now okay? Or would it mean that one more person, one more family, and a whole congregation are added to the long and growing list of those broken by the sexual sickness of our times and, in effect, prove the point at a terrible cost?

Of course those of us who are serving in ministry are painfully aware of the nature of these times. We bathe in the same cultural waters as everyone else and wearing a collar is hardly a protection from the darkness. We are humans and we make mistakes, sometimes terrible ones. Our hearts are broken when we see one of us fall and we pray to God that it won’t happen to us and sometimes just hang on by our fingernails in the face of it all. We know that the standards in these things are at a different level for us and a plumber or business man accused of seeking out gay sex wouldn’t even merit a single line of newspaper copy while the mere innuendo of clergy scandal ends up above the fold on the front page. We know there are people who delight in exposing us and relish the idea of tripping us up. And its all complicated by the reality that deep inside, behind the faces we present on Sunday morning, are the common struggles of all Christians against the darts of the Evil One and the power of our own brokenness.

My prayers go out to Pastor Haggard, his family, and his parish, and doubly so if these accusations are in fact not a political stunt and have some merit. I hope yours do too because there will be suffering either way and perhaps a long road home if they are true. How we treat this man, this pastor, in the coming months will reveal the reality of who we are and the Gospel we proclaim. How we treat his accuser will as well.