I cam across this blog entry: http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2013/07/i-believe-in-god-but-i-dont-go-to-church.html and I thought this would be excellent to re-blog here because it deals exactly with a lot of issues that many priests and clerics deal with on a daily basis. Archimandrite Paul Papadopoulos get's to the heart of the issue which is focused on egoism. Egoism fuels the drive to be above scripture, to be above the church and everything that it stands for. Of course being united to Christ is not the work of the individual but the work of the community.
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I believe in God but I don't go to church."
We often hear the above phrase
from acquaintances, friends and relatives, so our discussion will focus a
little more on spiritual matters.
The basic argument of people who
say that they believe in God yet do not go to church to participate in
the Mysteries of our Orthodox Church, is that they are bothered by
certain things, such as the luxuriousness of churches, obnoxious priests
and chanters, the language is ancient (they don't understand it), the
microphones, the lights, the candle offering (where they give money for a
candle), the time the Divine Liturgy is celebrated, etc.
The excuses are certainly a lot
when someone DOES NOT WANT to live according to how the Church says.
Unfortunately these people consider themselves outside the Church since
they do not accept the basic components of the life in Christ, which is
the participation of a Christian in the Mysteries of the Church. These
people are not Christians, at least not Orthodox, because while they
(supposedly) believe, they do not follow any word of Christ.
The issue of course is that most
baptized Christians do not know who Christ is or what the Church is,
and what Christ and the Church offer to people. Thus they do not attend
church, because essentially they do not know what they are missing, and
they do not know what the sacramental life can offer.
The Church, with all Her
Mysteries, transforms us, sanctifies us, and brings us into communion
with God. Our participation in the Mysteries of the Church is the key to
this personal resurrection of ours.
The Church does not exist merely
to take the position of medicine and exhaust all its capabilities, as
some wrongly treat it. The Church exists to lead people, the faithful,
to the Love, the Light and the Life in Christ through the Mysteries.
To say you believe in God is
easy, but to believe in God in an Orthodox manner and to do
corresponding works is difficult, though not impossible.
If a person really wants to know
Christ, they can do this through the sacramental life offered by the
Church. If you want to fool yourself you can claim to achieve this on
your own. However, I do not know anyone that has been sanctified outside
the Church. (The crazy thing is that some people consider as saints
people like Elder Paisios, Elder Porphyrios, etc., yet they do not
accept their lives.)
All this happens for just one
reason: Egoism. When each person believes themselves to be a better
interpreter of the Scriptures, and they believe the God-bearing Fathers
of the Church are beneath them, and they believe they are smarter, more
worthy and holier than the old "religionists" as they call them, and
when they believe they have no need to repent of any of their sins (!),
and they could be saved by themselves (whatever that means to them),
then this text will probably not trouble them at all, rather it has been
a long time since they fell into the abyss of self-love and delusion.
The biggest obstacle that
prevents contemporary man from reaching communion with God is precisely
this: they are trying to know Him the wrong way, using the wrong means,
outside the Church. They dismiss the mystery of love and remain
willfully grounded in a sterile faith which in a best case scenario
simply means "acknowledging the existence of God" and not trusting and
surrendering to Divine Providence.
