St. Alexis Parish Meeting April 29 Cancelled

As Father Deacon Alex announced after Typica this morning, the Parish Meeting April 29 is cancelled.

A thorough analysis of our finances is complete. Bids are in on the building. We know what it would cost to build now, and we are about $118,000 short of having the funds to build.

• We have $290,000 in the Building Fund.
• We have $50,000 in unfulfilled pledges to the Building Fund.
• We anticipate netting $100,000 from the current building (down from the $120,000 we had assumed, but the lower figure is based on a professional competitive market analysis). We can borrow against that until it sells.
• Banks would lend us $310,000 of permanent mortgage based on our history of giving, an assumption of a slight increase, and (perhaps to an extent) the value of the current plan if built.
• The design would cost $820,000 to $870,000 to build (and we budget $870,000 hoping for few contingencies against the $50,000 contingency allowance).

Work to close that gap is continuing – mostly trying to raise the extra funds rather than to cut “muscle” from the design. But no vote in favor would allow us to break ground in May, so a meeting April 29 is pointless.

John Zarras, Memory Eternal!

John Zarras, father of Pete Zarras (who accidentally introduced me to Orthodoxy and formerly attended St. Alexis), has reposed April 1 at age 72, of carcinoid/neuroendocrine cancer.

John was a retired air freight executive who, having served on the St. Vladimir Seminary Board for some years, entered seminary in retirement and then became a Deacon in the OCA.

If you wish to make a donation to the cure of this disease in his honor, click here.

Building Update

I was overdue for an update of the building project status. The page is updated as of 7:20 am, March 31.

St. Alexis Website updated on New Building

I have updated the church website to reflect the current status of the building project through Saturday, February 25.

Roger Bennett
Building Committee Chair

Why Fr. Andrew Loves True Religion

In response to “standard, monergistic, anti-ecclesial, sentimentalist Evangelical” silliness (the twist being the it was delivered in a YouTube rap/rant), Fr. Andrew Steven Damick posted an irenic point-by-point response.

It was is if he had proposed to abolish Social Security – the famous “third rail of politics.” 19,000+ people viewed the blog, and many of them intended to use the comboxes to shout down Fr. Andrew or convert him (back) to a preference for cotton candy when he’s glimpsed the King’s Great Banquet.  Mindful of the proverb about dogs returning to vomit, he declined.

I can’t help but view his Tuesday blog as a further response of sorts.

I spent roughly 30 years in some variant of Evangelicalism before I became equivocally Evangelical/Calvinist (it wasn’t clear to me that the two were really compatible because of Evangelicalism’s dominant bad eschatology, Dispensationalism, which Calvinists traditionally rejected, but I still felt kinship with Evangelicals).

20 years later still, I left that all – Evangelicalism and Calvinism – for Orthodoxy, still feeling that millions of Evangelicals just needed to hear Orthodoxy to heed it and embrace it. To me, Orthodoxy felt like the fulfillment of nearly 50 years of errant Christian life, and I assumed that others would feel the same.

Nearly 15 more years has left me doubting that. I’m afraid, for reasons I still haven’t deciphered, that most Evangelicals are content to wallow with the pigs and eat the pigs’ leftovers (conformity to, and slavish imitation of, it, mainstream culture, including the Evangelical rapper’s imitation, no doubt, of some mainstream rapper in style if not in substance).

Father Andrew is ever so much nicer and more thorough that I. I commend to you the video and his 2 (or is it 3?) responses. It may be important to read because this is the kind of spiritual nonsense which dominates North America’s faux-Christian culture, at least in the imaginations of the mainstream press. (I’ve never been “mainstream” Protestant, so I cannot say if it’s sounder, nor do I know whether, although ignored by the press, its totals exceed those of Evangelicals.)

If you are keenly interested, some guy blogging as “Tipsy Teetotaler,” with a writing style suspiciously like my own, but less inhibited, has also commented on this stuff. I’ll leave you to Google him if you like.

Memory Eternal!

Our sister in Christ Vera Rozdestvensky reposed Tuesday morning about 4 am.

Panikhidas will be served:

• Thursday the 19th, the third day, at 7 PM
• Wednesday the 25th, the 9th day, immediately following the usual akathist
• Sunday, February 25, the 40th day, after Litutgy.

Funeral services will be “back east.” Here’s today’s newspaper obituary.

Service Schedule Change, January 7, 2011

The Liturgy Saturday morning at 10 am on January 7 has been cancelled.

Compline will be served at 5:30 pm, instead of Vespers, and confession will follow.

Service Cancellation

The Liturgy for the Feast of St. Stephen, December 27 at 10 am, is cancelled.

Building Program Status

Today was the time for the congregation to see and discuss the plans. The Architect, KJG, came through with some beautiful renderings in time for the meeting. With Tecton Construction Management functioning as general contractor, we feel we’ve got a pretty good handle on the costs, even with no firm bids yet.

Roberts Rules of Order are designed to let the deliberate (adj.) majority have its will while allowing a minority to force the majority to deliberate (v.). We deliberated for nearly 3 hours, with me chairing. The consensus strongly seems to be that the design is wonderful, and we want to build it.

Now a few more financial hurdles!

It seems to me as I digest the lessons of the past few months, and of the meeting today, that banks don’t know quite what to make of a parish that has always risen to every financial challenge — but then has settled into a fairly low level of routine giving. For that matter, many members of the parish don’t know that to make of that, either.

If I’m right about that, our biggest financial challenge may be increasing general fund giving above our immediate needs if only to prove ourselves creditworthy.

Stay tuned. But also, if you wish, feed back your thoughts.

Roger Bennett

Three worthy Ancient Faith Radio Podcasts

1. Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, the erudite priest in Chicago who visited St. Alexis, noted something I hadn’t: Our Orthodox Divine Liturgy is a 4th Century liturgy.

That much came as no surprise. What did come as a surprise is the consequence of that: standing alone, the Divine Liturgy could lead one to the heresy of monphysitism, because it came before the two natures of Christ were affirmed (as always, in response to the threat of a heresy to the contrary) at the Council of Chalcedon.

Thus, it is not only beneficial, but arguably is necessary for spiritual health, for an Orthodox Christian to participate in Matins and Vespers, which are post-Chalcedonian, and to read the Gospels during the week rather than to rely on Divine Liturgies alone for spiritual formation.

(Teacher and Savior)

2. This was from Clark Carlton rather than Fr. PHR. Carlton happened to land on Chalcedon as well (Chalcedon marks a rift between what today are called “Eastern Orthodox” and what are called “Oriental Orthodox”).

What the speaker noted is that the rift was not so much a disagreement (how could the folks who would become “Oriental Orthodox” disagree with the modest, apophatic Orthodox view that the two natures of Christ are not to be thought of  as confused, changeable, divisible, or separable?) as a refusal of the future Eastern Orthodox to adopt a particular affirmative, cataphatic definition of the two natures rather than a more open-ended definition-by-exclusion.

(Theological Language, Ecumenical Dialogue, and Evangelism: Part III)

3. Clark Carlton again audaciously (I thought) sets out to explain the theology of St. Gregory Palamas “in twelve minutes or less.” I hope I’m not deluded, but I thought he did a wonderful job, which I would hesitantly but evocatively (I hope) summarize in SAT terms: essence/transcendence = energies/immanence. (I confess to having had some instruction in the basic affirmation in the West that God is both transcendent and immanent.)

In other words, the theology of St. Gregory is an attempt to maintain that God the Holy Trinity is both transcendant (in His essence) and immanent (in His energies); that the experience of God’s glory is a real experience of God(‘s energies); and that humans can actually become “partakers of the divine nature” (i.e., energies, not essence; see I Peter). A refusal to acknowledge that God’s energies are the immanent presence of God leaves us essentially alone in the universe, theorizing about God, but never experiencing Him. It effectively denies the reality of God’s immanence. It’s the result of doing theology in a classroom rather than in prayer.

I guess I’d been over-complexifying it.

(Palamism Explained in Twelve Minutes or Less)