I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

Martin Luther King, 1968

Introduction

One of the main hopes in my life has been Church unity and to see a united Local Church here one day. From the outset I could see that the forces of division were very strong. However, I still did not want unity at any price, unprincipled unity, but unity in Truth and in Love. Such unity is only possible once the Church administration is free of politics and respects and tolerates others. It is unity in Christ. Ignorance, narrowness and judgementalism are to be cast aside. However, the existence of a Local Church cannot be an end in itself.

We have the example of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).  It was a very brave move to establish the OCA, but over 50 years on we can see that it has been a failure. We have to learn from that. As in that example, all the impediments to establishing an authentic Local Church anywhere, in our case, in Western Europe, are ideological, top-down problems, which come from the elite. These impediments are all by definition divisive, not unitive, and therefore cannot build a Local Church. There are three impediments, namely:

Nationalism

When I was young, any young person who approached Greek, Serbian, Romanian or Bulgarian Orthodox churches and asked to join was told, at best, to ‘go away’. ‘You are not of our nationality’. The only Orthodox Church which would accept those not of its nationality was the Russian Church. Unfortunately, the Russians were divided into three anti-unity factions for purely political, reasons. They concerned differing attitudes towards the then Soviet regime in Russia. Nevertheless, we had to be patient. We had no other choice, despite the squabbles imposed top-down on pastors and people. For example, one of these Russian groups was based around a personality cult with indecent undertones. I refused the priesthood there and we left. We sought Christ, not sensualists. It collapsed, as soon as the object of the cult had died. However, we realised that our task, to help bring unity to these three groups, could only be successful once the cause of division, the Soviet regime, had fallen.

In North America, there seemed to be some hope in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), founded in 1970, which claimed to be the Church for all Orthodox in North America. However, it attracted relatively few of the Orthodox population, only about 10%. This was because it was unable to accept different nationalities, languages, calendars and customs, as it too fell into nationalism, namely, into American nationalism, and tried to impose ‘Americanism’ on all. In other words, it replaced Greek, Russian and other nationalisms with American nationalism and so could not become a Local Church for all. So some criticised it as ‘Coca-Cola Orthodoxy’, as they found much of it turned not towards the spiritual, but towards the lowest common denominator. Some there cruelly imposed the English language and made it obligatory, they had a Protestant spirit, an anti-monastic and modernistic ethos, and created spiritual emptiness, failing to provide the people with spiritual food.

Ecumenism

In the 70s and right up to the early 2000s many Orthodox bishops, some under political pressure, others because they were just superficial careerists and bureaucrats and had little faith, were engaged in a purely political movement called ecumenism. Now, the idea that Orthodox should be good neighbours with Roman Catholic and Protestants is of course accepted by all, except by the pathologically ill (see below). However, ecumenism, as such, is a political ideology, involving freemasonry (I was once promised the priesthood, if I agreed to become a freemason). Ecumenism involved compromises with the Faith, known as modernism, liberalism and, in general, ‘new calendarism’. This is completely unacceptable to anyone with an Orthodox consciousness and who is rooted in our Orthodoxy of the monasteries, pastors and people.

Typically of the ecumenists, many Greek bishops then declared that there was no difference between different Christians; as phyletists (racists) they sent English people away and instructed them to become Anglicans; in the 70s one Russian Metropolitan openly gave communion to Jesuits, whom he admired for their wealth and power (later he died in the arms of a Pope), giving rise to speculation that he had been a secret cardinal; another aristocratic ‘protopresbyter’ celebrated the liturgy in France with the filioque (!), so that ‘the Catholics will not be shocked’ and suggested ‘structures in waiting’, that is, there was no need for a Local Church, as we should wait to be absorbed into Roman Catholicism. true, the ecumenist danger has diminished over the last decade or so, but only to be replaced by yet the latest deformation, described below.

Pathology

The third and no less divisive ideology which impedes the development of a Local Church is neither nationalist, nor ecumenist, but pathological. This stems from immigrant inferiority complexes or else from the insecurity complexes of neophytes. The first complexes come from the second and third generations of immigrants who suffer from insecurity and want to make out that they have some exclusive ideological truth, which condemns all others who do not confess it. This is highly divisive and will never lead to the formation of a Local Church, which requires not intolerance and, even less, fanaticism, but openness to all. Such people are concerned only with exclusivism, to the point of the esoteric. The second set of complexes come from a pathological and unChristian need to condemn those who come from the same original background as the neophyte.

I remember a comment about one Dutch convert to Orthodoxy who came from a strong Roman Catholic family: ‘I am not sure if he is Orthodox, but he certainly is anti-Roman Catholic’. This complex illustrates that it is pathological and can reach proportions of hatred and jealousy which reach psychiatric depths. Such people never belong to the Orthodox Church, but always to sects and are capable of making captive parts of the Orthodox Church into schismatic sects and cults. This can be seen most obviously among old calendarists, but not only. Groups which have lost their ethnic base, like ROCOR and Antioch, and have to recruit from unstable converts, can be prone to such psychopathological fanaticism and exclusivism. Fortunately, such groups are very small and do not impede the majority, who are concerned with the millions of mass Orthodoxy.

Conclusion

What is the situation today? The pathological attract the internet generation of incels and other lonely and often unstable individuals, and not families. There is clearly a psychological disease here. This trend will not continue, for only families are the continuity of the Church down the generations. As for ecumenism, it died after the fall of Communist persecution and nobody talks about it today, though modernism and liberalism are still alive, especially among the old generation. As regards nationalism, the situation has changed.

Unlike fifty years ago, today, ironically, it is the Russian Church which has turned to nationalism and for now is in schism, largely turning its back on Non-Russians and on a Local Church. The problem is that pastors have been replaced by politicians and monks by managers. Now others, especially the Greek and Romanian Churches, which are in any case far larger than the Russian in the Diaspora, are generally turning away from nationalism and towards local people. Here there is at last hope for the future Local Church of Western Europe.