{"id":9176,"date":"2013-11-30T10:38:29","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T18:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=9176"},"modified":"2013-12-04T11:51:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-04T19:51:00","slug":"metropolitan-methodios-our-mission-to-lead-others-to-jesus-christ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/metropolitan-methodios-our-mission-to-lead-others-to-jesus-christ\/","title":{"rendered":"Met. Methodios: Our Mission is to Lead Others to Jesus Christ"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Metropolitan
Metropolitan Methodios<\/figcaption><\/figure> by Terry Mattingly –
\nIt happens all the time: Church leaders stand at podiums and urge members of their flocks to go and share their faith, striving to win new converts. These speeches rarely make news, because they are not unusual. But something very unusual happened earlier this month in Brookline, Mass.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will surely agree that our mission \u2026 is to lead our brothers and sisters \u2014 both inside and outside the church \u2014 to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,\u201d said the featured speaker.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is becoming more and more difficult because many hesitate to share their faith, fearing they will be considered quaint and bothersome. This is especially the case in America\u2019s colleges and universities where atheism and indifference on matters of faith and religion reign supreme.\u201d<\/p>\n

This would be ordinary, if not tame language in a gathering held by Campus Crusade for Christ, the Southern Baptist Convention or any Bible Belt megachurch. But this speaker was Metropolitan Methodios, the white-haired leader of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston, addressing clergy and laity in a conference center dedicated to Greek culture. <\/p>\n

Let me be clear: Core teachings of our faith are not subject to popularity polls or political correctness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox believers in New England didn\u2019t stop with this call to evangelize people inside and outside his flock\u2019s sanctuaries. Instead, he directly challenged the lukewarm or even compromised version of the faith that may result from the media \u201cbombardment of materialistic and hedonistic philosophies\u201d that shape the public square.<\/p>\n

All too often, he said, the result is neither orthodox nor Orthodox.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople today fashion their personal beliefs by integrating Orthodox and non-Orthodox elements,\u201d he explained, in the speech text posted online\u00a0(.pdf)<\/a>. \u201cWithout realizing it, they become \u2018cafeteria Christians.\u2019 Just as they do not partake of every food item in a cafeteria line \u2014 but only those foods which they like \u2014 in the same way they feel they can pick and choose from what Orthodoxy teaches. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me be clear: Core teachings of our faith are not subject to popularity polls or political correctness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Metropolitan Methodios even, without mentioning a specific name, criticized a New England legislator who \u201cclaims to be an Orthodox Christian\u201d and who \u201cchampions Greek political causes\u201d because of his public advocacy of same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that, through the years, Eastern Orthodox bishops have released occasional public statements in which they affirmed basic tenets of their ancient faith. In some cases they have applied these doctrines to public issues in American life.<\/p>\n

For example, the Eastern Orthodox bishops of North and Central America recently released a document that expressed \u201cdeep concern over recent actions on the part of our respective governments and certain societal trends concerning the status of marriage in our countries, in particular the legalization of same-sex unions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, the symbolic leader of the world\u2019s 250 million Orthodox Christians (including me) recently addressed challenges to church teachings on marriage. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Istanbul stressed that the \u201cpartnering of the same sex is unknown and condemned\u201d in church teachings, along with the \u201ccontemporary invention of \u2018mutual cohabitation,\u2019 which is the result of sin and not the law of joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the first time I have heard a Greek Orthodox bishop speak publicly with this kind of clarity and certainty on some of the pressing moral issues of our day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

These kinds of documents are good, but only carry so much weight, noted Father Johannes Jacobse, head of the American Orthodox Institute in Naples, Fla. It is one thing for bishops to affirm two millennia of church teachings. It is something else for a bishop to openly challenge his people to life by them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time I have heard a Greek Orthodox bishop speak publicly with this kind of clarity and certainty on some of the pressing moral issues of our day,\u201d said Jacobse, who served as a Greek Orthodox priest from 1991 to 2009 and currently leads an Antiochian Orthodox parish. In this case, a veteran bishop \u201cjust stood up there and SAID IT. There seemed to be no sense of hesitation or fear that someone might think that he sounded like \u2014 heaven forbid \u2014 an evangelical or a moral conservative or something.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bottom line, concluded Metropolitan Methodios, is that clergy and lay leaders must recognize that they need to \u201cre-evangelize, to re-catechize, to re-teach the faith\u201d to their own people, especially those on the margins of church life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth,\u201d he stressed, \u201cis that many brethren sitting in the pews of our parishes are not knowledgeable of even the basic teachings of Orthodoxy.\u201d<\/p>\n

HT: Patheos<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Terry Mattingly – It happens all the time: Church leaders stand at podiums and urge members of their flocks to go and share their faith, striving to win new converts. These speeches rarely make news, because they are not unusual. But something very unusual happened earlier this month in Brookline, Mass. \u201cYou will surely … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[142,15,5,130,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftist-tyranny","category-moral-issues","category-orthodox-christianity","category-orthodox-church","category-religion-in-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}