Stephen decided to come to church with me yesterday, instead of attending our old church. If my parents were home, the kidlets would just go wherever they were going that week. But with them gone, I had to shuttle Hannah to a friend’s house so that they could bring her to church. I had intended to do the same for Stephen – all of their friends are at that church, and its where they’ve grown up. But instead, he asked if he could come with me.
I was born and raised a Heinz-57 Protestant and pastor’s daughter. I left my nondenominational church eight months ago to join the Orthodox Church. It’s a long and astoundingly simple story: God led me there. In the meantime, my dad retired from his position of nearly 25 years. He doesn’t have a new pastoring position lined up, so for the time being, my family is church floating. Dad has done a lot of guest speaking engagements, conferences, etc. while trying to build up some business on the side. This is a time of tremendous change for our family, and I won’t get into all the details here, but one of the net results is that the kids don’t have a church “home”, so to speak.
On the ride over, after we dropped Hannah off, I asked him why he wanted to come with me. I love the kid, but I know that the long service and huge chunks of Greek language can be a little much for a fifteen year old boy, especially when he’s not accustomed to doing it week after week. Just as importantly, I wanted to know why he didn’t want to go to our old church. He said, “[X-church] is demanding. Your church is calming.”
I’ll admit, that wasn’t quite the answer I expected. But it gave me a lot to mull over.
My first thought was, Well, Orthodox worship is pretty demanding. Liturgy literally means ‘the work of the people’. We stand for most of the hour and a half service, we sing, we cross ourselves, we chant responses. It is work, and you can expect to be pretty worn out by the end of it all. So in that sense, our worship is demanding.
But it’s a different kind of demanding. At our old church, like many evangelical churches, you’re expected to bring something to worship. An energy, an excitement, an emotion. There’s this sense that you need to give something to God (a tenuous theological position if ever there was one). In the Orthodox Church, we bring nothing but ourselves, and we give nothing but ourselves. Broken, imperfect people, who are desperate for grace. That’s why we sing, “Lord, have mercy” over and over. Not because we think that God will zap us out of our pews, but because we realize that we need God. It is mercy, forgiveness, and grace that characterize our worship, not working up feelings and energy. No wonder someone would think it demanding. If I’m relying on myself to make the worship experience ‘true’, then I will only be disappointed.
