What's in a name

I have just finished a redesign of the British Orthodox website. It's taken many tens of hours and still isn't complete but I think it presents a more up to date image and gives me more screen space for further developments.

I've found the website to be very important in helping enquirers get n touch with us, though as a Church we need to be doing a whole lot more to support people when they do make contacr. Believe me there is a lot of work going on in the background to get some new structures in place.

It took a while for this second post to get written. I was thinking this morning about adding a blog to the Church website and I started to create a new account called British Orthodox, then I realised that I had not ever given this blog a chance.

What's in a name?

British Orthodox or Western Orthodox?

Of course I am British Orthodox but I think that what I am interested in is a project which needs to be undertaken all across the West. So Western Orthodoxy is just as appropriate a name for a blog. I'd not want a US reader to feel that it had nothing to say to their situation, and I'd not want myself to think that I didn't have anything to learn from the US, Canadian, and wider European experience.

Over the last months I have become more convinced that the issue of Western Rite is secondary to that of Western Orthodoxy. So again The Western Orthodox Project is a suitable name. I can find lots of people publishing about the Western Rite but not so many with a desire to see a culturally sensitive Orthodoxy in the West.

A lot has happened and is happening. More about all of that tomorrow I hope.

I have a mission...

I am Orthodox. I am British, English even. Am I British Orthodox?

I am a member of the British Orthodox Church within the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate. Am I British Orthodox?

What does it mean? What would it look like to be part of an Orthodoxy which has been successfully inculturated into British culture? Would it look like what I am living and experiencing and helping to shape?

What sort of Orthodoxy could a working man enter into without a degree in Church History, and knowledge of a variety of Middle Eastern languages?

That is what I want to discover, and describe here in this blog.

I want to find an Orthodox way of being a Christian which is at home in Britain, and which a British person can feel at home with.

It needs to be said that I am not a natural Western Riter. I grew up in the Plymouth Brethren and although we had an unwritten liturgy we were deeply resistant to written prayers of any kind. I think that I was the first person to lead the congregation in the Lord's Prayer one Sunday. Even that prayer was suspect because it was written down.

So my Western Orthodox Project is not the same as the Western Rite Project, although I shall be looking at the variety of Western Rites.

I am also not averse to Eastern and Oriental Orthodox culture and traditions. In fact I am a devoted disciple of St Severus of Antioch and St Cyril of Alexandria, and other important Oriental Orthodox fathers, such as St Timothy the Great of Alexandria, and St Philoxenus. Presently I am very happy indeed worshipping each Sunday praying the Greek Liturgy of St James, in English of course, and the Coptic Orthodox Rites of Raising Morning and Evening Incense.

In one sense, I don't have any problem with what I am doing at the moment as part of the British Orthodox Church. After praying the same Liturgy for several hundred times I am completely comfortable with it and it is slowly, too slowly, becoming part of my subconscious, and I find passages coming to mind unasked.

But in another sense, the Church does not exist only for me, or those with whom I worship so happily. It exists for all those people, and in my context these are mostly British people, who know nothing about Orthodoxy, and find the way in which we present our Orthodox faith and worship to be daunting, overwhelming and almost impenetrable.

The aim of this project is not to be anti-anything, but to positively try to think about the content and substance of an authentic Western Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is maximalist. We do not take the view that there is only a small core of doctrines which are necessary to the Christian life, and the rest are all negotiable. But it is the case that not all doctrines, or all aspects of the Tradition, are as important at all times and in all contexts.

I am very interested in the evangelical Alpha Course. It seems to me that though this course is deficient in many respects, from an Orthodox point of view, nevertheless it presents its own version of the Christian faith in a simple, easily understood and easily appreciated manner. Where is the Orthodox equivalent? This is part of what I want to discover.

I want to think about evangelistic meetings in the British Orthodox context. I am aware of several non-Orthodox contexts where families attend liturgical services in some numbers and are either repelled by the austerity of a very traditional liturgical service, or are able to enter into a simpler service, still liturgical, but non-eucharistic.

How does that fit into Orthodoxy? Why do we use the Liturgy as a 'Gospel Service' when in fact in the great missionary age of the Church non-baptised were not allowed to even particpate in the liturgy of the faithful? Is there scope for a more open and evangelistic service based on the Office? Not as a substitute for the Liturgy in any sense, but as a means of drawing non-Orthodox into Orthodox liturgical worship without overwhelming them.

These are the sorts of things I want to think about.

More later....I shall probably come up with a list of things I want to think about.