Calling out Ambassadors of AOI: Advocates of Disingenuous Revolutionary Ideas....

The confusion and dishonor demonstrated by growing numbers of outspoken laymen and clergy who are attempting to master the web but are only clogging up the blogosphere with their opinions on the church in America and Mother Churches. These fringe thinkers are “nominal Christians” and/or “nominal clerics” which present a rudimentary problem for the Church in the United States, inflaming the passions and certainly their own egotism. They are schematics who hide behind the OCA which has been riddled with financial abuses and now attempts to assert itself on the world stage. They have come to expect the church with its various jurisdictions to behave like a club or social institution with a religious affiliation. They wish to make it a national institution.

As the body of Christ we must refrain from cultivating our passions in a competitive field of false piety and self righteous indignation. We must work within the existing framework of the church and not arrogantly entitle ourselves to mandate that the church yield to the times of modernity. As Orthodox Christian we are in the process of healing on the journey to purification. All feelings, beliefs and actions must yield and draw us closer to the only correct or orthodox direction the Mother Church. The current trend of persons associated with AOI for example only serve their own personal ambition and give rise only to their own passion to hear their own voice and fashion ecclesiastical positions to suit that aim.

In this context, the Church in the United States will not be transformed into some nationalistic enterprise or some new made American Folklore. To quote Saint Paul as Christians we should privately and publically be “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor., 10,5)

The Church relies on the pastoral care of believers regardless of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity age or spiritual maturity. We must therefore remain obedient and true to the Mother Churches and not seek to cast them down or put them to the side. They are not incidental to our healing they are necessary. Protestants have given themselves the luxury of picking and choosing what they prefer and they don’t even know what they believe or who they are.

As a caution to believers who understand themselves to be the big thinkers and progressive. When members stray from the perspective that they need to be healed and they need the church as it has been established by the Holy Fathers and Christ himself they are led to false beliefs about themselves first and then about the Faith. Such individuals find themselves on the road to agnosticism and atheism. In actuality they are secularists, plagued with one spiritual lacking or another. Their narcissism usually leads them to either indifference to the church or they “become so-called defenders of the rightness and advocates of disingenuous revolutionary ideas about church administrative independence, irrespective of whether they pretend to belong to the Church via one jurisdiction or another”.
According  Saint Gregory Palamas the church does not merely represent the body of Christ but is in actuality one with it. As members of the one body it is the place or origin of our communion of our deification because its members participate, in various degrees, to cleansing, illumination and veneration. It is the Body of Christ, because its Head, Christ, is closely tied with its members through the mysteries and the doctrines.