Orthodox Biz Blog

My parish is in the Diocese of the South, and does not have a bishop at present. When we do have a bishop, that bishop covers an area the size of Western Europe with over 70 different parishes. The fact is that a bishop presiding over the South could spend every Sunday away from home, and still not be able to visit all of his parishes in a given year.

Now, of course, the situation is worse. There is no bishop in Dallas, and the Metropolitan is trying to run the whole OCA and deal directly with 70 plus parishes strung out from Texas to Florida and as far north as Virginia. To say this is a bad situation is to put it mildly.

So, in the best of times we have church governance centered around a man we hardly see. At this point, our church governance is centered around a man most of us will never see.

Our bishop is supposed to be the head of our Eucharistic assembly. He is supposed to be a teacher and spiritual physician. The bishop is not supposed to be someone who just shows up periodically and then disappears for another 18 months.

This fact was forcibly brought home to me last year when I was talking to a young woman in her second year of being Orthodox. She asked me about Archbishop Dmitri. I had the honor of knowing him personally, because I had spent time in Dallas attending his cathedral while on a professional services contract. (I'm a Florida native.) I described him in glowing terms as a wonderful teacher.

"So what," she responded bitterly, "When none of us will ever attend any of his classes?"

We almost lost her to the faith. She is doing much better now after weathering a severe personal crisis, but had she fallen away, her bishop would never have noticed. She would have just been a statistic on some report that landed on someone's desk concerning membership trends in our parish.

This is where we are, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. The men who are leading the faithful don't really know who we are, as the Orthodox Church in the United States is organized around a model of remote leadership. The bishop is not integrated into the lives of his parishes. Instead, he is an outsider that appears to know very little about what is happening in most of the parishes operating under his authority.

The bishops are not a presence in the lives of the faithful - they are an absence. This is the not the model of church governance which converted the Roman Empire. Bishops are supposed to be local. As laity, we are supposed to have a relationship with our bishops. We don't, and that fact is retarding the growth of the Orthodox Church in North America.

This excerpt from the History of the Catholic Church makes the local nature of the episcopate in the early Church very clear, "During the first three centuries, the entire religious life of the diocese centered around the person of the bishop. The priests and deacons were his auxiliaries but they worked under the immediate direction of the bishop."

Yes, I know. To assist the Metropolitan, in the South, we now have a chancellor in Dallas, and of course, each parish is part of a deanery with a Dean helping oversee them. This helps somewhat to keep order. But the fact is that chancellors and deans are priests, not bishops. Their authority and scope of action will always be limited. They aren't bishops. The people will never treat them with the reverence and deference that we are taught, by holy tradition, are to be extended to bishops.

A small story from the life of St. John Chrysostom illustrates this quite well. Once, while St. John Chrysostom was still a Presbyter, at a gathering of the Faithful he did not see Flavian, the Bishop of Antioch. The bishop was ill, and this fact caused the Saint to lament, saying tearfully, "When I look upon that Throne, deserted and bereft of our teacher, ...I weep; I weep, because I do not see our Father with us!"

How would this Saint of our Church respond to the situation today in which our thrones are always empty? I have been Orthodox 10 years. I have received communion from the hands of my bishop in my home parish five times. A number which is much higher than normal, owing to the importance of my home parish in the Diocese of the South.

St. Ignatius said in his letters, "Let no one do any of the things which concern the Church without the bishop... Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."

How would St. Ignatius react to the situation we find ourselves in now? Far from doing nothing without the bishop, today we do everything (practically) without our bishop.

The office of the bishop is not optional. It is not a nice-to-have artifact of a by-gone era. It is essential to the Church. The Orthodox faithful want a personal connection to their bishops. We want to attend Bible study with them. We want them to teach us. We want them to preach to us. We want them to bless us, and give us the medicine of immortality - the Eucharist.

Above all, we want them to know who we are. We want them to understand us, to know our parishes, to make good, solid, informed decisions based on what is happening in our various communities.

The problem is not the office of the bishop, the problem is the huge gulf between what the office should be, and what it has become. This gulf has to be closed. The office of the bishop must once again become local to as much an extent as possible.

The only way to do that is to have more bishops. Combining the jurisdictions would help, as this would lead to a more rational allocation of parishes. Ordaining married men to the episcopate would also help. I don't have stats for the other jurisdictions, but in the Greek Archdiocese 91% of active Greek Orthodox priests in the United States are married. That means that, at most, 7% of serving Greek Orthodox priests are eligible to be bishops. The OCA is probably not much different in terms of numbers.

That is an impossibly small pool of candidates. Only through the mercy of God have we been able to find the few good men we have now. With that kind of pool to draw from, it will be well nigh impossible to expand the episcopal ranks sufficiently to actually allow bishops to function in a local fashion.

But can married men be bishops? They have been in the past. The complete prohibition of married Bishops dates from 692 AD. In fact, in 1990 the Clergy-Laity Congress of the Greek Archdiocese voted to recommend the elevation of married priests to the episcopate. Here was the reaction of one of the OCA's prominent Theologians at the time:

Orthodox theologians agree that the restriction on married bishops is a matter of church discipline rather than doctrine and therefore could be changed. But changing such a practice would require a consensus among all the self-governing Orthodox churches, said the Rev. John Meyendorf of the one-million member Orthodox Church in America. Father Meyendorf teaches at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, N.Y.

Is this a good idea? I don't know for sure. The office of bishop is quite a busy one, but if exercised locally, then a family man could fulfill the role. If married men can run countries, multi-billion dollar corporations, and whole armies - I certainly can't see why a married man couldn't oversee a few parishes.

While I don't know whether having married bishops is a good solution or not, what I do know is that our current organizational structure is absymal. We have essentially taken a local office and turned into the worst kind of fly-in management. Then we wonder why Orthodoxy, despite its doctrinal perfection, is not making more in-roads into the American mainstream.

To me, it doesn't appear that anyone is taking this situation seriously. I know there are severe challenges in the OCA and all other jurisdictions. But this one needs to be added to the list. The office of bishop was never meant to be exercised remotely as a matter of course. We certainly can continue to do this, but don't be surprised when we find ourselves getting the same results we have been getting for the past few decades. We will grow, the Gospel is too compelling not to take root. But that growth will be slower and more difficult than if we just followed our own historical model of having as many local bishops as possible.