HOW EACH OF US CAN AND OUGHT TO SERVE THE CHURCH, 2

And so two contradictory laws of life stand against one another, two kingdoms: the kingdom of the meek and the kingdom of the powerful. The kingdom of the meek is forced to wage war against the kingdom of power while located in the midst of it and surrounded on all sides by the kingdom of power and force.

The struggle continues. It is difficult for the Church. It is not surprising that the human powers of the Church weaken towards the end of the struggle. But the end has been written beforehand in heaven: victory is on the side of the kingdom of the meek. And should it not turn out this way by the laws of logic? For the Church has been standing against the kingdom of the world for two millennia now. If meekness were not power, then how could she have survived for even the shortest time in the struggle? Still, there come moments in the history of the Church when Her powers, exposed to popular view, weaken in the struggle. Why? Is this because the meek Christian weapons turn out to be useless or insufficient? No! This happens when, under the influence of discouragement and weakness of faith, those who serve the Church forget their true armament and adopt a foreign kind. The evil world urges its own weapons on them: worldly power, force, deceit. If those who serve the Church yield to the enticement, they weaken and bring Her internal sufferings as well. History gives us sufficient examples of this sort.

The world creeps into the Church by an even simpler method: by human passions, self-love, and ambition, love for the first place, insistence on one’s own will. The world of the proud creeps in with the wish to submit the Church to one’s own plans, to make her an instrument that is political, national, even partisan. It creeps in through indulging our weaknesses of the flesh, through replacing authentic virtues with seeming ones; in a word, through the help of those powerful, poisonous means which are called the spirit of flattery (or deceit).

By nature the Church is meek and it is easy to insult Her. If we attentively read the history of the Church, we can see how many have insulted Her from within, entering into Her very heart and thus all the more painfully wounding Her. But it is not enough to say that there have been offenders: it is more grievous that so-called academic history attributes the actions of those offenders to the Church and blames and blasphemes Her for these actions.

We should all remember this when our thoughts are directed to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Someone may think: this is a peculiar little handful of Orthodox scattered over the far ends of the earth. What kind of social force do we represent? If the numerically, materially, and morally powerful branches of historical Christianity are withstanding the powers of this world with difficulty, then what are we to think of our Church? In answer to such a thought, we must remember that the power of the Church is not in numbers. Rather that in order to preserve inner, spiritual strength one should stand apart, and such is the situation of the Russian Church Abroad. Thus, if we are children of the Russian Church Abroad, if we are devoted to Her, if we love Her and wish to see Her internally mighty and glorious, then how can each of us serve Her?

Of course, the fullest form of serving the Church is for a person to give himself to Her completely for his entire life as a pastor or in another life of service, close to the pastorate. But we must not feel that only the ordained servants of the Church are called to be Her soldiers while the
others are only observers - some sympathetic, others critical. Each of us has a place in the ranks of the soldiers of the Church, and the forms of participation in service to the Church are varied. The Apostle writes: Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called (I Cor. 7:20). Translating this quotation into contemporary concepts, we can say that there does not exist a constructive, honest profession and a social position where a good person could not at one time or another contribute his good mite to the work of the Church. Look at how the fruits of pagan higher education were used to great advantage by the great hierarchs Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom. What a precious heritage they gave to the Church!