To be honest, don't we all have more important things to do than argue about Protestants vs. Orthodox? It is useless, neither will change their mind anyways. And anbapola, you are correct, even if a Protestant wants to ask questions and question Orthodoxy he might at first take a striking role but St. Paul himself said "Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21 but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22 reject every kind of evil." Attacking him and calling him a heretic and asking him to leave the forum is wrong. If we can establish respect, we can move on. Calling people heretics, anathema, pagans and so on is counter productive and insulting. Also not everyone will convert to Coptic Orthodoxy and by definition they are, according to some people on this forum, heretics. It is not practical to label everyone as heretics and as a result treat them with hostility; we will never be able to coexist with others. Our Church prides itself in rationale, humility and peace; we have lived with Muslims, many of whom wish to annihilate us yet although they are not close to our religion and want to kill us, we have treated them with respect and love as Christ instructed us. I don't believe much of what I read here to be the Christian way. We are now partaking in the Great Lent; let us focus on improving ourselves and helping those around us. There are homeless, hungry and needy people (and children) all over the world and we're worrying about which song is Orthodox enough to be sung in Sunday school? Really?! So I agree with a lot of what Unworthy1 said, we are focusing too much at this point on traditions and customs and forgetting about Jesus' true message i.e. the bigger picture. The Samaritan man in Jesus' parable was neither a priest nor even a Jew yet he was the one who delivered God's message better than those who knew the scripture and the traditions. Jesus himself when he came down to Earth didn't take a book and start writing down which instruments we should or should not use, which tunes are appropriate, etc. He went around healing the sick and feeding the poor. Let us not forget God does not need our praise, it is us who need to praise him. Ultimately, these hymns and songs are not for him, they're to help us but if we just sing them, go to Liturgy, and listen to a few sermons and the waste the rest of our time arguing over who has the better traditions and try to keep guitars out of our Church, I'm afraid we'll turn into the Pharisees Jesus warned us so much against. -God bless
Does anyone read? I said if your here to fight, leave, if your here for inquiry then that is fine! I never called anyone a heretic, I have plainly stated several times over that the BELIEF is heretical, I am NOT JUDGING the person. We are not arguing over who is better than who, or who has better traditions. Simply what the truth is. But every time I post something, people read what they want apparently and continually say I am attacking people. It is utter madness, now I see why it took all those plagues for the Pharaohs to "get it". (that was a a joke by the way)
[quote author=Ioannes link=topic=10823.msg131904#msg131904 date=1299158187] Unworthy1 what you are advocating is heresy, and your misuse of scripture tells me that your mind has already been perverted by protestantism.
Unworthy1 is from L.A., that makes a lot of sense, the Coptic churches out there are pretty much protestant.
That was in response to me alone. You have said basically the same thing to everyone that questions your authority on Orthodoxy. So I do not see how you can repeatedly say you are attacking the BELIEF and not the PERSON. Calling someone a heretic is an attack. Implying that a faithful orthodox believer like myself is protestant is unfounded. To say that you are misunderstanding something is more appropriate. I urge you to correct with love.
If you have read my post to you as one with a tone of animosity, I regret the way I worded it. As I have said before, I admire your desire to keep the church pure. I have even responded to your request for people to email you about protestant influence in the church. My concern is that you are taking things to an extreme and alienating those within the church and those who might want to join. Thus, I return to my previous point of knowing how to expand the church but retain our faith and identity. What that entails, I do not know. I pray Christ guides us to what that is.
And regarding the churches in Los Angeles, you are referring to bible studies. The prayer services, liturgy, and all our sacraments are intact as they are in all other churches. The churches are not protestant, but the members of them can choose to go to a bible study that leans in that direction. So I do not know what "facts" you are referring to that makes the churches protestant. What you are referring to are bible studies that are loosely associated with the church, and not really condoned by most priests. But what can they do? Tell them they can't meet? That will only give them more reason to rebel and create division.
a) How can we help answer protestants and their attacks on our Church?
I suggested a YouTube Video Channel that could be used as a Q&A section to answer them, but I think Fr. Peter felt that this was useless, and he prefers a Facebook group instead.
I think literature is important, but what I like about YouTube is that it has a wider audience and its free.
What other suggestions are there??
Even if Protestants dont read / view what we write, at least we can use these videos to clarify to Orthodox Christians their faith before they embark on a deluded journey in the Protestant Churches.
b) Tradition in the Coptic Orthodox Church.
Of course nearly everything in the Coptic Orthodox Church is Spiritual Tradition. The priest doesn't do anything out of having a novel idea. Its something that either stems from the Church fathers, or from the OT.
Perhaps it would be a nice idea if a new book on the liturgy was written that had the liturgy of Saint Basil the Great in there (as we use), but moreover if it had explanations on what is happening in the Liturgy and why? Surely this would bring alive the liturgy to those who felt that what they were witnessing was just rituals/traditions for the sake of tradition???
Please don't attack my ideas.. these are just ideas anyway. If you have anything better to offer, please suggest it. That includes Fr. Peter.
But then comes the question of non-spiritual traditions that we have in our Church. I.e. stuff we do that has no spiritual meaning but is more "cultural".
What IS it??
What do people identify as Cultural Tradition in our Church? And perhaps they have this confused in their heads between spiritual and cultural tradition? Is there anything that we do that is cultural????
Personally, I see no point in repeating the Bible reading in English/Arabic after its been read in Coptic. Its silly. Just read it in Arabic or English.
Pi-nishty should be sung on weekday liturgies when the Church is EMPTY, not on major feast days where the Church is packed with people who hardly come to Church anyway. That's just cruel.
Does anyone have ANYTHING to say about that?? Are you someone that likes you sing Pinishti as a deacon during a major feast???? If so, I'd like to know who you are and where you live and what makes you so sadistic??
Do you have ANY idea how cruel that is??
I really cannot think of ANYTHING else haphazard that we do in our Church or non spiritual... I really can't. But, again, this could be a question of "perception" - what others perceive to be cultural, when in fact it is entirely spiritual in its nature.
Its absolutely stupid for the Church, and the clergy, NOT to educate the youth on all these. When there's a technology like YouTube available where you can create videos to explain what goes on in the mass, and WHY the priest does what he does, why not use it? I find it ASTONISHING, to say the least, how priests can be so short sighted in this.
If someone is IGNORANT about their faith, you need to educate them. But to come here and complain that they are going to the protestant Churches and that this is "so wrong" and yet you do NOTHING useful to educate them on what the benefits are of Orthodoxy and to iron out any misconceptions they have about spiritual traditions in our Church, is annoying.
We learnt about ALL the spiritual traditions in our Church and their meanings THROUGH VIDEO lectures!!!!
(Corrected for mistakes - sorry, my preview button never works)
Perhaps it would be a nice idea if a new book on the liturgy was written that had the liturgy of Saint Basil the Great in there (as we use), but moreover if it had explanations on what is happening in the Liturgy and why? Surely this would bring alive the liturgy to those who felt that what they were witnessing was just rituals/traditions for the sake of tradition???
CYC also has a show that goes through parts of the liturgy and explains them.
[hr] I have a good idea. Whenever someone says something we think of as Protestant or wrong, so as not to lose our temper we should try to limit our posts as much as we can to quoting Scripture, the Church Fathers or HH's Comparative Theology books. That way we can maintain peace with one another and yet still explain things. I'm almost sure that anyone here who states something incorrect does so out of ignorance and not out of malice. There is no reason to tell anyone to leave (we're not admins), as we are all brothers and sisters. If Fr. Peter deems that someone should leave, he will obviously let them know, and I don't doubt that his judgement will be a lot better than ours.
Please my brothers and sisters, having the correct belief does zero good if we have no love. We must focus on our relationship with God who is the focus of our lives. Orthodoxy is not just a bunch of correct dogmas collected together by some ancient bishops who did a lot of reading and thinking. It is a life, and it is our path. The great Theologians had such a knowledge of God that they knew from experience that what they said of him was true. Real Theology is where it passes from being mere words, and something that we experience in our relationship with God. This is the reason why the Church Fathers would not heresies; because this affected the congregations relationship with our Lord and our Savior. If however our relationship with God is weak, what good does knowing about God do us. If indeed our arrival to paradise is like a wedding with Him, then surely we must begin to know him here on this Earth. Please my brothers let us focus on our spiritual lives during this blessed time, because ultimately if we solely know about God we have not fulfilled what true Orthodoxy is.
Please pray for me and that I may not be a hypocrite in instructing things that I fail to do.
[quote author=Zoxsasi link=topic=10823.msg131980#msg131980 date=1299226419] Does anyone have ANYTHING to say about that?? Are you someone that likes you sing Pinishti as a deacon during a major feast???? If so, I'd like to know who you are and where you live and what makes you so sadistic?? I do. My name is Mina Girgis, i am from NJ, Saint Mark's Church. good luck finding me.....
Do you have ANY idea how cruel that is??
2 questions: First: Why does it always have to be ONLY about YOU and never consider others?! Second: why do we always have to be SELFISH and get our way in everything (Church or outside)? hmmmm, i said 2 qs, sorry, i lied. One more: why do we never consider what happens in Church despite what we want or desire?!
If someone is IGNORANT about their faith, you need to educate them. But to come here and complain that they are going to the protestant Churches and that this is "so wrong" and yet you do NOTHING useful to educate them on what the benefits are of Orthodoxy and to iron out any misconceptions they have about spiritual traditions in our Church, is annoying.
yes we do...we should teach them about the faith and the Church and everything that is done in it...... ::)
With regard to the use of Coptic and objections to it, the reoccurring theme I see in the dissatisfaction with it is that nobody understands it. This is logical complaint to whatever extent it is true, but cannot be taken as the last word, as though there is nothing we can do about it so we might as well throw out the Coptic language. I am obviously not a Copt and so maybe my opinion is worth less than someone who is actually in the Church or descendant from Egyptian stock, but I do know that as a believer and a linguist, this is most definitely the most surmountable kind of objection. Really, it's not at all impossible to fix, or at least improve. There are resources (including many teaching resources) to learn Coptic, especially to the level needed to participate fully in the liturgy (which is somewhat less than is necessary to speak it fluently). We are not talking about its revival as a spoken language, which is another issue, but enough to sing the hymns that were written in it or translated into it and know exactly what you are saying.
I think a more proactive attitude regarding the promotion of Coptic as one of the treasures of the Church should be fostered, if there is not such an effort underway already. It is a matter of sociolinguistic fact that one of the major factors that leads to language death in the first place is the attitude of its speakers, particularly the younger generation. In many, many cases, the child decides, either consciously or unconsciously, that their native language is not useful, or is shameful or in some other way "bad" (in comparison to the dominant language/dialect), and they stop using it for fear of being marked as provincial, or maybe even out of fear of punishment (this is how boarding schools destroyed countless Native American languages within a few decades). In the case of Coptic, where the situation is in some ways much more dire than that of many other languages, there is a lot of work to be done in this area.
I, for one, won't accept "but we don't understand it". You (the general "you", not anyone here) are serious about fasting, prayer, and everything else that comes with being Coptic Orthodox. The language of the liturgy and its hymns, whether it is English, Coptic, Arabic, Xhosa, or whatever, is also something to approach seriously.
It appears that we are in protestant bashing mode during lent times. Last year Abouna Peter admonished us to keep the lent days holy. Enough has been said on this topic and I guess the same advise is valid for this year too.
[quote author=minatasgeel link=topic=10823.msg132058#msg132058 date=1299282840] [quote author=Zoxsasi link=topic=10823.msg131980#msg131980 date=1299226419] Does anyone have ANYTHING to say about that?? Are you someone that likes you sing Pinishti as a deacon during a major feast???? If so, I'd like to know who you are and where you live and what makes you so sadistic?? I do. My name is Mina Girgis, i am from NJ, Saint Mark's Church. good luck finding me.....
Do you have ANY idea how cruel that is??
2 questions: First: Why does it always have to be ONLY about YOU and never consider others?! Second: why do we always have to be SELFISH and get our way in everything (Church or outside)? hmmmm, i said 2 qs, sorry, i lied. One more: why do we never consider what happens in Church despite what we want or desire?!
If someone is IGNORANT about their faith, you need to educate them. But to come here and complain that they are going to the protestant Churches and that this is "so wrong" and yet you do NOTHING useful to educate them on what the benefits are of Orthodoxy and to iron out any misconceptions they have about spiritual traditions in our Church, is annoying.
yes we do...we should teach them about the faith and the Church and everything that is done in it...... ::)
I think its a cruel thing to do on major feasts where the liturgy is already 3 hours long, and you've already done the magma3a il qidisseen before... why not do it on a weekday?? When the Church is empty?
Comments
If we can establish respect, we can move on. Calling people heretics, anathema, pagans and so on is counter productive and insulting. Also not everyone will convert to Coptic Orthodoxy and by definition they are, according to some people on this forum, heretics. It is not practical to label everyone as heretics and as a result treat them with hostility; we will never be able to coexist with others. Our Church prides itself in rationale, humility and peace; we have lived with Muslims, many of whom wish to annihilate us yet although they are not close to our religion and want to kill us, we have treated them with respect and love as Christ instructed us.
I don't believe much of what I read here to be the Christian way. We are now partaking in the Great Lent; let us focus on improving ourselves and helping those around us. There are homeless, hungry and needy people (and children) all over the world and we're worrying about which song is Orthodox enough to be sung in Sunday school? Really?!
So I agree with a lot of what Unworthy1 said, we are focusing too much at this point on traditions and customs and forgetting about Jesus' true message i.e. the bigger picture. The Samaritan man in Jesus' parable was neither a priest nor even a Jew yet he was the one who delivered God's message better than those who knew the scripture and the traditions. Jesus himself when he came down to Earth didn't take a book and start writing down which instruments we should or should not use, which tunes are appropriate, etc. He went around healing the sick and feeding the poor. Let us not forget God does not need our praise, it is us who need to praise him. Ultimately, these hymns and songs are not for him, they're to help us but if we just sing them, go to Liturgy, and listen to a few sermons and the waste the rest of our time arguing over who has the better traditions and try to keep guitars out of our Church, I'm afraid we'll turn into the Pharisees Jesus warned us so much against.
-God bless
Unworthy1 what you are advocating is heresy, and your misuse of scripture tells me that your mind has already been perverted by protestantism.
Unworthy1 is from L.A., that makes a lot of sense, the Coptic churches out there are pretty much protestant.
That was in response to me alone. You have said basically the same thing to everyone that questions your authority on Orthodoxy. So I do not see how you can repeatedly say you are attacking the BELIEF and not the PERSON. Calling someone a heretic is an attack. Implying that a faithful orthodox believer like myself is protestant is unfounded. To say that you are misunderstanding something is more appropriate. I urge you to correct with love.
If you have read my post to you as one with a tone of animosity, I regret the way I worded it. As I have said before, I admire your desire to keep the church pure. I have even responded to your request for people to email you about protestant influence in the church. My concern is that you are taking things to an extreme and alienating those within the church and those who might want to join. Thus, I return to my previous point of knowing how to expand the church but retain our faith and identity. What that entails, I do not know. I pray Christ guides us to what that is.
And regarding the churches in Los Angeles, you are referring to bible studies. The prayer services, liturgy, and all our sacraments are intact as they are in all other churches. The churches are not protestant, but the members of them can choose to go to a bible study that leans in that direction. So I do not know what "facts" you are referring to that makes the churches protestant. What you are referring to are bible studies that are loosely associated with the church, and not really condoned by most priests. But what can they do? Tell them they can't meet? That will only give them more reason to rebel and create division.
Let's just focus on the main issues:
a) How can we help answer protestants and their attacks on our Church?
I suggested a YouTube Video Channel that could be used as a Q&A section to answer them, but I think Fr. Peter felt that this was useless, and he prefers a Facebook group instead.
I think literature is important, but what I like about YouTube is that it has a wider audience and its free.
What other suggestions are there??
Even if Protestants dont read / view what we write, at least we can use these videos to clarify to Orthodox Christians their faith before they embark on a deluded journey in the Protestant Churches.
b) Tradition in the Coptic Orthodox Church.
Of course nearly everything in the Coptic Orthodox Church is Spiritual Tradition. The priest doesn't do anything out of having a novel idea. Its something that either stems from the Church fathers, or from the OT.
Perhaps it would be a nice idea if a new book on the liturgy was written that had the liturgy of Saint Basil the Great in there (as we use), but moreover if it had explanations on what is happening in the Liturgy and why? Surely this would bring alive the liturgy to those who felt that what they were witnessing was just rituals/traditions for the sake of tradition???
Please don't attack my ideas.. these are just ideas anyway. If you have anything better to offer, please suggest it. That includes Fr. Peter.
But then comes the question of non-spiritual traditions that we have in our Church. I.e. stuff we do that has no spiritual meaning but is more "cultural".
What IS it??
What do people identify as Cultural Tradition in our Church? And perhaps they have this confused in their heads between spiritual and cultural tradition? Is there anything that we do that is cultural????
Personally, I see no point in repeating the Bible reading in English/Arabic after its been read in Coptic. Its silly. Just read it in Arabic or English.
Pi-nishty should be sung on weekday liturgies when the Church is EMPTY, not on major feast days where the Church is packed with people who hardly come to Church anyway. That's just cruel.
Does anyone have ANYTHING to say about that?? Are you someone that likes you sing Pinishti as a deacon during a major feast???? If so, I'd like to know who you are and where you live and what makes you so sadistic??
Do you have ANY idea how cruel that is??
I really cannot think of ANYTHING else haphazard that we do in our Church or non spiritual... I really can't. But, again, this could be a question of "perception" - what others perceive to be cultural, when in fact it is entirely spiritual in its nature.
Its absolutely stupid for the Church, and the clergy, NOT to educate the youth on all these. When there's a technology like YouTube available where you can create videos to explain what goes on in the mass, and WHY the priest does what he does, why not use it? I find it ASTONISHING, to say the least, how priests can be so short sighted in this.
If someone is IGNORANT about their faith, you need to educate them. But to come here and complain that they are going to the protestant Churches and that this is "so wrong" and yet you do NOTHING useful to educate them on what the benefits are of Orthodoxy and to iron out any misconceptions they have about spiritual traditions in our Church, is annoying.
We learnt about ALL the spiritual traditions in our Church and their meanings THROUGH VIDEO lectures!!!!
(Corrected for mistakes - sorry, my preview button never works)
How to Benefit from the Holy Liturgy
The Spirituality of the Rites of the Holy Liturgy in the Coptic Orthodox Church
St. Basil Liturgy Reference Book
CYC also has a show that goes through parts of the liturgy and explains them.
[hr]
I have a good idea. Whenever someone says something we think of as Protestant or wrong, so as not to lose our temper we should try to limit our posts as much as we can to quoting Scripture, the Church Fathers or HH's Comparative Theology books. That way we can maintain peace with one another and yet still explain things. I'm almost sure that anyone here who states something incorrect does so out of ignorance and not out of malice. There is no reason to tell anyone to leave (we're not admins), as we are all brothers and sisters. If Fr. Peter deems that someone should leave, he will obviously let them know, and I don't doubt that his judgement will be a lot better than ours.
Please my brothers and sisters, having the correct belief does zero good if we have no love. We must focus on our relationship with God who is the focus of our lives. Orthodoxy is not just a bunch of correct dogmas collected together by some ancient bishops who did a lot of reading and thinking. It is a life, and it is our path. The great Theologians had such a knowledge of God that they knew from experience that what they said of him was true. Real Theology is where it passes from being mere words, and something that we experience in our relationship with God. This is the reason why the Church Fathers would not heresies; because this affected the congregations relationship with our Lord and our Savior. If however our relationship with God is weak, what good does knowing about God do us. If indeed our arrival to paradise is like a wedding with Him, then surely we must begin to know him here on this Earth. Please my brothers let us focus on our spiritual lives during this blessed time, because ultimately if we solely know about God we have not fulfilled what true Orthodoxy is.
Please pray for me and that I may not be a hypocrite in instructing things that I fail to do.
Does anyone have ANYTHING to say about that?? Are you someone that likes you sing Pinishti as a deacon during a major feast???? If so, I'd like to know who you are and where you live and what makes you so sadistic??
I do. My name is Mina Girgis, i am from NJ, Saint Mark's Church. good luck finding me..... 2 questions:
First: Why does it always have to be ONLY about YOU and never consider others?!
Second: why do we always have to be SELFISH and get our way in everything (Church or outside)?
hmmmm, i said 2 qs, sorry, i lied.
One more: why do we never consider what happens in Church despite what we want or desire?! yes we do...we should teach them about the faith and the Church and everything that is done in it...... ::)
I think a more proactive attitude regarding the promotion of Coptic as one of the treasures of the Church should be fostered, if there is not such an effort underway already. It is a matter of sociolinguistic fact that one of the major factors that leads to language death in the first place is the attitude of its speakers, particularly the younger generation. In many, many cases, the child decides, either consciously or unconsciously, that their native language is not useful, or is shameful or in some other way "bad" (in comparison to the dominant language/dialect), and they stop using it for fear of being marked as provincial, or maybe even out of fear of punishment (this is how boarding schools destroyed countless Native American languages within a few decades). In the case of Coptic, where the situation is in some ways much more dire than that of many other languages, there is a lot of work to be done in this area.
I, for one, won't accept "but we don't understand it". You (the general "you", not anyone here) are serious about fasting, prayer, and everything else that comes with being Coptic Orthodox. The language of the liturgy and its hymns, whether it is English, Coptic, Arabic, Xhosa, or whatever, is also something to approach seriously.
http://tasbeha.org/content/community/index.php/topic,8772.0.html
[quote author=Zoxsasi link=topic=10823.msg131980#msg131980 date=1299226419]
Does anyone have ANYTHING to say about that?? Are you someone that likes you sing Pinishti as a deacon during a major feast???? If so, I'd like to know who you are and where you live and what makes you so sadistic??
I do. My name is Mina Girgis, i am from NJ, Saint Mark's Church. good luck finding me..... 2 questions:
First: Why does it always have to be ONLY about YOU and never consider others?!
Second: why do we always have to be SELFISH and get our way in everything (Church or outside)?
hmmmm, i said 2 qs, sorry, i lied.
One more: why do we never consider what happens in Church despite what we want or desire?! yes we do...we should teach them about the faith and the Church and everything that is done in it...... ::)
I think its a cruel thing to do on major feasts where the liturgy is already 3 hours long, and you've already done the magma3a il qidisseen before... why not do it on a weekday?? When the Church is empty?