N-C-C ya later!

  • Via Mere Com­ments and Ortho­doxy Today: The Anti­ochian Ortho­dox Church has with­drawn from the National Coun­cil of Churches.

    Good job, yo? It’s a sad thing to have to part com­pany with some­thing that sounds like good med­i­cine for this ail­ing world, but why is it that when these orga­ni­za­tions go nation­wide and world­wide, they always start lean­ing left? And not just lean­ing — more like just lying down on that side alto­gether and talk­ing about how bal­anced and fair they are. The NCC Web-site has an enthu­si­as­tic news brief about how they’re right in step with the World Coun­cil of Church (WCC) dic­tum to “to reflect a global per­spec­tive rather than an ultra-patriotic ‘cul­ture club.’” And in case you’re not quite sure what that means, WCC Gen­eral Sec­re­tary Dr. Samuel Kobia spelled it out at a speech in Oregon:

    Kobia noted that the world is afraid of U.S. poli­cies like the doc­trine of pre-emptive war and the Bush administration’s reluc­tance to sup­port inter­na­tional ini­tia­tives against global warm­ing, or the Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals.

    Uh, gotcha. So we’re to show how inter­na­tional we are by leav­ing ter­ror­ism alone (which was work­ing really well for the world for the last cou­ple decades. I don’t know what we were think­ing!) and by stick­ing corks in our cows’ butts so that their methane gas doesn’t melt the North Pole and make Den­nis Quaid make any more bad movies. Yay, global perspective!

    (Oh, and the fourth head­line on the NCC’s head­line sec­tion was this speech by globally-chic lunkhead Jesse Jack­son, who doesn’t accuse Bush of being a racist bigot bent on over­throw­ing the black right to vote until the sec­ond para­graph, caus­ing no end of high suspense.)

    So thank good­ness Met­ro­pol­i­tan PHILIP is a gutsy guy. I can’t imag­ine any­thing we care about that would come from the hope­lessly lib­eral WCC and NCC. But, um, how about the rest? Accord­ing to Ortho­doxy Today, the OCA is con­sid­er­ing pulling out. But Greek Ortho­dox, Ser­bian Ortho­dox, Ukrain­ian Ortho­dox, Syr­ian Ortho­dox (that’s dif­fer­ent from the Anti­ochian? I prob­a­bly don’t want to know), and SCOBA are all still listed as mem­bers on the NCC Web-site.

    I think we should start our own orga­ni­za­tion and call it the World­wide Orga­ni­za­tion of Churches that Aren’t Lame (WOCAL) and issue state­ments say­ing that we wouldn’t have to be a super-patriotic cul­ture club if the rest of the world’s churches could grow a back­bone and stand up to the ram­pant lib­er­al­ism that’s under­min­ing any hope for reli­gious peo­ple around the world to keep their integrity.

    Yep, I think that would be good.


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    July 31st, 2005 | Grace | 9 Comments |

9 Responses and Counting...

  • steven paul 07.31.2005

    I’m not sure what you are get­ting at, Grace… could you be more spe­cific? :) 40x
    After all the press the Anti­ochi­ans get for being “lib­eral and mod­ernist“
    its inter­est­ing that they are the ones who step up to this plate and hit the home run. Nice Job MP Phillip!
    s-p

  • Greg

    Well, would you expect any­thing less from the Anti­ochi­ans? After all, they’ve got all the money…

  • steven paul

    kinda like the “Anti­ochian NY Yan­kees”? :)

  • Grace

    I bet­ter explain that Greg-the-Husband’s com­ment was based on us hear­ing that pro­nounced as some kind of known con­ven­tional wis­dom when we were in an OCA church. It struck us as kind of funny, since I hadn’t had the feel­ing that the other two Anti­ochian OC churches we had belonged to were exactly rolling in dough, but y’know, … whatever.

    I have noticed some dif­fer­ences between OCA and Anti­ochian, and I notice the ways that Anti­ochian is a lit­tle more relaxed with some of the things that IMHO aren’t very impor­tant (head­cov­er­ings, let­ting women and chil­dren chant, slightly dif­fer­ent antiphons, etc.). But our cur­rent OCA church doesn’t really stick to the rules (and BTW, if our bishop is read­ing this, that parish would be. um, St. Franistan’s Church of Tas­ma­nia.) so I don’t see where it makes a big dif­fer­ence at the laity’s level. I think there are big­ger dif­fer­ences fur­ther up the food chain, and I tend to wish that there were more like Mpn. PHILIP.

  • steven paul

    LOL! Yeah, the OCA thinks EVERYONE is rich com­pared to them. :)
    The Anti­ochian and Greek parishes I know have some well to do’s but so did most protes­tant churches I attended. I know what you mean about the AOC and OCA, I’ve been in both too. You pick your “local” bishop and you pick your “issues” and litur­gi­cal rubrics, it doesn’t mat­ter what arch­dio­cese you are in.

  • This Side of Glory » Blog Archive » Bloggy round-up

    […] The Russ­ian Church may leave the World Coun­cil of Churches (WCC) (HERE) — Remem­ber back HERE when the Anti­ochi­ans got out of the NCC and I won­dered why the other Ortho­dox arch­dio­ce­ses couldn’t do the same? Am I right in think­ing the NCC is con­nected to the WCC? Or is it con­nected to the knee­bone? Well, in any case — hooray! It’s obvi­ous that these “world­wide church orga­ni­za­tions” have just become polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions that preach a secular-progressive ethos from the pul­pit. If we can’t turn that around, we need to make it obvi­ous that we don’t agree with poli­cies that “turn the WCC into a ros­trum for pro­mot­ing fem­i­nism, the rights of sex­ual minori­ties, ideas which erode the prin­ci­ple of national sov­er­eignty, and cer­tain polit­i­cal pro­grams,” in the words of Moscow Patri­ar­chate spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin. […]

  • joseph godleski

    my arch­bishop in the ukrain­ian ortho­dox church in the u.s.a head­quar­ters in south bound brook nj say we are not part of the ncc and insist that they have told the ncc to stop send­ing them infor­ma­tion but if you look on the ncc mem­bers list they still list us as mem­bers i am con­fused does any­one know what is going on

  • Grace

    Joseph:
    I don’t know — I’ll move this com­ment up to the top of the blog and let’s see if any­one can offer any info.

  • This Side of Glory » Blog Archive » NCC news?

    […] Joseph com­mented to THIS POST from 2005 about Ortho­dox issues with the National Coun­cil of Churches (NCC). Joseph said: my arch­bishop in the ukrain­ian ortho­dox church in the u.s.a head­quar­ters in south bound brook nj say we are not part of the ncc and insist that they have told the ncc to stop send­ing them infor­ma­tion but if you look on the ncc mem­bers list they still list us as mem­bers i am con­fused does any­one know what is going on […]

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