Orthodoxy in an American elevator

There is nothing unusual about a priest who is dressed in clerical garb having a stranger ask him a religious question during a long airline flight. "You ask a guy where he's from and what he does and then he asks you the same thing. Many people just want to talk," explained Father John David Finley, a missionary priest in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.

The man in the next seat recently asked the priest a question he has heard many times: "What is Orthodox Christianity, anyway?"

Ironically, Finley was -- at that moment -- writing some comments about a contest in which participants prepared a 30-second "elevator speech" response to strangers who asked that very question. The contest was organized by the archdiocesan Department of Missions and Evangelism, Finley's home base.

This particular man was a convert to Buddhism, although he was raised in a home that was Christian, to one degree or another. He was interested in how different churches interpret scripture and how Eastern Christians pray.

"He wanted to talk about icons," said Finley. "He thought they were beautiful, but he also knew there was more to icons than wood and paint. He said, 'They're not just pictures, right? There's more to icons than art, right?' ... What you hear in questions like that is a search for beauty and mystery and spiritual power."

The term "elevator speech" comes from the business world and describes a punchy presentation of what a company does and "what it's all about," said Howard Lange, administrator of the missions and evangelism office. The idea of a national contest emerged from discussions in his parish, St. Athanasius Orthodox Church, near Santa Barbara, Calif.

"The idea is to convey the essence of your organization to someone in two or three sentences, in the short time that you're on an elevator or maybe in a grocery store checkout line," he said.

This is a hard task for all religious leaders in the increasingly diverse arena of 21st century American life. However, this challenge is especially hard for Eastern Orthodox leaders in a land shaped by Protestant history and culture, as well as the rising influence of Catholics from around the world.

Americans know, or think they know, what people believe in Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist or Episcopal pews. But for many, the first word that comes to mind when they hear "Orthodoxy" is "baklava."

When Protestants talk about church, they usually jump into discussions of their preacher's pulpit skills, their children's programs, the excellence of their classical, gospel or rock musicians and other selling points. The Orthodox (I know this from experience, as a convert) need to back up a millennium or two and cover basics. Then there are the complicated -- literally byzantine -- histories of the churches in Palestine, Greece, Russia, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and, yes, even in lands such as North America.

The goal of the "elevator speech" contest, said Lange, was to focus on broad strokes, using language outsiders could understand -- while not oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy. The winning entry, selected through an online ballot, stated:

"Orthodox Christianity is the authentic and original Christian Faith founded by Jesus Christ," wrote Valerie Ann Zrake of New York City. "As an Orthodox Christian you can experience heaven on earth through the Divine Liturgy which is mystical, spiritual and beautiful, with it's incense, icons, and sacred music. You can transcend time and space while you meditate upon the words and teachings of Jesus Christ. It's the most pure form of Christianity -- nothing artificial added. It's the real deal."

Even in this simple statement, it was hard to avoid nuanced language. "Divine Liturgy," for example, is the Eastern rite name for what, in the West, would be called the Mass. That reference would stump many seekers.

The bottom line, said Lange, is that there is no one ideal "elevator speech" to introduce faiths that are as ancient and complex as Orthodoxy. What works with a next-door neighbor who is already a churchgoer would not work with a skeptical graduate student who walks in the door ready to argue.

"You have to be able to relate to the person who is standing in front of you," he said. "If this contest got Orthodox people to start thinking about that, then it did some good. It's a start."

Hitting the 500-year wall

Every half a millennium or so, waves of change rock Christianity until they cause the kind of earthquake that forces historians to start using capital letters.

"What happened before the Great Reformation, we all know," said Phyllis Tickle, author of "God Talk in America" and two dozen books on faith and culture. "We know, for instance, that some sucker sailed west and west and west and didn't fall off the dad gum thing. That was a serious blow."

So Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and then a flat, neatly stacked universe flipped upside down. Soon, people were talking about nation states, the decline of landed gentry, the rise of a middle class and the invention of a printing press with movable type. Toss in a monk named Martin Luther and you're talking Reformation -- with a big "R" -- followed by a Counter-Reformation.

Back up 500 years to 1054 and you have the Great Schism that separated Rome and from Eastern Orthodoxy. Back up another 500 years or so and you find the Fall of the Roman Empire. The transformative events of the first century A.D. speak for themselves.

Church leaders who can do the math should be looking over their shoulders about now, argued Tickle, speaking to clergy, educators and lay leaders at the recent National Youth Workers Convention in Atlanta.

After all, seismic changes have been rolling through Western culture for a century or more -- from Charles Darwin to the World Wide Web and all points in between. The result is a whirlwind of spiritual trends and blends, with churches splintering into a dizzying variety of networks and affinity groups to create what scholars call the post-denominational age.

Tickle is ready to call this the "Great Emergence," with a tip of her hat to the edgy flocks in the postmodern "emerging church movement."

"Emerging or emergent Christianity is the new form of Christianity that will serve the whole of the Great Emergence in the same way that Protestantism served the Great Reformation," she said, in a speech that mixed doses of academic content with the wit of a proud Episcopalian from the deeply Southern culture of Western Tennessee.

However, anyone who studies history knows that the birth of something new doesn't mean the death of older forms of faith. The Vatican didn't disappear after the Protestant Reformation.

This kind of revolution, said Tickle, doesn't mean "any one of those forms of earlier Christianity ever ceases to be. It simply means that every time we have one of these great upheavals ... whatever was the dominant form of Christianity loses its pride of place and gives way to something new. What's giving way, right now, is Protestantism as you and I have always known it."

It helps to think of dividing American Christianity, she said, into four basic streams -- liturgical, Evangelical, Pentecostal-charismatic and old, mainline Protestant. The problem, of course, is that there are now charismatic Episcopalians and Catholics, as well as plenty of Evangelicals who are interested in liturgical worship and social justice. Conservative megachurches are being forced to compromise because of sobering changes in marriage and family life, while many progressive flocks are being blasted apart by conflicts over the same issues.

In other words, the lines are blurring between once distinct approaches to faith. Tickle is convinced that 60 percent of American Christians are worshipping in pews that have, to one degree or another, been touched by what is happening in all four camps. At the same time, each of the quadrants includes churches -- perhaps 40 percent of this picture -- that are determined to defend their unique traditions no matter what.

The truly "emerging churches" are the ones that are opening their doors at the heart of this changing matrix, she said. Their leaders are determined not to be sucked into what they call "inherited church" life and the institutional ties that bind. They are willing to shed dogma and rethink doctrine, in an attempt to tell the Christian story in a new way.

"These emergent folks are enthusiastically steering toward the middle and embracing the whole post-denominational world," said Tickle. "We could end up with something like a new form of Pan-Protestantism. ... It's all kind of exciting and scary at the same time, but we can take some comfort in knowing that Christianity has been through this before."

Church Shoppers 'R' Us

How many Southern Baptists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: "One to change the bulb and 16 million to boycott the maker of the old bulb for bringing darkness into the church."

And on the left, how many United Church of Christ members does it take? Answer: "How dare you be so intolerant! So what if the light bulb has chosen an alternative light style?"

There are zillions more ecclesiastical light-bulb jokes where those came from and Carmen Renee Berry heard plenty while writing "The Unauthorized Guide to Choosing a Church." How many Catholic nuns does it take to change a light bulb? Episcopalians? Calvinists? United Methodists? Pentecostals? Members of the non-instrumental Churches of Christ?

Behind the jokes is a serious issue. According to her "meticulous count, there are exactly 29816 gazillion denominations to choose from." What are consumers supposed to do, throw darts at the Yellow Pages?

Berry has been there and done that. Over the years, she said, "I met a variety of 'believers' -- incense burners and Bible thumpers; charismatic hand wavers, 12-steppers and genuflectors; priests, pastors and prayer warriors; militant social justice demonstrators and right-wing activists; and lots of theologians who were straight, gay, male, female, fighting for purity and fed up with the status quo -- a varied spectrum of people all living under the umbrella of the 'church.'

"I've listened to, and argued with, them all."

Berry was raised in the conservative Church of the Nazarene and, in the end, found her way back into a small flock of Nazarene progressives. But her searching taught her things. She knows she is allergic to incense. She can dress Presbyterian. She can tell Mennonites from the Amish. And she learned that she is not alone in this search.

"People want to make a faith their own," said Berry, a former social worker who is best known for writing the bestseller "Girlfriends."

"They don't want to go to a church just because they were born into it. ... They want to authentically express their own spirituality. They want to find that congregation that will help them find their own way, their own path."

It doesn't help that most religious groups keep changing -- in terms of doctrine and style. There are Baptists writing documents that look like creeds or confessions. There are Catholics who pick and choose what to believe in the catechism. There are Presbyterians who don't think hell and predestination matter anymore and Methodists who think evangelism is cultural imperialism.

Next door, there are fundamentalist churches that are as old-fashioned as ever, while others show movie clips in between the offerings of their hard-rock worship bands. There are flocks that use incense, candles and ancient rites while the priests sound like Oprah.

Berry openly argues that seekers must start by knowing their own needs and biases. She, for example, avoids churches that do not accept women as clergy. She learned to avoid churches -- on the left and right -- that "engaged in group-think" on politics. She found that vital small-group ministries were crucial.

She also found that she does not need a church with ironclad teachings on heaven and hell. She doesn't want to get tangled up in today's fierce debates about sexuality and marriage. Those issues are not at the top of her personal list, she said.

Thus, her book tried to offer a kind of consumer's guide to the worship, history and culture of various traditions -- Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism, Congregationalism, Methodism, Pentecostalism and the complex world of Baptist and free-church evangelical life. She also included a detailed personal-faith survey.

The hard part is finding a balance between personal freedom and the larger framework of spiritual authority found in a church, said Berry. It is very American and very Protestant to want both at the same time.

"I believe in true Truth, with a big T," she said. "But I have to admit that I have a kind of shopping list of my own. I have my beliefs, too. I know that sounds contradictory, but there you go. ... You end up advocating a kind of spiritual consumerism. That makes me very uncomfortable, but that's the reality of what is going on out there. That's what people are doing."