Author: Metropolitan Jonah
September 4, 2009
The Necessity of Unity – We’ve Got to Get over this [in NA]!
ADMINISTRATOR’S NOTE:
These excerpts of Metropolitan Jonah’s September 4 speech were edited by Dean Calvert on the “orthodoxdetroit.com” – ‘discussion forum’.
“We are not Christians unless we evangelize…””Be transformed in the renewal of your mind,… ”
“The Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Archdiocese have an imperative to come together.”
“…we’ve got to get over this – we’ve got to get over these divisions…but we have to respect the diversity within the Church – because that ethnic diversity, the cultural diversity, is actually something beautiful which can enrich our experience of Orthodoxy…”
“The bishop with his clergy and the faithful serving the Divine Liturgy…wherever that is present – there is the fullness of the catholic church…” “If we think that by the fact that we are in some kind of a canonical relationship with an Old World patriarch – that that patriarch is the guarantee of our catholicity..if that’s the case, then we have no choice but to submit to Rome…that’s Roman Catholic ecclesiology, that’s not our ecclesiology. Orthodox ecclesiology is the ecclesiology of the local church…the local church territorially defined, and quite frankly, this doesn’t look like Damascus – it doesn’t look like Bucharest… it certainly doesn’t look like Moscow…”