The Russian Orthodox Church in Twentieth-Century Britain: Laity and 'Openness to the World'

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is threefold: firstly, it describes the life of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh, focusing on the relationship between the Church and the world as reflected in the practice of the diocese, and focusing also on how the laity's role in this relationship is understood; secondly, the paper considers the sources and origin of the openness practised within Orthodoxy in Britain; and thirdly, it attempts to offer some preliminary remarks which might allow one to arrive at a theological understanding of the openness underpinning the relationship between tradition and the world under various circumstances and conditions. This latter aspect of my paper touches upon Orthodoxy's relationship to cultural, ethnic and national identity and ecological issues also. What I present here are my research findings from four months of fieldwork carried out in Britain during summer 1997 and early 1998. First, though, a word or two needs to be said about the 'engaged' nature and logic of the very questions addressed in my research, as also about their practical as well as their academic significance for an understanding of the fate and the place of Orthodox Christianity in postsoviet society. There is no doubt that the fundamental experience of Orthodox life during the Soviet period was the existence of the Church under conditions imposed by an atheistic state, that is, a necessarily closed existence where the Church's ties with the social life beyond its walls were exceptionally weak. This 'c1osedness' was accepted as almost natural, and it was justified in terms of the separation of the Church from the state. However, it is also the case that this c10sedness affected the internal life of the Church and deformed certain key intuitions in the traditional experience of Christians. Of these intuitions, the one that was most adversely affected was that relating to the place and role of laypeople. How did, or how does, the activity of laypeople fit among the various forms of service which clergy, deacons and believers fulfil within the Church? On a practical level the impoverishment in the understanding of a proper role for lay believers' became evident in three ways: in the dying out of parish life; in the destruction of the Church's service in society (diakonia); and in the debasement of notions about the Church's relations with and towards the world.