two words:

Kneeling Vespers

[probably served immediately after Liturgy]

Joyous feast!

Call ahead and see if the kneeling vespers will be on Sunday or Saturday, for you don't want to miss it.

Enjoy the Byzantine chant. You'll find it quite different from the chant done at St Anthony the Great church. Have a blessed feast day.

End of the Final Antiphon of the Kneeling Vespers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr_pCrg1XwY

And what the heck, for good measure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81O0NB1etpg

Be sure to visit St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery in Arizona at some point in your life! May God bless your explorations into the Apostolic Church!

Hey! I'm fairly certain this is the church I attended while I lived in Houston for a short time during high school. They are nice people! Have a good time!

Here's some very basic info about Pentecost to help you be more aware of the slight changes in the hymnography of the day.
http://www.oca.org/OCchapter.asp?SID=2&ID=79

Also, I hope they have Kneeling Vespers right after church--but prepare your wife and daughters for another 20+ minutes of church AFTER the Liturgy is done, with most of it spent kneeling. In all seriousness, since the church has tile floors, you may want to consider bringing some kind of foam pad, or else just sitting on the floor for the comfort of your little ones.

The church might have coffee hour after that, so be sure to get some sustenance! Our church has its feast day on Pentecost, so we're having a church picnic afterwards.

The kneeling prayers are so beautiful, but the first time I heard them I was so focused on how uncomfortable I was kneeling on the hard floor that I didn't hear them.

So make sure to find a spot on a rug for this portion of the service!

The 50 days between Pascha (Easter) and Pentacost are a time of the greatest celebration in the Church. As part of the celebration we do not kneel in our worship during these days...in not kneeling we show that we have risen with Christ and that we expect the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the Age to come...where our resurrected bodies will stand in the Kingdom. This practice goes back to at least the second century and a canon of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicea confirms it. After Pentacost the kneeling returns as we exit this portion of the liturgical calendar. And, as you have read, the return of kneeling is appropriately ushered in with prayer.

Your blog articles have become quite a hit in the Orthodox Forum and Blog World. I have enjoyed them immensely. I did not read your blog prior to these articles about visiting the Orthodox Church but I gather you were a recipient of the Lilly grant to take sabbatical? That is a marvelous program. And what a great way for you to spend it! To be refreshed by worshiping God in Spirit and in Truth. May the Holy Trinity guide you and renew you.

They have two wonderful priests there at St. Joseph, but you'll especially want to speak with Fr. James as he earned his M.Div. at SWBTS here in Fort Worth and served as a Baptist foreign missionary.

Ah, that's Father Honeycutt's church. He's a well known author (One Flew Over the Onion Dome) and blogger, http://southern-orthodoxy.blogspot.com/

He's extremely humorous.

Last year my wife and I visited an Orthodox church. It was pretty much everything I would hope a worship service to be, plus or minus all the stuff about the saints and Mary, and one very troubling social feature: crazy patriarchy.

Now, we were no strangers to sexist strains of Christianity. We'd been going to a conservative evangelical church, where it was official doctrine that I, as the husband, should be the "head" of the marriage. But no one ever treated my wife as if she were invisible there.

After the gorgeous service, we went to the coffee hour. The men in the church would come up to talk to my wife and me, and they would insist on talking to *me*. This is *very* unnatural for us: I am not comfortable chatting with strangers, while my wife is a practiced small-talker. As we usually do, I would keep hanging back, while she would keep smiling and leaning forward and being all friendly, trying to pick up on the conversation--but consistently the male congregant would keep looking and talking right at me, and ignore my wife utterly. This happened many times. The priest acting this way as well.

But throughout our time at this Orthodox church, I was treated as the real person, and she was treated as a mere social appendage to me. (This was mostly by the men of the church; the women behaved differently.) I would be able to understand this a bit better if the people at this church were actually from some traditionalist old-world culture, but the vast majority of the congregants were converts, as was the priest himself.

So we're never going back there again. Considering the merits of the service itself, this is an enormous shame. We would love to hear that other Orthodox churches are not like that one at all.

Sweet! St. Joseph's is a wonderful parish (holds a special place in my heart, too, as I was baptized there), and I second the comment about how lovely the priests are and that you'll want to talk to Fr. James.

Toby, I'm an Orthodox convert and I've never had anything at all like that experience in any of the parishes I've been to. I'm sorry you and your wife did! I know what it feels like, as I had similar experiences in some of the Protestant churches of my past.

crazy patriarchy.

Gordon,

It was truly a blessing to have you and Jeanene with us this morning. I am so glad that I had the chance to speak to y'all. If I can be of any help to you, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Fr. James

Keep exploring the Orthodox Church and never let one idea or one experience deter you. I am a convert of 4 years (grew up at Baptist and Lutheran schools and a Presbyterian church- went to Westmont College and Fuller Seminary- in short, steeped in Protestantism). I have been told time and time again that if there is something you don't understand or you are frustrated by a particular experience, hang on. You will understand it in time. And it's oh so true. I would encourage Toby to keep pressing. Keep exploring. Keep looking. And stay open to the Holy Spirit. Keep going back.

I'm a pastor in the Danish Lutheran People's church (which is also the statechurch) to which 81,5 % of the population belong - well, most people use the church for baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals. App. 2 % attend worship regularly. Still, most children are baptised and most 14-year-olds are confirmed and in the church we try frantically to make these teen-agers interested in attending the service.
The great idea is to make the service as modern as possible, as down-to-earth, as relevant to every day life as possible. Guess what: It doesn't work. But almost all the mystery, all the majestic, all WORSHIP, all AWE has been removed. Our service is about man and not about God (I don't want to offend anybody and this is, of course, a simplification and not the whole truth, but anyway).
It was so good to read your impressions on a service where worship of God is the essential item - as it should be. And my question is: may I translate your article "Not for lightweights" from June 3 into Danish and use it in my church magazine? I would dearly love to share it with my fellow pastors and my parishioners as a part of the ongoing (and ever ongoing) discussion on church attendance and modern times.

I read some of the responses on this issue of being comfortable while attending a church. I'm really quite surprised that more Christians do not check out more churches during their lives. We should all desire a church experience that makes our time in prayer very meaningful.

We will never find perfection but we should definitely find a comfort level. It makes sense for each of us to look forward to attending church every week. Denominations are man made. Let's find the one that touches our hearts. online casino

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