Where is the Church?

from Joanna's notepad

Yesterday my friend, Reader Daniel –who converted 50 years ago– expressed a thought that today the apostasy [falling away] is so great that these must be the end times.  He noted that in world-orthodoxy eschatology is suppressed – they want to think that Orthodoxy is going forward and growing into a big beautiful Orthodox world.

This is an excellent observation.  We tend to think that the world apostasizes and WE Orthodox - the tiny ship compared to the world population - are the elect.  But the elect is much smaller than that.

We need to see the huge size the apostasy really is.  And that this apostasy is INSIDE our Church, not outside of it.

Apostasy is a "falling away".  People who were never Orthodox Christian in the first place can not fall away from the Church that they were never in.  They are not apostates: they are heterodox and pagans. 

We say the Roman Church apostasized because it "fell away" from the Orthodox Church.  We don't say that Luther apostasized when he left the Roman Church – he was already in apostasy.

The Great Falling Away is going to be from the Orthodox Church.  If you are part of the majority of people calling themselves Orthodox, then you can be assured that you are in the apostate part, because most of the Orthodox world will fall away.

Read the signs: new calendar, WCC, EP, EP communing with heretics, new-age ideas and positivism being taught in world-orthodox churches, ...

We are truly in the last times, and not in some chiliastic flowering.  This is why world-orthodoxy hides eschatological teachings, because the wolves don't want the sheep to be aware we are in the end times.  But Christ taught us to watch for the signs...

Fr. Seraphim Rose reminds us that the gates of hell will not not prevail against the Church.  The Church will always exist.  The last 3½ years before Christ's 2nd Coming on the clouds the Church is the woman who hides in the wilderness.  Whether She exists is not the question.  The question is, rather, will we be able to find Her.