We believe the Orthodox Church is the Church Christ founded. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Not a denomination among many, but the fullness of the Christian faith preserved through the centuries.
That’s going to sound arrogant to a lot of folks in Southeast Texas. I get it. Your Baptist grandmother is a saint, your Methodist neighbor feeds half the county, and the Catholic parish down the road runs the best food bank in Beaumont. How can we claim to be the Church?
Here’s what we mean. When we say the Orthodox Church is the Church, we’re not saying God’s grace stops at our parish doors or that other Christians aren’t really Christians. We’re saying that Orthodoxy has maintained the fullness of what the apostles taught and practiced. The complete package. Other Christian bodies hold parts of that truth, sometimes very significant parts, but they’ve departed from the fullness in various ways.
Think of it like this. If you grew up Baptist, you know the Bible. That’s real. That’s important. But you probably didn’t have the Eucharist as the center of worship, you didn’t have apostolic succession through bishops, you didn’t have the sacramental life the early Church knew. If you grew up Catholic, you had sacraments and apostolic succession, but the papacy developed into something the early Church wouldn’t recognize. These aren’t small differences. They shape how we understand salvation itself.
What This Means in Practice
So we don’t do open communion. Communion isn’t just a personal moment with Jesus. It’s the expression of complete unity in faith and life under the same bishops. When you commune at St. Michael, you’re saying “I believe what this Church believes, and I’m part of this body.” We can’t pretend that unity exists with Christians who aren’t in communion with us, no matter how much we might wish it did.
But that doesn’t mean we treat other Christians as enemies or heretics in the nasty sense. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware writes about this tension beautifully. We hold two truths at once: Orthodoxy is the fullness, and God’s grace works beyond our visible boundaries. We don’t know the exact status of other Christian communities in God’s eyes. We know where the Church is. We can’t always say definitively where it isn’t.
Your coworker at the plant who’s a faithful Methodist? We’re not going to tell you he’s damned. We don’t know the mysteries of God’s mercy. What we do know is that we’ve been given a treasure, the fullness of the faith, and we can’t pretend we haven’t. That would be its own kind of arrogance, actually. False humility.
This is why we receive converts the way we do. Some folks coming from traditions with valid trinitarian baptism are received by chrismation. Others are baptized. It depends on what the bishop determines about their previous baptism and the tradition they’re coming from. We’re not re-doing something God already did. We’re completing what was incomplete or providing what was missing.
Living This Out
So how do you relate to your Baptist family at Thanksgiving? With love. With respect. You don’t have to argue about whose church is right. You also don’t have to pretend the differences don’t matter. When your mom asks why you can’t take communion at her church anymore, you can say something true: “I’ve found the fullness of the faith in Orthodoxy, and communion means something different now. It’s not about being better than you. It’s about being faithful to what I’ve been given.”
The Antiochian Archdiocese has always emphasized this balance. We’re confident in our faith without being jerks about it. We cooperate with other Christians on social issues, disaster relief, community needs. After Hurricane Laura, Orthodox, Baptist, and Catholic parishes in the region worked together. That’s appropriate. That’s Christian charity. But we don’t blur the theological lines to make people comfortable.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann used to say that the tragedy isn’t that we claim to be the Church. The tragedy is that we so often live as if we’re just another denomination. When we really believe we have the fullness, it changes everything. How we worship. How we pray. How we raise our kids. How we face death.
You’ll find Orthodox Christians have different emphases on this. Some are more hopeful about ecumenical dialogue. Others are more cautious. But we all agree on the basics: Orthodoxy is the Church Christ founded, other Christians are still Christians to varying degrees, and we relate to them with both truth and love.
When you’re received into the Orthodox Church, you’re not joining a club that thinks it’s better than everyone else. You’re coming home to something that’s been here all along. The apostolic faith. The faith of your spiritual ancestors, even if your biological ancestors were Baptists in Vidor. And once you’ve tasted that fullness, you can’t pretend it’s just one option among many. But you can share it with gentleness, knowing that God’s mercy is bigger than any of us understand.
