“Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them,

and they that are great exercise authority upon them.

But it shall not be so among you:

but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;

And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:

Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto,

but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28, KJV)


The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklesia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church
(and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word,
which connoted equal participation in all deliberation by all members,
came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia -
which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times,
who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)

- Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter




ΦΙΛΟΤΙΜΟ: THE GREEK SECRET


Sunday, January 6, 2008

"Protest Found to Be Without Merit..."

So says our Metropolitan in his letter ratifying the recent elections of our community. Without the courtesy of notifying those who filed the protest, he announces his unilateral decision in one of his all too familiar "Beloved in the Lord" letters.

If he truly believed we were "Beloved in the Lord", he might have had the decency to contact either Mr. Gus Colessides or Mr. Jim Sifantonakis and inquired why they filed their protest. As we have seen with other, especially recent, "Beloved in the Lord" letters though, treating human beings from his flock with decency and respect escapes his thinking. Instead, his two assigned proistamenoi lackeys provide all the information necessary and the people be damned.

When will we finally come to the realization that "pray, pay and obey" must stop? We must always continue to pray. We can only offer to pay when our clergy leaders treat us with appropriate respect, and until that time, the payments ought to stop. Finally, how can we obey when those leading us do so only with their own best interest in mind?

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