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A roundtable discussion involving national Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF) leaders and students from Hellenic College Holy Cross (HCHC) convened at the Maliotis Cultural Center in Brookline, MA, on the evening of Nov. 5. The event was part of a multi-day conference hosted by the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at HCHC entitled, “Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches: Moving the Dialogue Forward.”
National OCF Director of Ministries, Christina Andresen, Assistant Director of Ministries, Peter Mansour, and Atlanta-area Campus Missionary, Jacob Sparks, were joined in conversation by HCHC students Ethan Wayne Buchson, a seminarian, Sophia White, a graduate student of theology, and Kyrillos Nashed, an undergraduate. Dr. Peter Bouteneff, Associate Dean for Institutional Mission and Engagement and Kulik Professor of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, served as moderator.
Dr. Bouteneff’s opening remarks underscored the “thirst for dialogue wherever Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians live and struggle side by side.” A shared diaspora experience presents unprecedented and unforeseen opportunities to pursue unity across various aspects of church life, especially among youth and young adults.
Many such opportunities—both seized and yet unseized—were raised by the roundtable’s student speakers. While HCHC provides a nurturing environment for bridge-building on a personal level, the school has significant ground to cover institutionally. Recruiting more students from Oriental Orthodox backgrounds, offering courses on Oriental Orthodox history, languages, and liturgical traditions taught by Oriental Orthodox faculty, and coordinating more events to increase students’ mutual exposure to sister traditions were cited as desired next steps for HCHC as a leading Eastern Orthodox institution of higher learning in the United States.
Ministering to Eastern and Oriental Orthodox students throughout the country, OCF leaders expressed mixed feelings of hope and frustration. The current campus ministry landscape is highly irregular, with some OCF chapters consisting of a near-even mix of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox students, while others coordinate to varying degrees of success with parallel ministries serving Oriental Orthodox students. “We’re hitting the ceiling of what can be done on the ground,” Mansour said.
Questions from His Eminence Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, Diocesan Legate and Ecumenical Director for the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America, and Archdeacon Gebre Kristos Nicholas Siniari, Ecumenical Officer of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of New York & New England, sparked a frank but respectful enumeration of what might be done at the diocesan and synodal level to improve this situation.
As an agency of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America (ACOBUSA), OCF operates under the ecumenical guidelines established in the 1970’s by ACOBUSA’s predecessor, the Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas. These guidelines do not account for shared agreements reached between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches in 1989 and 1990, nor do they acknowledge the realities of campus life in the 21st Century. A standard protocol for campus ministry that establishes what can and should be done together would regularize the situation on the ground and generate momentum for potentially merging parallel ministries.
Additionally, Andresen called upon the hierarchs of both families of churches to bless the production and use of materials for common prayer and hymnody, citing a diversity of worship that is worth cherishing and celebrating. Mansour, White, and Nashed, all Coptic Orthodox Christians who attend or have attended Eastern Orthodox institutions of higher learning, testified to the mutually enriching experience of attending the liturgical services of traditions that are not their own, and of inviting their fellow classmates to do the same.
Despite this shared eagerness for unity, ecclesiastical disunity remains the present reality. Respecting sacramental boundaries, however, shows a deeper sense of unity—a commitment to both honor our respective traditions and pursue a common source of truth. Quoting from what the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware once said regarding Eastern Orthodox and Catholic relations, Sparks offered a fitting final word for the evening: in the absence of full communion between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians, “we should be doing everything else together that we can.”
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