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Liturgy in the Contemporary Local Community and Belonging: Thanksgiving and Petition

In North American culture, many people select a church community through a process akin to shopping. For all Christian communions, many factors contribute to the complex crisis of ecclesial belonging, including the frequent collision of theological legacies with contemporary cultural values. I will offer an example of the problem of belonging from my own native Orthodox tradition to set up the thesis of this essay. Most readers are aware of the crisis that has embroiled Ukraine since 2013. The current war in Eastern Ukraine has resulted in a human catastrophe: over 1.5 million people are now homeless. The crisis began as a confrontation between enormous crowds of protesters in Kyiv and then-president Victor Yanukovych, peaking in February 2014 when Yanukovych ordered the Berkut (riot police) to fire on the crowd. At the height of the crisis, one of the Orthodox churches of Ukraine, the Kyivan Patriarchate, issued a directive to clergy and parishes instructing them to cease praying for the president and civil authorities. The rationale for the omission of this petition was symbolic; the church used its liturgy to demonstrate its removal of support for the Yanukovych regime. Not long afterwards, Yanukovych was forced from office. The leader of the patriarchate claimed that ending prayer for the government led to the regime’s collapse. When I read about this development during the crisis in Kyiv, I had mixed feelings about the directive. I understood the rationale: the church was attempting to make a public moral statement about the regime’s culpability in the death of innocents. I imagined how the people would respond to a change in the texts of the petitions, which no longer prayed for the president and government, but only for Ukraine as a nation. The church’s removal of the petition for the government responded to the swelling of patriotism within the capital, but it was ultimately a political move and a manipulative one. When I examine this situation through the lens of the thanksgiving-petition dynamic, I conclude that the church used the liturgy to achieve a political end. The church may have gained support among certain parties and strengthened its reputation as the people’s patron, but removing the petition was not a result of the thanksgiving-petition dynamic in liturgy. It was instead a revision of the liturgy at the mercy of political theology.