We live in a time of apostasy. Many of us have watched as fellow parishioners have left the Orthodox faith. This is not unique to Orthodoxy, as all established religious groups have lost membership.
Ideally, the descendants of the founders and early parishioners of our parishes should still be around, and have some relationship with their old family parish (even from afar if they have moved away). But instead, our old parishes are empty in many places despite there being many descendants of historical parishioners.
In mission parishes, the children of converts are leaving.
The descendants of past parishioners who were close with our ancestors, people we should have a relationship with, have fallen away and are nowhere to be found. In many cases, in our ancestral parishes, the community has been torn asunder or at least weakened by parishioners leaving the faith.
In many cases, we know people who grew up with us, or people who are children or grand children of old family friends. But we rarely see them.
Initiative
1. Make a list of those whom we know to have strayed from the Orthodox Christian Faith. Perhaps they are deliberate apostates who have publicly renounced the Faith. Or maybe they have simply disengaged.
2. In your daily prayers, pray for their return. Pray for them by name.
In the Svit Prayerbook, there is a petition in the daily prayers that can be used:
"Those that have apostatized from the Orthodox faith and are blinded with the pernicious heresies do Thou enlighten with the light of Thy knowledge and incorporate with Thy Holy, Apostolic, Catholic Church."
3. Check with your priest and see if it is appropriate to commemorate someone who is straying from the Orthodox Faith in the Proskomedia.
