Our Vision
That believers of both Orthodox families would approach one Cup together, and would realize, when they do, that they never truly left it.
What we are looking toward
A day, nearer than most people imagine, when a Copt in Cairo and a Greek in Thessaloniki, a Syrian in Aleppo and a Russian in Moscow, an Armenian in Yerevan and an Ethiopian in Addis Ababa, commune from one Cup without anyone first needing to be told that the other has stopped being a heretic. Because the other never was.
We ask neither family to surrender anything true. Not the Copts to abandon St Cyril. Not the Greeks to abandon Chalcedon. We ask both to look carefully at what the other has actually confessed for sixteen hundred years, and to notice that the anathemas have been fired at positions neither side ever held.
Why this is not optional
“Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you… Is Christ divided?”
1 Corinthians 1:10, 13
St Paul wrote that to a church whose divisions were nothing compared to ours. And St Clement of Rome wrote to those same Corinthians around AD 96, while men who had seen the Apostles were still alive, for the single purpose of ending a schism, calling their division shameful and unworthy of their calling in Christ. That letter is the oldest Christian writing we have outside the New Testament, and its subject is unity.
St Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be killed in Rome around AD 107, wrote to church after church with the same urgency: keep one Eucharist, under one bishop; where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church. St Cyprian of Carthage wrote that the Church is the seamless robe of Christ, which the soldiers would not tear, and that a man cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his mother.
St John Chrysostom said that nothing angers God so much as the dividing of the Church. St Basil the Great wrote letter after letter in grief over Christians at war with one another while the world watched.
Every one of those men is a saint in both our Churches. They are not on one side of our argument. They are standing in front of both of us with the same face.
What we are
An independent lay initiative, written by Sam Metry, holding no ecclesiastical authority of any kind and claiming none. Baptized Orthodox Christians who believe the wound of 451 has been carried long enough.
What we are not
- Not a new church, jurisdiction or hierarchy, and we will never found one.
- Not a watering down of the faith. We confess the historic Orthodox faith entire.
- Not against the bishops. Unity will come through the shepherds or not at all. Our work is on hearts.
- Not a campaign against Rome, Protestants or anyone else. Our subject is the household of Orthodoxy.