With the EO being an “Eastern church” ,do yous think they should keep the language of the church in an “Eastern tongue”? like Greek or slavonic instead of using a Western language?
Does it take from the DL dropping the Greek or slavonic?
or do you think if they are in England/Australia/USA that EO churches should use English?
anyway i know this is off topic
I can’t speak for Nine Two’s church, but I am happy with the 75/25 split in my Coptic church. If there were more native English speakers in the church, I would want more English. As it is now, that would be a disadvantage to the people who struggle with English already, as many do (particularly the women and the elderly). They are, after all, the majority, and I do not think it would be right to demand that what little Arabic and Coptic we use (which I have no problem with anyway) be abandoned, especially not for my or other non-Egyptians’ benefit. Ideally, given our geographical location (Albuquerque, NM), I can foresee a day, God willing, when the liturgy would also be celebrated in Spanish, as is already the case in the
church in Mexico and Bolivia. Perhaps also Navajo as well, as we are blessed to have a large number of Navajo people remaining on the land who speak their native language.
The Orthodox Church is not a museum for old world ethnicities and cultural practices. As I’ve written elsewhere, there are now around 400 native Bolivians who attend the
Coptic Orthodox Church of Bolivia , and there are also Coptic Orthodox churches in
South Africa,
Fiji,
Germany,
Australia (which is also blessed with its own
theological college),
Canada, etc.
There are some places where I’ve heard complaints (e.g., a Coptic acquaintance in Belgium says that his priest can’t really manage French), but such situations are certainly not by design, and it seems that most priests do learn the native language of their new countries. You’ll note for instance that the priest in the German news story gave his interview in German. It’s not easy to learn all these European and other languages if your background is Arabic, but the new generation raised in Europe and America take to the languages of their new homelands quite quickly. In my own church, one of the deacons is here on a student visa (not even a permanent resident of the USA), and he is always asking me questions to improve his English. The Copts are very dedicated, and appreciate very much the freedom of the United States and other western societies they have settled in, since they know so much oppression and violence in their homeland.
The Orthodox Church, in my limited experience, is very pragmatic about these things, so while many will call (rightly, in my view) for the preservation of the liturgical language as a facet of the preservation of the overall heritage of the church, this is not to the detriment of using English and attracting non-Egyptian/Syrian/Indian/Greek/Arab/etc. visitors and converts. It just means that we use mostly English and for those things that aren’t in English, there are translations provided. This is not so different than in the Roman Catholic Church, is it? I still remember with fondness praying “Miserere nobis” in otherwise mostly English Novus Ordo mass, so I don’t see why it’s not okay to now pray “Je nai nan” instead, as the Copts were never part of the Latin world. Why is one fine but the other “ethnic” and bad and a sign of some sort of default in the Church? Nobody forces me to pray in Coptic or Arabic any more than an RC Christian could be said to be forced to pray what little is left in Latin in that church’s ritual, and I certainly would never say that its use of Latin somehow makes it unacceptably or especially ethnic.
