The Russian Church Abroad is dear to us beyond any price, but only insofar as it actually remains the lawful heir of the previous Russian Orthodox Church-the unswerving and faithful preserver of the God-given Apostolic teaching on faith and piety, a zealous follower of the traditions of the Fathers, the Sacred Canons, and all the pious ordinances and traditions of Holy Russia.
The sacred motto of our Church is that of the great confessor of Orthodoxy, St. Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria: "We must not serve time, but God."
In the midst of the general, mass, already self-perpetuating movement "Forward! Forward! To the Antichrist!" (although it might not be expressed so openly) for us members of the Russian Church Abroad the age old motto of the true Church of Christ remains in full force: "stand fast…remain unmoved!"(cf. The words of Bishop Theophan in On Orthodoxy with Warnings about Errors Against it[in Russian],p.7).
Why is this so?
"Human teachings," writes this same Bishop Theophan, "are always reaching out to what is new, growing, developing; and this is natural, for they do not have truth, but are just seeking it. And let them seek it, as long as they find something stable. For us both the truth and the way to the truth have been defined once and for all. We possess the truth, and all our efforts are directed toward its assimilation, not its discovery"(IBID).
This is why we are not going in the same direction at all as any "modernists" and "ecumenists". Our gaze should not be directed "ahead," but "backwards" --to the earthly life of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to the Divine teaching He preached on earth 19 centuries ago, to His act of redemption, His glorious Army of Martyrs, to the Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church, to the establishers of the True Faith, to the righteous ascetics, those" angels in the flesh," and, for us Russian, to the ideals of Holy Russia…
For us "forward" is only the constantly spreading "Apostasy" predicted by the Word of God and the Holy Fathers of the Church, and its crown--the Antichrist, of whose near arrival so many already are so openly speaking; but after that will come the shining triumph of our Faith; the Last Judgment, the eternal torment of sinners and the eternal blessedness of the righteous.
This is our ideology; this is the genuine (without evil or deceit) Orthodox view of the world to which our whole Russian Church Abroad should hold in order to justify its existence on earth, not to become the " salt which has lost its savor."
Whoever thinks otherwise, whoever is inclines to "march in step with the times," consequently, has already entered into some sort of compromise with the "evil of this world," leading to the Antichrist, and is not really a member of our Church Abroad, even though he formally continues to belong to it.
From the Writings of Archbishop Averky of Blessed Memory.
