ROCOR Site Rant

[尼古拉前执事]

[rant]Grrr! I am so frustrated with the official synod site of ROCOR. The Russian site has been updated twice this week already, but the English site has not changed since early last week. Serge has spoken of this phenomenon with English-only parishes and priests, but I wish they would update both sites at the same time. Often when the English site is updated it only gets a portion of the update that the Russian sites had gotten a week or 2 before hand.[/rant]

[bogoliubtsy]

It is frustrating. I suppose though that since ROCOR has parishes all over the world, the common language for most is Russian, and English might come in as the second most spoken language. From what I've heard, this is the reasoning for using Russian at Jordanville as the primary teaching language...it's the language considered most universal to the Russian(indeed, still very Russian) Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It does make you wonder though, what IS the mission of the Russian Church Abroad in this day and age?
I'm curious Nicholas, how much of your services are in English at your parish in CT? Is your priest of Russian descent?

[尼古拉前执事]

In Stratford we have an all-Slavonic church and my church which is about 60% Slavonic and 40% English, give or take 10% either way. Our main priest is actually of Greek decent and our 2nd priest is of Serbian decent. But the parish being at least 50% people of Russian decent that speak Russian, want to keep services in Slavonic as much as possible, even if they are not at most of them. How does your parish add up?

[bogoliubtsy]

Ha..well...I attend an OCA parish in Boston which is 100% English. Our priest is of Arab descent. About a quarter of the parish is made up of Russians who came to this country fairly recently, another quarter is 3rd and 4th generation Ukrainians, Austro-Hungary folks, Russians, etc. The rest of the parish are protestant converts(and sometimes you really feel it). I attend this parish because the closest ROCOR parish uses about 99% Slavonic. Although I can follow along in a bilingual prayer book for the main parts of services there, the troparia, kontakion, etc. are not easy to follow. So, because of language I attend the OCA parish regularly, and the ROCOR parish about once a month..sometimes more sometimes less. I just don't know enough Russian/Slavonic to be there full time.

Wishing there was a local ROCOR alternative...
Peter(Josh)

Josh is my middle name...and i;ve generally gone by it most of my life...btw.

[bogoliubtsy]

Also, about the ROCOR site...I don't know if you've noticed but there's been a dead link from the "History" and "Our Legacy" sections on the English version since the site was started. I wrote to the person running the site asking about this and didn't get a reply. Hmmm.

[尼古拉前执事]

Yes, they need a full-time English webmaster to fix up dead links.

Is your local ROCOR parish St. Nicholas or Epiphany? I understand those 2 are mostly Slavonic, while St. Xenia is mostly English.

[bogoliubtsy]

Local ROCOR parish is Holy Epiphany(this church is heavenly..). St.Xenia's is all English except for one of the short litanies during liturgy, I think. Right now though, living in the city I decided I can do without a car..I should have thought that decision through a bit more.