Measuring a Parish:

St. Gregory the Theologian Church – Fifty Years in the Hudson Valley

Our human love of anniversaries answers our need to validate and mark the progress of our life. Anniversaries give meaning and definition to our efforts. In marriage it marks the success of surviving struggles, defeats, hardships and the endurance of two or more (with children and relatives) personalities growing side by side. One can say that committed parish life may in some measure be one step up from marriage because the personalities do not come together by choice or attraction. People arrive at a parish knowing that it is the local gathering of the One Universal Christian Church, gathered with her same Lord throughout the world in numerous other parishes. They accept to enter a cohesive group that is already working in harmony, and they naturally expect to be received and embraced by this group. With our diversity of politics, economic needs and expectations, ethnic preferences and habits, family customs and cultural mores – all this makes parish life in America a serious challenge. The “village” is no more. In some measure, then, the parish can be a gathering of strangers, or it can strive to become in time a New Village, one no longer defined by geographical neighborhood, but by the refined “citizenship” in another kingdom.

America is THIS new experiment, this new possibility that did not previously exist in historical memory. At St. Gregory’s we are very conscious of the unique challenge that most of our American parishes face to place the deliberate emphasis on being nothing other than the local presence of the Body of Christ, above all other “preferences” that once marked particular parishes. Six years before Autocephaly defined the uniquely American character of the Church that now transcended all ethnic and cultural limitations, the Founders of St. Gregory’s fixed into their by-laws the decision for English as the language of worship to consciously curtail any sentimental backsliding into “favorite” forms of Orthodoxy. This parish was to be a living invitation to every person in the surrounding culture to fully enter the Body of Christ. In all these years the parish has been pastored by priests George Timko, Pitirim Stehnach (first permanent pastor), Thomas Hopko (’68-’78), and Alexis Vinogradov (’78 to present). Since 1994 Fr. Michael Plekon has also served at the altar of St. Gregory’s.

Father Alexander Schmemann, to whom this issue of Jacob’s Well is devoted, remarked that the Church is not a place to which one goes in order to get some emotional satisfaction, an addendum of religious feelings to improve life. Rather, Fr. Alexander insisted, we assemble together in order to become the Church. It is only when we are intentionally gathered in Christ (the “two or three” of the Gospel) that we are transformed and become His Church, His bride. So, in her fifty years, St. Gregory’s has avoided the trappings of a fixed institution for select members, and some kind of social or political standing in the secular community. One can say that the clergy have literally served several “parishes” that have come through this one geographically consecrated spot on the map. Families enter and move on, and our fervent hope is that the seeds of our orientation towards God, and that “other” lasting Kingdom, become the fruits that our members carry into their adult college and work life and in the planting of holy families everywhere, remaining always bound to us in faith and in love.

The gathering of so many families and pilgrims on this past Bright Saturday and Thomas Sunday (April 26-27) around our primate bishops, His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon, and His Grace Bishop Michael, proved our anniversary to be a symbol that this Kingdom to come is already given as gift and foretaste of her citizens, young and old.

To God be glory everywhere!