I am Scots-Irish and German, so I understand the challenges a convert might have in a strongly-ethnic parish. Of course, there’s the OCA and the Antiochians that have a lot of converts and use all or mostly English.
As far as Slavonic goes, I do understand most of it and I assume the priests who use it do too. I converted into the Carpatho-Russian church, which used mostly English and some Slavonic. Then I spent a few years in the Russian Church in Exile, which used only Slavonic and, since I already knew the Liturgy in English, I did kind of a backward translation. I know some Russians ans Serbs who say they do not understand parts of the Liturgy, but I think they could if they tried, given what seems to me to be strong similarities in the languages. The Gospel and the sermons will be in the modern language of the people, or in English.
Politics doesn’t come up much, unless it has something to do with the old country. The NATO war against Serbia got a lot of coverage in Serbian churches. I think most priests see their job as helping us work out our salvation, not telling us how to vote.
Did you mean Carpatho-Russian, or Carpatho-Rhytian? The CRs are the Orthodox Cossack sent into the Carpathian mountains by the Czar about 1810 to drive out all the "Swedes" (Mostly Sa'ami hard metal miners looking for gold/silver/tin/iron/zinc/etc.)
Those folks had their own language ~ closely related to Skolt ~ and the ones who left to go back to Sweden, and Finland (also the Czar's personal possession), recently disappeared as a linguistic minorty. The last speaker, an elderly woman, passed on.
A tribe of humanity is gone and I was there in spirit if not in fact ~ I had just found out about them weeks before they expire from this world.
A friend of mine was a Carpatho-Rhytian. He died some years back, but he related that the news back home in Pennsylvania was grim. The congregation was getting old and they were going to need to install pews ~ gasp! ~ to seat the elderly for services, but they did have central heat in the old church.
Your kind are not as invisible as you might imagine.