Yet we all know that the little external traditions we keep in the Church are expressions of Faith and our respect for it. For example, the beeswax candles and pure olive oil burn with purity and without a residue -- as God's love burns pure.
Orthodoxy is keeping faith, being true and unwavering to the commitment made by the Church Fathers. It's not being conservative and it's not an option, matter of taste or preference. It's not cultural, or political.
It is about keeping the Faith (as) unchanged (as possible), symbolically as well as spiritually. If one can show that anything our forefathers did is broken, then change it!
Changing something because we feel "infected with freedom" is not a good reason. Neither is personal preference. The domino affect of permitting changes on the outside invariably lead to making changes on the inside. Once change is made for the sake of change, it continues. Change is a sign of corruption. This world is ever-changing, because it is subject to decay. Faith subject to change is a decaying faith.
Being Christ-like means becoming as unhanging as possible. Everything about God, Faith, Church and customs of our predecessors reflects spiritually and symbolically the eternal and unchanging nature of God.
However, the Orthodoxy did change. From time to time, it wondered off into heresies that required corrective measures (thank God Rome held the Orthodox course when we didn't!). Examples such as iconoclastic period come to mind, and then +Palamas established that Faith is not an academic discipline, but a spiritual one; not intellectual, but monastic.
I have no problems with English Divine Liturgies either. My question is why all the external changes? Why are they necessary? Are the habits of the Old heretical? Or is it because we have a culture that has no respect for the old, and traditional? Is it because Americans strongly believe that anything American is better than antyhing European? Or is it because we live in a culture that nurtures egos and our ultimate desires, that we inherited from Adam, to be gods?
I am afraid the reasons for pushing for changes are not that the old ways are broken and heretical -- but rather because of the idea of being "infected with freedom" is tainted with egos that want to be gods! It is because the predominant American culture is Western, Protestant, evangelical, where pride is not a dirty word, and egos are free to build personal kingdoms and consider traditions, as used cars, something whose utility has come to pass.
How can Orthodox phronema flourish and mature on such soil without being corrupted? Only by keeping close ties to the churches from which they came.
America is not English, or Protestant. It is predominantly English, German and Protestant. In a few decades it will be something else. Is Matthew more of an American name than Kosta? Are we going to change American Orthodoxy to reflect the Hispanic culture in a few decades so that we can fit in?
If a parish has mostly English-speaking members, then let the Divine Liturgy be in English! But don't change it to English so we can "fit in." Personally, the intonations of English are not suited for the Divine Liturgy sung in Greek or Slavonic. English Divine Liturgy needs to be adjusted to phonics of the English language, so that it can flow and sound natural in it.
Your comments speak to what all of us "cradle" types feel. But at least from this Greek Orthodox's point of view, I fear that you may be reading more into some of the things you've seen in GOA Churches than is STILL there. Let me dispose of one change very quickly; the use of paraffin candles. It is, for most of us a matter of ready availability, cost and smoke, frankly. There's nothing more to it than that. The other things, like organs, pews and choir robes are the remnants of a time in the GOA when the highest goal of the immigrant church, made up mostly of particularly brave and hard working immigrants seeking freedom in a new country, was to become Americans. It was a desire to "pass for white". I don't scorn this at all. Our old people and some of the new people to this day, left pretty bad places and came to a pretty good place where they faced some heavy duty discrimination. We were usually never the big ethnic group in an area so we couldn't get away with completely preserving the old ways and we wanted to look like Americans as far as we thought we could without actually becoming Protestants. Remember, Kosta, it was only a few years ago that a trip to the old country took weeks by ship and frankly, very few people ever made the trip. They were here for the duration. So they did things that they thought were "American". The desire to become accepted as part of the mainstream was so powerful!
Today, that's changing. We did succeed socially and discovered that we can be both totally Orthodox and fully American at the same time (though there's nothing easy about it!); that we can be Americans and still preserve our ancient forms of worship and belief and praxis. This is because we have come to understand America and because America today is a different place than it was in 1930. The mindset which made us install organs, wear choir robes, electrify the candelia, priests shave their beards, take off the rasso and don the dog collar of the Episcopal vicar is dying very fast my friend.
Amen brother, said like a true Father of the Church.
There was an old Georgian tradition of having a few widely spaced benches in the nave in addition to the traditional benches or stadia around the periphery, making more room for people to grab a place to take rests during long vigils and services. Not a bad way to accomplish both the open space and the practical concerns of long services.
But I would note that I am unaware of any monastery in the US of any jurisdiction that has pews in its chapels -- it would be my hope that eventually the witness of our monasteries will work its way back into parishes. Read Kontoglou -- 50 years ago the idea that traditional iconography would universally carry the day in Greece, let alone in America, would have been thought to be a pipe dream, yet that is exactly what has miraculously happened.
There is a rocky road ahead for Orthodoxy in America, but if we believe that the Holy Spirit breathes through the Church, we Orthodox in America have to believe that God will help us to survive our own tendencies toward error and heresy just as the same Holy Spirit helped our predecessors in the faith survive iconoclasm and all the other heresies and temptations of the past. I don't believe that the triumph of a "Protestant Orthodox Church" is at all inevitable, if for no other reason than the huge number of formerly Protestant converts would absolutely raise a ruckus -- we've been down that road, and never want to go back.
Having been a member of parishes of 4 different jurisdictions over the last decade and a half, and having regularly attended services at parishes of yet other jurisdictions, I can honestly say that there is not a single weakness or error that runs through all the jurisdictions here. And there is certainly no jurisdiction that is free of weaknesses and distortions that it wouldn't be better off without.
Conversely, there is no virtue that is not being lived and practiced somewhere by someone here in America. Somewhere, someone is getting it right in America, whether in externals or internals -- which are ultimately inextricably linked and woven together. Serbs, OCA, Antiochians, ROCOR, Greeks... I could go down the line and tell you things that each has the the others would do well to emulate.
The resources and good examples are all available in America, and when we add the wisdom of living connections to the old countries -- which I believe are still absolutely essential, no matter what Metr. Philip says -- things get even better. The question is whether we will have the wisdom to see strengths and truths in our brothers where we ourselves have weakness and errors, and whether we will have the fortitude to change to become like them in those ways, giving up our own pet bad habits. Ultimately, we need each other to be whole -- and that is the real reason that unity matters.