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The situation is changing. There are certainly the young people who come in with little idea what to do, and there’s the old babushkas who’ve been attending for years and seem to know everything. But I have seen more young people and fewer clumsy ones when attending churches in Russia. Probably more so ruraly I guess.

I see the same thing when younger folks who are in the US on a visa or recently immigrated attend.

I think in general the church should work a bit harder to make the customs of what to do when entering/leaving/worshipping clearer.

I do like that our parish has a sign on the doors noting what times one should not be entering/leaving/moving about the church/lighting candles etc.

Our priest also gave me a little pamphlet he put together once on a few of the basics, which is excellent though it was something i had to mention to him to get ahold of.

It will take generations for the Eastern communities to be fully integrated into the Church. For exmaple, in Serbia there are more believers than ever, but different studies show that their beliefs are questionable, their knowledge of the faith revealed is rudimentary and often very flawed.

Only aout 3% of the population attend churchr egulary. Even if a church is crowded with overflow (which happens only on great feasts), it is an insignificant number compared to the rest of the population. This is not much better than, say 5-6% in Germany, where nearlym 1/3 of the population (actually 29%) considers itself atheist.

In America, a profoundly secular country if we judge it by the way of life, trends, fashions, behavior, and so on, the attendance figures are vastly inflated, especially among the Evangelicals. All one has to do is pay attention to people on a Sunday as one drives to church. The vast majority is not going to churches. That much is obvious.

In my parish, there were seven people, priest included, at the Holy Thursday vespers. On regular Sundays, perhaps 30, if that many (it's an ethnic Serbian parish, so it is not very large). On Paschal Sunday, or Christmas Eve, there were hundreds of people present.

It's a minimalist religious culture. Like those chicken-hawks who never could give up three years of their lives to serving/defending their country, they find it impossible or too burdensome to give God two hours of their precious weekned.

It's a miracle the Churech survived communism. The rest will follow naturally, in spite of everything.