Posted on 06/21/2022 5:48:40 PM PDT by marshmallow
On the 19th of June 2022, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia visited the Cathedral of the Savior in Penza. After serving Liturgy, he gave a sermon based on the Gospel Reading for the day; highlighting the words of Our Lord, “Whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in Heaven” (Matthew 10:32).
The Patriarch explained that to understand this passage one might understand confession as another word for faithfulness; “Faithfulness to the Lord is what confession is all about.” He went on to point out that the Church even uses the word “Confessor” for those who have been faithful to Christ even through suffering and torment. Even “today these martyrs and confessors of our land are like bright stars in the divine firmament”.
Going on, the Patriarch tells his listeners this faithfulness to Christ is not just limited to those who were persecuted in the past, “But even today, even if we are not suffering, we are still required to be faithful to the Lord, which we must first and foremost demonstrate in our outlook on life”. By following Christ's Commandments as a matter of integrity, the Patriarch exhorted, we can be faithful and not just individually but as a consolidated community as well. Hearkening to the Roman Empire as an example, he points out that “With ease, the empire would have repelled all the barbarians if the life of the people had been consolidated, if the people had been consolidated. But without the inner integrity of the human person,
This consolidation is extremely important for Russia at this present time, as the Patriarch put it, “we need this consolidation today, this concentration of our entire nation in the face of great external dangers!”. However, it is impossible for.......
(Excerpt) Read more at gorthodox.com ...
Interesting.
Interesting.
More chuches = more christians
Not exactly Biblical.
One Word: LGBTQI#%!@!
Yet, we have fools here than think Russia is evil and we're the good guys.
My economic theory is the when the last new church and bank gets built, we head down hill.
There is no separation of church and state in Russia. In some respects Russia has cast aside some aspects of the USSR while retaining some others. The church/state symbiosis reflects the former.
Because so many churches here have become fag churches and their aren’t enough queers to need more fake churches 🤪
And any American who supports Russia or China should do us all a favor and off themselves or move to their favorite countries.
globohomos will be by shortly to tell us why Russia building churches is bad and that globohomo atheism and destruction of Christendom in the West is good.
The US has become Sodom with nukes. Russia is finding G-d and not grooming or mentally torturing its children to become homos or trans.
Russian church is run by a KGB agent.
Nuff said...
Rather, neither are the good guys, but supporting an dictator invader who threatens the US with nuclear devastation is only somewhat better than supporting those who work toward annihilation of the US from within. Both are at war with God, and those who are born of His Spirit.
Across all three waves of ISSP data, no more than about one-in-ten Russians said they attend religious services at least once a month. And it is Putin who boasts of his power to destroy America, and helps its enemies, including seeking an alliance with China. Liberals oppose him due to his anti-LGBTQ stance and favoring Trump and being a threat to their dominance, while traditional conservatives - at least non-RO Christians who expressing of faith Putin outlawed - overall oppose Putin due to him being the actual threat to our faith and freedoms.
Putin may be an instrument of Divine chastisement of America, and which should commend Putin's opposition to the LGBTQ agenda, but he is the dictator of corrupt government and which persecutes the most conservative Christians, evangelicals, even outlawing any evangelism by them at all.
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Moscow church destroyed in sign of new Russian repression Posted on Sep 26, 2012 | by Jill Nelson
MOSCOW (BP) -- It was in the early hours of the morning on Sept. 6 when Pastor Vasili Romanyuk's phone rang. A group of men backed by local police were demolishing his Holy Trinity Pentecostal Church, housed in a three-story building nestled in a Moscow suburb. As word spread, congregants arrived at the scene hoping to save the building, but their efforts were futile. By dawn the church was in ruins and some of its most valuable contents were missing.
An isolated incident? A misunderstanding? Analysts watching the current climate in the former Cold War country don't think so: "This destruction of the church is about as concrete of evidence as you can get that something very bad and very troubling is taking place," said Katrina Lantos Swett, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. "This could not have happened without the backing, support, and implicit blessing of the police."
The incident is just one sign of deteriorating freedoms in Russia, and behind the scenes a cozy relationship between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church has raised more than a few eyebrows. As President Vladimir Putin digs into his third term, a number of Kremlin crackdowns involving vague interpretations of the country's extremism law and other human-rights abuses are troubling signs that the country has slipped into a familiar, repressive era.
"When you have unknown people backed by the police coming out at midnight to begin tearing down a church, you know something doesn't smell right," Lantos Swett said.
Officials evicted Holy Trinity Church from its original building in 1995 and relocated the church to the eastern Moscow suburb. The congregation used its own funds to construct a new building and repeatedly battled officials over permits. The church demolition and its history reflect an emerging pattern: Authorities confiscate land from non-favored religious communities and force the congregation to relocate to a remote suburb, the religious leaders apply for permits that are subsequently denied, and officials confiscate (once again) or demolish the relocated congregation, citing lack of proper documentation.
Pastor Romanyuk and a small group of the church's 550 congregants arrived on site around 3:30 a.m. as about 45 men claiming to be civil volunteers blocked them from the building and threw stones. "When I arrived, I just burst into tears," 25-year-old Natalya Cherevichinik told The Moscow Times as she surveyed the destruction. "I couldn't believe that something that had been built over several years could be destroyed in a few hours."
Russian Evangelicals Leery of Orthodox Church, Friday, December 30, 2011:
class="adjusted">MOSCOW, Russia -- For decades, the Russian Orthodox Church was persecuted under the Soviet Union's Communist Party.
Since the early 1990s, the church has grown in size and influence as its relationship with the Russian government has improved significantly.
However, that cozy relationship worries the country's evangelicals.
Threats Against Evangelicals
For eight years, Yuri Sipko ran one of the largest Baptist organizations in Russia. Now, 20 years after the fall of Communism, he worries about the growing threats against the country's evangelical movement.
"The collapse of Communism was supposed to usher in an era of greater religious freedom, but I'm concerned we are moving in the wrong direction," Sipko said.
What makes the Russian evangelicals very concerned is an emerging relationship between the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church.
"For example, the government recently introduced religious classes based on the principals of the Orthodox Church in public schools," Sipko said.
"Then late last year, the Russian president announced an initiative to appoint Orthodox chaplains to all army units," he said. "Our constitution clearly states no religion can be the state religion."
Russia Church-State Relations
Russia watchers credit two men, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, for elevating the church's prominence. The state media has also played a key role, often showing the leaders attending church services.
Sergey Ryakhovski knows both men well. As head of Russia's Pentecostal Union, he meets regularly with top government and Orthodox Church leaders.
Ryakhovski worries that the Orthodox Church's influence is coming at the expense of religious freedom, especially for minority groups such as Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists.
"There are so many laws and by-laws that regulate religious life in Russia," Ryakhovski said. "For example, evangelical Christians just can't go out and buy a church building or buy a piece of land to build a church."
"Plus, criticizing or challenging the Orthodox Church is not a task for all," he added.
Orthodox Church Revival
The Russian Orthodox Church on the other hand has had it easy in recent times after decades of state persecution.
Church buildings that were destroyed during the Soviet era have been rebuilt with Russian taxpayer money. In the past 20 years, the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars restoring some 23,000 churches.
Most Russians say they belong to the Orthodox Church. Yet CBN News found mixed reactions on the streets of Moscow to the growing bond between church and state
At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY Published: April 24, 2008
STARY OSKOL, Russia —
It was not long after a Methodist church put down roots here that the troubles began.
First came visits from agents of the F.S.B., a successor to the K.G.B., who evidently saw a threat in a few dozen searching souls who liked to huddle in cramped apartments to read the Bible and, perhaps, drink a little tea. Local officials then labeled the church a “sect.” Finally, last month, they shut it down.
There was a time after the fall of Communism when small Protestant congregations blossomed here in southwestern Russia, when a church was almost as easy to set up as a general store. Today, this industrial region has become emblematic of the suppression of religious freedom under President Vladimir V. Putin.
Just as the government has tightened control over political life, so, too, has it intruded in matters of faith. The Kremlin’s surrogates in many areas have turned the Russian Orthodox Church into a de facto official religion, warding off other Christian denominations that seem to offer the most significant competition for worshipers. They have all but banned proselytizing by Protestants and discouraged Protestant worship through a variety of harassing measures, according to dozens of interviews with government officials and religious leaders across Russia.
Russia's De-Facto State Religion : Persecution : http://www ... www.persecution.org/?p=9350&upm... International Christian Co... Putin frequently appears with the Orthodox head, Patriarch Aleksei II, ... Baptists, evangelicals, Pentecostals and many others who cut Christ's robes like bandits, ...
Government Returning Land to Religious Organizations to Favor Orthodox Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009: An ambitious draft law on the transfer of property of religious significance to religious organisations may reignite a process begun in 1993.
Pentecostal Seminary Targeted for Liquidation
Pentecostal Church Forced to Meet Outside in Moscow Winter
Russia: Governor Orders Church Land Grab
Germany has some beautiful churches and cathedrals, supported by tax dollars. Not many devout Christians, however.
He told me Putin has built 30K churches in Siberia and supports the orthodox church. My buddy claims the churches are overflowing with young people, standing room only.
Now my friend told me his parents were atheists because the quickest way to lose your job was to go to church. So I say good for Putin, churches, and the Russian people about the orthodox church.
Going to a Russian orthodox church is more a patriotic function than a religious one. There is no functional difference between the church and state there. So the state does what it damn well pleases with one of its biggest potential critics effectively silenced.
CC
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