The Orthodox Parish. The Indifference of parishioners and the sectarian proselytism
The parish is the field and the horizon where the man reaches the real and redeeming union with God by receiving the grace of the Sacraments administered by priests, which ensures the ecclesial unity of God's people in the universal Church. Typically, the most part of our Christians join occasionally in celebrating the sacraments, specially Baptism, Marriage or Funeral. Some do not know the real, deep and mystagogical meaning of the sacramental acts that are related to the biblical text. When they unite with Christ, they remain, as St. Paul writes, „earthly people”, less changed interior, existential and spiritual, by the bright and saving work of God. Of course, the sacramental dimension of the Christian condition requires the knowledge of divine truth through permanent call to Scriptural texts, that contain the historical revelation of God culminating in Christ, an act of divine love and devotion for the man, that experiences the presence and the work of God in the concrete and everyday life, but especially in the condition of prayer, meditation and worship, that give in Orthodoxy the heavenly ambience, the beauty of the eternal kingdom in the melodicism of hymns that reproducing, mostly, the biblical words of God taken and placed in the hagiographic poetic creativity inspired by the Holy Spirit in the communion of saints. In this regard, the rediscovery and the awareness of liturgical and sacramental ministry of the Church by her sons, the Orthodox laity, is a mystagogical and missionary requirement, imperative and urgent.