Baptist meets Byzantium

Wow.

I may just have to check that out for myself.

I'm a Protestant planning a visit to an Orthodox parish. Our Antiochian parish has liturgy on Thursday evenings, which makes it more convenient. I can still say I'm "looking forward to it," maybe because I haven't been through it yet!

THIS IS BIGGER THAN YOU ARE.

It certainly is.

Well, this is going to get me in some hot water, but I've just got to say it: I don't really get the whole "Worship as a test of endurance" thing that so many seem to celebrate when talking about Orthodox liturgies.

It's the same phenomenon that left me, with every intention in the world to *love* what's now called the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, completely puzzled instead of instantly transfixed. Granted, I've only been to one on two occasions. But instead of being caught up in a mindset that since it was so difficult and confusing it must be a really high form of liturgy and that if I persisted and endured I would one day be rewarded with the ability to appreciate it, I just went back to the Novus Ordo Mass with contentment (because I really think the NO Mass suffers more from the random experimentation of priests and liturgists than from some hideous intrinsic deficiency, and since this seems to be the opinion of the Church as well for the most part I don't think I'm in bad company).

The thought of having to attend a two-hour (or longer) liturgy every Sunday back when my children were young wouldn not have filled me with joy, but increased my deep frustration. We had a military chaplain for a pastor back then, and he ran a tight liturgical ship--a very reverent and solemn NO Mass was said by him every Sunday morning, and the whole Mass from start to finish ran about 49 minutes in length. He did this in two ways: one, he kept the music simple, traditional, and restrained (no runaway choirs squeezing in an extra verse of the song while everyone stands waiting); and two, he kept his homilies short and to the point (he was fond of saying that the mind won't hear what the seat won't endure). Even at that length it was sometimes difficult for me to keep my children ages 2.5, 1.5 and newborn in line for the whole time, and if I had been expected to present them for twice that long--well, the mind boggles.

Today, sure, my children could "endure" a two-hour liturgy. But how many could not? Would the mentally challenged group-home patients who attend our parish's Sunday Mass be able to do it? Would the elderly, the chronically ill, the cancer patients, the children and babies be present in such large numbers as they are?

When worship becomes a test of endurance, it also becomes a barrier to those who through no fault of their own can't endure it. Does that mean that worship should be twenty minutes worth of marshmallow prayers prayed from the comfort of marshmallow chairs? Not at all. But when we start to see the "test of endurance" as a liturgical good in itself, I can't help but think that our focus is misplaced. The Puritans loved endurance in worship too, and their preachers were known for preaching one and a half to three hour sermons on Sunday as part of the day's worship service; yet no one I know of would like to recreate a Puritan society.

Well, wonder of wonders, I actually agree with Erin on this one, and I think she put it rather well. I was brought up on Latin Mass, not infrequently what they called High Mass, though I guess it was really a regular Mass with most of the parts sung, and with incense and extra candles. I enjoyed this, but I was a weird kid, and my younger siblings certainly did not. My long-suffering mother was heard to observe that the Church was awfully hard on mothers, because they expected you to have all these children and then bring them to Mass and make them be quiet! Reverence and ritual are fine, but do they have to become an ordeal? It says in Psalm 100 (Douay-Rheims version here): Sing joyfully to God, all the earth: serve ye the Lord with gladness. Come in before his presence with exceeding great joy. I don't really have a dog in this hunt any more, but it seems wise to leave a little room for joy. Don't make everything a struggle.

The thought of having to attend a two-hour (or longer) liturgy every Sunday back when my children were young wouldn not have filled me with joy,

So, everybody in the congregation has to endure child-suitable worship? Maybe if we didn't aim everything we did in church at children, or maybe expected children to display some maturity and patience for a couple of hours once a week, there would be more mature and thoughtful adult Christians out there and fewer supposed adult Christians with a childish view of their faith.

I also have trouble understanding the "endurance-test model" of liturgy. Treating mystery and difficulty as good things in themselves strikes me as a version of the Gnostic heresy, which Christianity early on rejected in favor of a more populist or democratic notion of worship as something equally available to all, not just initiates. As far as we can tell, the earliest Christian services were happy celebrations conducted in people's homes and entirely in the vernacular, not a matter of "demands" or deliberate incomprehensibility.

Given my own style of Christian upbringing, I happen to like high production values -- nice music, visuals, etc. -- and wouldn't insist that liturgies be plain and unadorned. But I see no reason why worship should be hard. That wasn't the strategy that made Christianity a world religion, and it doesn't seem like a particularly smart one today for old-line churches that are already hemorrhaging members.

Erin, in those Orthodox parishes which lack pews, the toddlers generally wander around, with various congregants taking turns as surrogate parents if necessary. The kids love it, and so do I. The only time everyone is expected to be quiet is during the homily, otherwise we are all singing along with the choir, and are not aware of fussy or loud kids unless we're quite close to them. Orthodox worship sans pews is extraordinarily child-friendly.

Romulus, is man made for the Sabbath, or the Sabbath for man?

Conforming ourselves to the liturgy does not mean that liturgies which demand two hours of standing in relative silence are the perfect model of the liturgy. Certainly monastic forms of worship which demand much, much more than a mere two hours of standing and prayer from those who enter into them are not designed to be the model which the parish church should follow, at least not in the West--yet could we not say, with perfect truth, that the monastic form of worship is higher than that which lay people are capable of assisting at?

If two hours are good, why not four, or six, or eight? If the Lord's Day is for worship, why isn't it mandatory to spend the whole day in church?

Should we go back to the notion that women in their child-bearing years along with any children under the age of five are just expected not to show up? I've been in enough churches with my children when they were little where that belief apparently prevailed; there are few ways to break a young mother's spirit more than to scold her for bringing her toddlers to church. I can't help but wonder how many women in earlier ages stayed at home with "the baby" so long that they lost their faith in the process; the family that prays together stays together, but apparently the family that does split-shifts on Sunday in order not to bother anyone by bringing the children along is an exception to that rule.

And goodness no, this isn't about dumbing down the liturgy so that children can appreciate it. I'm not in favor of the "dismiss children to go color things and call it Children's Church" approach to the liturgy, either; the point of bringing them to Mass is to teach them from their earliest years what the Mass is, how they ought to behave, and why we worship in this way. It's just barely possible, despite the glares of other parishioners and the nagging of the children's liturgy people who want your children to go color things, to do this, by a patient and firm approach each and every Sunday morning from the time they're quite small until they reach the age of reason and can receive Our Lord in the Eucharist, at which point they're supposed to be at Mass anyway. Add an extra hour of liturgy each Sunday morning, though, and you've pretty well changed this process from "excruciatingly difficult" to "well-nigh impossible" for families with more than one or two children.

The bottom line for me, as a Catholic, is that I trust the Church when it comes to liturgy. Yes, even after the deficiencies of the last 40 years; when you read things our present pope wrote as Cardinal Ratzinger about why there was a need for reform in the first place, you realize that the claim that things were all fine before the Second Vatican Council isn't completely true. So if the Church doesn't mandate two-hour Masses as the norm, I trust her wisdom in doing so.

OK, Larry, I take the point. But I wonder if even appealing to adults and the educated is best done through mystery-mongering, as opposed to clarity and accessibility -- which, as I say, I think were Christianity's original and highly successful methods.

As far as we can tell, the earliest Christian services were happy celebrations conducted in people's homes and entirely in the vernacular, not a matter of "demands" or deliberate incomprehensibility.

Mr. Kane, you are not dead wrong, but you're on life support. As far as we can tell, the earliest Christian services resembled Jewish seders - which are in private homes but are nevertheless solemn and highly structured. You don't get to make up the seder prayers as you go along, and you don't get to change them from year or year. Catholic Masses and Orthodox Divine Liturgies are tied to this historical root and are likewise solemn and structured.

Charles Foster Kane,

Actually, the churches that are hemorrhaging the members most are those which (at least in many of their parishes) are dumbing down the liturgy. People reason that if worship is all about feeling good about yourself, then you might as well sleep in and feel good about yourself at home. And I can't really blame them.

That said, I don't know if homilies should be _longer_; they should be _better_. They should involve fewer anecdotes about what the priest was doing last Wednesday at the mall, and more quotations from scripture and the church fathers. If a homily is going to be fluffy and silly, as many Episcopal homilies are, then I'd honestly prefer a shorter one to a longer one.

But I wonder if even appealing to adults and the educated is best done through mystery-mongering, as opposed to clarity and accessibility

Mr Kane, God is almost entirely mystery. To obscure that is to obscure the truth.

"A God you could understand would be less than yourself." -- Flannery O'Connor

Romulus, see the point I just made about the Incarnation. God apparently did not want to be "almost entirely mystery," if Christian teaching is at all correct.

P.S. Why do people keep calling me "Mr. Kane"? I'm "Citizen" to my friends. :-)

Ah! So much to say on this one, but I'll try to restrain myself.

First--Pastor Gordon's comments are precisely the way I felt the first time I attended the Latin Mass. Despite the hardships, this love affair has not grown old after 3 years.

Erin--I think it's important to point out that the liturgy is not conceived specifically as an endurance test--whether you are referring to the Orthodox or Roman Rites.

Also, keep in mind that the fact that we are having this discussion about the difference in complexity and length of services (and the incumbent stress they exert upon children and parents...) is because many of us are now accustomed to the "Novus Ordo". There is much to be said for what you grew up with.

It was a long ordeal getting my older kids to behave in church when we switched from the Novus Ordo to the Latin Mass. But my youngest has not nearly the difficulty being still and quiet that they did, specifically because she never experienced any other way.

I struggle all the time with the differences between liturgies, and which one is really "better", if that word can be applicable to worship. On the one hand, Christ himself told his disciples, "And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard. Be not you therefore like to them, for your Father knoweth what is needful for you, before you ask him." (Mat 6: 7-8)

On the other hand, you have CFK's comment--
You think the falloff in church membership has nothing to do with people growing up remembering church as a place of boredome and confusion?
Can it possibly be a coincidence that the precipitous fall off in church membership began when the liturgy was changed by VII? The old-timers, who couldn't bear the change in the liturgy they had known all their lives, were the first to leave. Then, generations of others followed them as they found the Mass to be nothing so special that it was worth wearing your Sunday best for, and missing other more interesting events...

I blame this not on the liturgy alone. The three things that have by themselves degraded the Mass are these:

1) The priest is like a performer on stage now, with the attendant showmanship. Naturally, there was a great deal of pomp and circumstance and pageantry before, but it was clear that it was focused on the Sacrament and not the priest himself.

2) While celebrating the Mass, the priest has his back to Our Lord and the Tabernacle. Of course, some churches have sought to remedy this by moving the Tabernacle from its rightful place, front and center...

3) Worst of all, the congregation receives communion from lay ministers, in the hand, standing up.

So much in this world can be communicated without a word. The sacredness of the Blessed Sacrament--and our belief that it truly is the body of Our Lord (not just a symbol)--is communicated very effectively in the Traditional Mass by the fact that one receives communion ONLY from the hand of a priest or deacon, ONLY on the tongue (so that one does not touch it), ONLY while kneeling--and the server always holds the paten below to keep the host from falling on the floor. This is an incredibly important difference, and it speaks volumes.

It is terribly easy to lose one's uniquely Catholic belief in the Blessed Sacrament as more than just a symbolic meal, when you see people who look like they just walked in off the street, casually receiving Our Lord and chewing Him as they shuffle out to the parking lot. If it's really just a symbolic meal, why bother going every Sunday? Might just as well have some bread and wine at home in that case...

So are the hours of tedious chanting in unfamiliar languages absolutely necessary for effective worship of God? On the aggregate, I cannot say that it is. But for myself and my children, it is by far the most effective way I have found for giving Our Lord the most perfect worship I am able, and for instilling the importance of doing so in my children. It's not because I relish the pain or endurance--it's because the sense of the sacred is palpable in a way that it never was for me when I was growing up in the Novus Ordo.

Erin,

This is one reason that most Orthodox have a habit of showing up late to Liturgy. There are some who insist that every good Christian ought to be standing in the nave before the first "blessed is the Kingdom," but this is a minority opinion. Worship is ongoing, and each worshiper participates in that ongoing worship for as much or as little time as is appropriate for their salvation.

If it is appropriate for a family with small kids to spend no more than forty-five minutes at Liturgy, then they should show up forty-five minutes before Liturgy ends. Even if Liturgy has already been going on for more than an hour, and Matins for an hour before that... that's fine. They are participating in the worship of the Church for the amount of time that is healthy for them.

Those who are struggling mightily and for the sake of their souls need to be immersed in the worship of the Church for a full three hours-- they'll show up early, right as Matins begins. That's fine too.

Long services may feel like an endurance test (and spiritual warfare certainly *is* hard work), but that's not really their point. Sabbath may have been made for man, but worship is made to the glory of God. If the temple can be open for continuous worship, with each worshiper participating as much or as little as is good for their souls-- glory to God!

To begin with, Erin, a non-trivial point: the Lord's Day is not the Sabbath. The Lord was asking a question that probes far deeper than that of propriety. A prophetic understanding of Sabbath reveals it as essentially different from Sunday worship.

Well, then, what about Sundays? To be sure, the Lord's Day is made for us. That is why we are to receive it with gratitude (another word for eucharist, btw). To adopt a Minimum Weekly Requirement approach to worship is to depart from the spirit of worship entirely. The Church doesn't insist on the Sunday precept because she's into control. She does so because she's into salvation -- our salvation. If we disregard the Sunday precept we're not in violation of a juridical obligation, as observant Jews would be. Rather, without the sacraments we have no life in us. Without the sacraments, our problem is not legal but existential. The Church's mission is to proclaim this truth and to warn us of the consequences of not hearing it.

Like you I am Latin rite, with close to zero first hand experience of the eastern churches. But they seem to have been at it a good long time -- not just monks and ascetics, but ordinary people of all ages and conditions -- and to date casualties have been minimal. Challenging liturgy can be survived -- and if from time to time children squawk...well, let them. It will not be the greatest ordeal of Father's priestly life; he won't die either. If neighbors glare at you because small children are restless, the problem is with their own spiritual formation and condition. Pray for them.

Does this mean parochial worship ought to be a matter of hours on end? Um, no: man is an embodied creature and after a certain point cannot maintain the recollection necessary to make worship meaningful. However, I put it to you that that point is somewhat more than a bare bones 49 minutes. I put it to you that something's wrong with a view of Sunday worship as a begrudged interruption in an otherwise enjoyable day. I put it to you that something is wrong with the urge to minimize our time with the One whose coming was looked for for thousands of years.

To begin with, Erin, a non-trivial point: the Lord's Day is not the Sabbath. The Lord was asking a question that probes far deeper than that of propriety. A prophetic understanding of Sabbath reveals it as essentially different from Sunday worship.

Well, then, what about Sundays? To be sure, the Lord's Day is made for us. That is why we are to receive it with gratitude (another word for eucharist, btw). To adopt a Minimum Weekly Requirement approach to worship is to depart from the spirit of worship entirely. The Church doesn't insist on the Sunday precept because she's into control. She does so because she's into salvation -- our salvation. If we disregard the Sunday precept we're not in violation of a juridical obligation, as observant Jews would be. Rather, without the sacraments we have no life in us. Without the sacraments, our problem is not legal but existential. The Church's mission is to proclaim this truth and to warn us of the consequences of not hearing it.

Like you I am Latin rite, with close to zero first hand experience of the eastern churches. But they seem to have been at it a good long time -- not just monks and ascetics, but ordinary people of all ages and conditions -- and to date casualties have been minimal. Challenging liturgy can be survived -- and if from time to time children squawk...well, let them. It will not be the greatest ordeal of Father's priestly life; he won't die either. If neighbors glare at you because small children are restless, the problem is with their own spiritual formation and condition. Pray for them.

Does this mean parochial worship ought to be a matter of hours on end? Um, no: man is an embodied creature and after a certain point cannot maintain the recollection necessary to make worship meaningful. However, I put it to you that that point is somewhat more than a bare bones 49 minutes. I put it to you that something's wrong with a view of Sunday worship as a begrudged interruption in an otherwise enjoyable day. I put it to you that something is wrong with the urge to minimize our time with the One whose coming was looked for for thousands of years.

Interesting post and comments. Thank you all. Unlike the Baptist preacher, I had the opposite reaction at my first Orthodox service, and it hasn't gotten much better over the past few years. It didn't make me "feel" good that first time and I still don't feel good when I accompany my wife to church. She has said she feels like she came home. Not me. Of course, unlike my wife, I didn't grow up attending a liturgical church.I've read Matthews-Greene's essays, as well, and perhaps there is a macho aspect to Orthodox worship that appeals to some guys, but I'm too old for all of it and in any case, it seems a piss poor reason to justify the rightness or value of a particular form of worship. That said, I am a bit jealous of Matthews-Greene and others like her who are convinced that their particular way of worship is the "right" way. Unfortunately, I don't find much about most evangelical worship services that are appealing, either, so that leaves me in a strange no man's land when it comes to finding places to worship.

MJS, why don't you ask Rod? I'm telling about my experience every Sunday. I do not stand throughout the entire service, as I have arthritis in my knees, hips and back. Nobody cares about what I do or don't do, and I doubt anybody even notices. We have some benches around the periphery and chairs in the balcony, and I'm usually in one or the other. I have brought camp chairs as well. We do what we have to do. It is considered very bad form to pay any attention to how another participates in worship; that is between him and God, and none of my business.

If worshipping for a couple of hours seems tough, I wonder how hanging on a cross for several hours feels? Or sweating blood? We Orthodox call it Liturgy (WORK of the people) for a reason. Christianity isn't supposed to be easy or comfortable. If He can hang on a cross for me, I can stand a couple of hours in His presence. I have heard it said that Heaven is going to be like church because our worship is modeled on the descriptions of Heavenly worship in Revelations. If you don't like Church, you probably won't like Heaven. Better to get used to it now in smaller installments than jump into Eternity all at once.

Charles Foster Kane: "But I see no reason why worship should be hard"

Charles, others, it's not that worship should be hard, but that it should MEAN SOMETHING. No offense, but the "high production" style of "worship" may have the higher attendance numbers, but FAR too often it amounts to nothing more than cotton candy for the soul.

Charles,

It's not that I think worship should be _hard_, though it should be that too. (I wish my church made a bigger deal of fasting- fasting is hard for me, but I do make an effort, and I think it's important). But more importantly worship should, I think, be formal. Kneeling during parts of the service, and genuflecting during part of the Nicene Creed, is important, I think, because it shows the reverence that we owe to the person of Christ and to His sacrifice. The use of traditional English is another way that reverence is shown during a high-church service- old fashioned language serves almost like a super formal register. The organ is, I think, simply a better instrument for church music than piano or guitar though i realise many churches can't afford organs (though i know of an inner city Anglo Catholic parish in Boston that has a great organ and organist). Above all, I don't believe in replacing parts of the service with free-form paraphrases of the liturgy or even bigger departures. As you can see, I'm primarily talking about Anglican liturgies here, but the Catholics may want to make comprisons to their own experience (ive been to plenty of Catholic services too, never an Orthodox though unfortunately).

I'm politically on the Left (on most issues), theologically orthodox in most regards and heterodox in some, but liturgically pretty conservative....so this really shouldn't be an issue about politics, it should be an issue about what kind of worship does reverence to our God.

Rationcination,

What proof do you have of your claim that "the old-timers, who couldn't bear the change in the liturgy they had known all their lives, were the first to leave"? My grandparents who were born in the 1920's never left the Church, never even considered it and neither did any of their fellow parishioners. They were very open about their opinion of the "old Mass" as they called it. They had no great love for it. They much preferred the N.O. (done reverently, as it is supposed to be done) because they (poor, uneducated farmers) could finally understand what they were participating in. Vatican II wasn't an anomaly that spontaneously came into existence. People like to forget, when they are eulogizing the "good old days" that reformations happen for a reason. Anyone ever stop to think about the fact that the misguided cultural revolution by the college students of the 60's might have had something to do with the "children should be seen and not heard" mentality of the 1950's?

Is there any way to distinguish the enjoyment the Baptist preacher had--the feeling of "this is the right way," and his joy at being submissive to something--any way to distinguish these from the savoring of power?

I ask as someone with about a decade's worth of weekly (often more than once a week) attendance at an Orthodox church. Increasingly, the swooning about the rightness of the Church, and about the goodness of an ascetic attitude (give me more! more! more services!), seems to me hard to distinguish from narcissism. Infatuation with oneself, masked as submission. But obviously I'm jaded.

Not everyone strikes me this way. But the outspoken ones do.

Roland,

Funny, people have told me to swim the Tiber before. Not going to happen, I'm afraid. There are too many theological sticking points.

I should go and check out an Orthodox service some time though, I'm sure I could learn a lot. Currently I live in a part of the country with a lot of Greeks and Arabs, and when i go home on vacation there is a big Armenian community. Does anyone here know anything about the Armenian church?

Hector, I agree re: your comments about mystery. Herman, so whatever form of worship you practice is "the" true reflection of how it will be in Heaven. Do you seriously believe that? If so, there's a level of suspension of disbelief on your part that I find a incredible and frankly scary. Do you realize the indictment you're making against every other worship tradition? You have it just right and therefore everyone else has it just plain wrong. According to who? You? Your priest? Your bishop?

This has turned out to be a good thread. Lots of what I would say at this point has already been said above, so I won't go on for long. I would point out, though, that being able to move around in the Orthodox liturgy (our church has no pews, but many Greek churches in the US do) makes all the difference. Our kids usually sit on the floor and draw in notebooks or read lives of the saints during the service. If they get antsy, one of us takes the restless child outside for a short time, or takes him or her around to light candles and pray. It's not hard at all, and other parents are doing this too. It might sound strange to someone used to sitting still in a pew for services, but it's easy to get used to. If we had to sit as a family with small children for two hours (the liturgy at the cathedral goes on a long time), it really would be an endurance test.

Plus, as someone said, there are chairs if you get tired. Some elderly folks, and pregnant women, never stand. Also, as someone put it above, there is no penalty, social or otherwise, for coming in late; it is presumed that you have a good excuse, though; it's between you and God and your confessor.

I should say also that the liturgy has gotten noticeably shorter for me through familiarity. It used to seem very long and winding, but that's because it took a while to get familiar with the form. I do confess, though, that the Paschal service is an endurance test, and I do not enjoy it at all. I feel a bit guilty about that, because one is supposed to feel overwhelmed with joy. I usually just want to go home and go to bed.

Someone wrote: if it's so child-friendly, why was there a post from Rod this week about twerp" of a child at liturgy who annoyed Rod so?

That child would have misbehaved in that way no matter what kind of service it was. The mother could have done what other parents who had *babies* that would cry from time to time were doing when they couldn't calm their children: step outside with the child for a few minutes until he calmed down. It's easy to do in an Orthodox service. But she couldn't be bothered, no matter how difficult her child's behavior made it for everybody else. It seemed to me that this was a mother who had figured out how to ignore her demanding, difficult child as a way of coping with him -- this, instead of doing the hard work of teaching the boy how to behave in public with respect to others (and, in this case, to God). The form of the Orthodox service had nothing to do with this kid's behavior.

Again, I'm the father of three small children, none of whom is always and everywhere a perfect angel. When they act up, we deal with it. Because we've dealt with it over the years, our kids have learned from that, and we find we have to deal with it far less often now. That's how it's supposed to work.

Mike,

Herman is, I think, paraphrasing from certain passages in the Book of Revelation, where it implies that heaven will be like a worship service (especially, there is a scene where the archangels eternally sing the Sanctus, I think). I think, however, that this is meant to be analogical and metaphorical rather than literature. Heaven will be like nothing else we can describe. As St. Paul said, eye has not seen and ear has not heard, etc. All attempts to describe heaven are simply doomed to fail.

Charles Foster Kane,
I agree that beauty and clarity are very important for a worship service. One of the reasons I like traditional-English services is because the language is formal enough to uplift us out of our normal lives, but also close enough to colloquial English that we understand it. And beauty is also incredibly important. The reason that 18th and 19th century hymns are _usually_ (let's be honest) better than 20th century hymns isn't because those guys were better theologians (I'm sure Marty Haugen was perfectly orthodox), it's because they were better composers. (Or at the very least, only the good music from that era has survived). I'm not sure however that Bach (or other instrumental music) is a good example. One thing I _don't_ like about some Anglo-Catholic services is instrumental preludes. I mean, really: the point of church music is to allow the congregation the joy of participating in singing and in worshiping through music, not to show off the virtuousity of the organist.

Hector, I agree about the hymns. As a Lutheran I seized on the example of Bach, but that's more for special occasions. But I'm a big admirer of the great hymns and their writers.

On taking children to an Orthodox liturgy: it's not like in the Western Church.. Usually there are no pews, and kids move around, a lot. If they start to disrupt, they are gently corrected, or taken outside. Normally, though, in the Orthodox parishes I have been in, they just hang out, sit on the floor (often all together in the back) and play quietly or pray like the rest of us. It's very natural and organic. And the liturgy of St. John (less orthos) only lasts little more than an hour and a half.. It's not too much.

I love the way the children behave, and are seamlessly accepted and integrated. Much better than the usual Catholic practice (I'm Catholic) of hushing and then expelling, with many shooting looks of disapproval at the "offending" mother..

On the endurance aspect, personally I dig having to stand. It pleases me. A lot. It hurts sometimes, but so what. If I'm especially weak, I retire outside for a little bit, a few minutes to catch some air, sit down, then return.

Like the good pastor says, it "just feels right."

I hope he comes home, already. God bless him.

Rod,
This is the way I feel about Orthodox worship also.
Once I even cried at Holy Cross. (The same day someone told me you had converted, before you announced it publicly.)
But I cannot unconvince myself about the Catholic Church, being The Church. I believe there is a The Church, and I cannot believe Orthodoxy, by itself, is it. I think the Catholic Church, still holding councils and issuing decress and able to define doctrine, is acting the way The Church has always acted. And I think I am pretty imbued with Thomism and even Austinianism in a kind of baseline, underlying way.
But I have no sympathy at all for what I call American Suburban Catholicism.
I worship now in an Eastern Rite Catholic church in a rust belt city. Clearly, absent a miracle, this parish will be closed within 15 or 20 years, as almost everyone there is old. The Orthodox parish which split from them is doing much better. I would be just as happy to worship with the Orthodox, if I didn't have to renounce allegience to the Pope! But I can't help it, I am a Papist. I can't unconvince myself in order to become Orthodox.

However I will be very happy if this Baptist becomes Orthodox.

Erin, as far as the kids go, you have to see it in practice in an Orthodox church without pews. The kids fit in fine, it is much better if you don't have to stay in a pew, their movements are well accepted, and if absolutely necessary, it is easy to leave, and there is much less sense of missing something when you do.
I do have trouble standing the whole time, and usually sit on the chairs around the edge for some portion of the service. For the sermon you sit on the rug, or on a chair if gettign up and down from the rug is too difficult.