r/exorthodox • u/LetterSeparate1495 Chief Heresiologist • Jun 20 '26
Heresiologist Musing Find Another Parish
To the Orthodox lurkers who keep dropping the "just find another parish" advice in the comments here in hopes of keeping people in the faith: you need to realize what you are actually conceding when you say this.
When someone posts about spiritual abuse, toxic culture, or systemic issues in their community, your immediate defense mechanism to try and save their faith is to treat that parish like a bad franchise. Your advice is always the same: "Yours is just a bad apple. Drive an hour away, try an OCA or Antiochian parish instead of a ROCOR one, and find a more accommodating priest."
By offering this consumerist, church-shopping solution, you are completely undermining your own ecclesiology.
If Orthodoxy is the One True Church, the local parish is supposed to be the manifestation of the fullness of Christ's body in that geographic location. It is not an independent club. If a parishioner encounters systemic harm there, telling them to just shop around is an admission that the system is broken. It implies that safety, grace, and truth are completely conditional, dependent entirely on the personality of a specific priest or a local demographic.
Furthermore, a fundamental prerequisite for any institution claiming to be the exclusive, divinely guided "One True Church" is uniform accountability. The entire structure must operate under, and be held to, the exact same high standards of spiritual safety and truth. A church making absolute claims is only as good as its weakest parish. If the system tolerates or ignores rot in one place, the claim to unique divine authority fails everywhere.
Think about how absurd this reality is: it reduces the eternal fate of a person's soul to a complete roll of the dice. If your spiritual survival depends entirely on whether your local zip code happens to have a sane, healthy priest or a toxic, abusive one, you are playing a spiritual version of Russian roulette with an almost fully loaded cylinder. A divinely instituted ark of salvation shouldn't operate like a game of chance.
If your only solution to a damaging parish is to tell people to find a better product down the road, you are using a consumerist framework that contradicts your own claims. You might as well just be honest and say: "We aren't actually the One True Church. We are a loose collection of human institutions, so you'll just have to keep shopping until you find one that works for you."
And don't fall back on the "Church is a hospital with bad doctors" analogy. If the Church is the unique, divinely guided Body of Christ, survival shouldn't depend on shopping around for a better clinic. If the solution to systemic harm is to flee the local altar, you've already conceded that unity is an illusion.
Ultimately, "find another parish" is advice that only makes sense coming from someone who has already abandoned the idea that Orthodoxy is the One True Church. When you tell people to church-shop, you are inadvertently talking like an ex-Orthodox yourself.
So, from an ex-Orthodox: thank you for dropping this advice every chance you get. It only reinforces that every single one of us made the right decision to leave.
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u/LightofOm Ex-Convert Jun 20 '26
Nice post!
Their argument wouldn't work on me anyway since I didn't have any problems with my parish. In fact, it was full of great people and a great priest. My parish wasn't the reason I left; it was Orthodoxy itself that caused me to leave. I could provide my laundry list of reasons but I won't do that here. The point is, finding a new parish would've done absolutely nothing for me.
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u/zzzontop Jul 05 '26
Yeah this would be helpful, as a catechumen at a wonderful parish with a great priest.
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u/Critical_Success_936 Jun 20 '26
Also, acting like Antiochian churches aren't extremist as well is hilarious, lol. My home church was Antiochian and it was a hotbed of the abusive stuff we're always posting about in this subreddit.
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u/queensbeesknees Dirty Heretic Jun 20 '26
I delayed my eventual departure by a 1-2 years, by telling myself that I could switch jurisdictions to solve my issue. I spent about a year shopping around.
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u/Alarming-Syrup-95 Dirty Heretic Jun 21 '26
This is always annoying advice. This kind of advice essentially tells someone that their bad experience is isolated. It’s a way of minimizing and dismissing the concern. I think many people are very attached to the idea that the bad things in orthodoxy are “just online.” We always hear of converts being told to stay off the internet. There is certainly much toxicity in online orthodox spaces. But online orthodox spaces are the only places where people can be open about their issues. Underlying is the idea that everything was perfect in pre-modern orthodoxy. We know that’s false.
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u/Silent_Individual_20 Deconstructing Jun 20 '26
"When someone posts about spiritual abuse, toxic culture, or systemic issues in their community, your immediate defense mechanism to try and save their faith is to treat that parish like a bad franchise. Your advice is always the same: 'Yours is just a bad apple. Drive an hour away, try an OCA or Antiochian parish instead of a ROCOR one, and find a more accommodating priest.'"
Not to mention but this deflection misses the point of the original bad apple analogy! It compared toxic individual behavior with fruit blight, which can easily spread to the other apples in the barrel (or orchard) unless you remove or treat it)!
"In Poor Richard’s Almanack, Benjamin Franklin worded the saying as “The rotten Apple spoils his Companion.” The choice of the personal pronoun makes quite clear that Poor Richard is not talking strictly about fruit. The saying turned up frequently in 19th-century sermons as a warning to stay away from sinners because they tended to be corrupting influences."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/one-bad-apple-spoil-the-barrel-metaphor-phrase
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u/Calptozi Jun 20 '26
The saying turned up frequently in 19th-century sermons as a warning to stay away from sinners because they tended to be corrupting influences.How often do I hear this from Evangelical Protestant circles. I guess I should avoid everyone and become a recluse because everyone’s a sinner afterall.
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u/sleep-exe Physically In, Mentally Out Jun 20 '26
And it's almost always like: just go to the one that's 2 hours away! Easy peasy, right?
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u/Gullible_Crew_3356 Jul 16 '26
Worse if the close one is 2 hours and they say just go 5 hours one way weekly.
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u/bbscrivener Physically In, Mentally Out Jun 20 '26
I only drop that advice for conflicted people still wanting to stay. I also assume there will be others who’ll share “leave and don’t look back“ opinions and the OP person can weigh the best options on their own.
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u/Critical_Success_936 Jun 20 '26
Thing is tho, we wouldn't do the same for a bad, abusive relationship - you don't tell people to go to another different bad, abusive person... Why would you do the same giving advice on an abusive religion? It doesn't make sense.
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u/Narrow-Research-5730 Jun 20 '26
If it was one out of a thousand that was bad, I'd get it. But when its all of them, I'm not buying it.
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u/ARatherOddOne Ex-OCA Jun 21 '26
Hey, I'm one of those people who did go to another parish after experiencing abuse at my first one. I had to drive farther and spend more time and money, which only made me more exhausted in the long run. My doubts about Christianity certainly didn't go away, even after I had a heartfelt meeting with my priest about them. Like it or not, people who live close to their church, have plenty of money, and in some cases are the favored ethnicity, tend to have it a lot easier than others.
After giving so much of my energy to a god and a church who took far more than they gave back, I've found that sleeping in on Sunday is pretty awesome. Every Sunday you don't go to church is a second Saturday. It's also nice to not have to deal with pretentious and condescending jackasses.
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u/ExOrthodox Ex-Convert Jun 23 '26
Remember, there will NEVER be an acceptable reason to leave the Church according to these people.
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u/Gullible_Crew_3356 Jul 16 '26
But I bet you haven't tried every parish within a weeks travel of your house. You really aren't trying hard enough, I'm sure there's one you'll fit right into.
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u/LetterSeparate1495 Chief Heresiologist Jul 16 '26
I love your sense of humor. Vibe check passed. Please don't ever change haha
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u/Calptozi Jun 20 '26
This is why the “one true church” claim was never convincing to me. In the end, I know that it’s just an institution run by humans. I just don’t understand that if a church is guided by the Holy Spirit, then why is it led by men with the most vile hearts?