LIVING CHURCH

LIVING CHURCH. The “Living” or “Renovated Church” was a movement in Russia that profoundly affected church life in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. When Patriarch Tikhon Belavin (q.v.) had been arrested in Moscow by the Bolsheviks in 1922, a group of clergy with the help of the Communists seized control of the patriarchate (q.v.) and took possession of church valuables, including consecrated liturgical utensils (q.v.). This allowed the Soviets to sell confiscated church artifacts wholesale overseas through entrepeneurs (such as Armand Hammer in the United States) in order to bolster their failing economic policies, a practice that continued for at least fifty years. Correspondingly, the government gave control of the church administration to dissident priests whom it could manipulate. Theologically, at first the appeal of the Living Church to the progressive-minded was legitimate, coming from its institution of reforms that were discussed at the Russian Councils of 1905 to 1918, but were not initiated for various reasons. Soon they went beyond this to consecrate married clergy to the episcopacy-something not done since the Sixth Ecumenical Council (q.v.)-and grant permission for the remarriage of priests, considered by many to be an uncanonical act.

Although Patriarch Tikhon was supported by the faithful and anathematized the usurpers on his release from prison, continued government support gave the new movement access to church properties. In 1923 a council of the Living Church “deposed” the Patriarch and appointed Fr. Joh n Kedrovsky, a suspended married priest from the North American Russian Diocese, as “Archbishop of North America.” Kedrovsky returned to the United States and began litigating for church properties as the “lawful bishop” of the Diocese. Aside from creating confusion as to who the rightful bishop was, Kedrovsky posed a real threat of confiscating 115 parishes in the courts, especially after he successfully gained control of St. Nicholas Cathedral in New York City in 1925.

Despite its early successes in Russia, the Living Church soon lost popular support and that of the Communists (1926), disappearing completely during World War II. The only vestige of it that remained was one of its former proponents, Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky (1867–1944), who succeeded Patriarch Tikhon in power and adopted a highly controversial collaborationist relationship with the Communists (1927) after they forcibly imprisoned him. It seemed that the Soviets were to win a battle against the Church with Stragorodsky, but not with the passe Living Church strategy.

The situation in the United States was more long-lasting. Kedrovsky’s machinations under the guise of pseudo-legality forced the question, “Who is our bishop and what rights should he have?” Parishes moved to protect themselves under the law, because the American legal system is not readily equipped to handle questions regarding hierarchical churches, frequently preferring to focus on individual corporate congregations (i.e., a type of tacit congregationalism). In parishes doing so to protect themselves, they practically abolished the role of the bishop in the Russian Orthodox churches in North America: They permanently changed ecclesiology (q.v.) to the present. The authority (q.v.) that bishops previously exercised in building the North American missionary diocese-holding title to property, assigning clergy, checking the parishes’ financial statements and minutes, approving parish elections, paying salaries, settling disputes, etc.-was revoked for good bishops as well as bad ones. The revocation was almost complete, not to be reinstated even at present.