The Church Must Return to the Holy Fathers
For the Church to be rejuvenated, she must look to her treasures, to the preserved Tradition, to her sources of life. The Church must return to the Fathers. From there, she will take what is pure, authentic and true, in order to regenerate herself. Based on this, we could say that renewal does not mean eliminating and modifying all previous elements; developing new theological theories; inventing new ideas, methodologies or forms. We are often tempted to invent new sermons to use in our pastoral and ecclesial activities. True renewal consists in searching, theologizing and using existing sources. This gold mine already exists; it is stored and available. We only need to dig deeper to discover it and to offer it in its pure form. This is the meaning of renewal. In the early 1900s, the Russians implemented such a renewal. The Russians of the diaspora, the educated, intellectual Russian Orthodox Christians, successfully carried out this experiment. When they left Russia, they founded scho...