Springfield, Virginia, June 13, 2023
Photo: oca.org The Orthodox Church in America published a new adult catechism online last week.
The 16-chapter, 250-page Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs: A Manual for Adult Instruction is available for free in PDF format on the OCA site.
The OCA describes the book as a “groundbreaking work … an offering to the Church to assist clergy and parishes in their work of instructing inquirers and the faithful in the truths of the Orthodox Christian Faith.”
The manual is aimed at the development of an Orthodox worldview.
According to Archpriest Thomas Soroka, Project Manager for the Departments of the OCA, the catechism is to be a “living document” that will be occasionally “refined and perfected.”
Individual chapters were authored by Fr. Daniel Greeson, Fr. Lawrence Farley, Dr. Edith Humphrey, Fr. Joseph Lucas, Fr. Stephen Freeman, and Brian Van Sickle.
His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon of Washington and All and America and Canada writes in his introduction to the manual:
Using the Divine Liturgy as the framework for presenting the teachings of the Orthodox Church, this manual is a suitable resource for guiding inquirers, instructing catechumens, carrying out a program of mystagogy for the newly-illumined, and confirming mature Orthodox Christians in a fuller understanding of our holy faith. ‘
The Manual has already stirred up some controversy online, in particular concerning a statement in Chapter 11, “The History of the Church,” by Fr. Lawrence Farley: “Christianity regards contemporary Judaism as a true religion and as worshipping the one true God, but considers it to be deficient, since it stumbled at a step where it was called to mount up.”
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