Apostacy

[authiodionitist]

In your experience, how often do people aposticize (go away) from the Faith?

 

[rusmeister]

C. S. Lewis said

"We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither the belief in Christ nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed, and as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by an honest argument. Do not most people simply drift away?"

 

[kamikat]

It depends on what you're talking about. Are you talking about people who leave Orthodoxy to join some other church or other religion? Are you talking about people who just stop going to church every Sunday?

 

[authiodionitist]

It depends on what you're talking about. Are you talking about people who leave Orthodoxy to join some other church or other religion? Are you talking about people who just stop going to church every Sunday?

In my understanding both of those choices amount to the same thing.

 

[kamikat]

If you are counting the ones who just stop going to church, you're going to get astronomical numbers. Do you consider those who show up only for Christmas and Pascha? Do you consider people like the ones in my parish who only attend September through May and don't come whenever Sunday School is not in session? Is it apostasy is someone is raised nominally Christian, was baptized and chrismated, but never really knew the faith, and left the Church? I think we should be concerned about our own faith, rather than statistics.