Personally I'm in the OCA - and the other option I'm considering if we move is a ROCOR...which in and of itself would have its own liturgical language challenges for me. That said - the ROCOR is Orthodox, and I'm thankful there is a church around that are where we may move. I personally am a very big proponent for liturgies in the vernacular of the people - so I may have particularly strong feelings. I get it that there are some phrases that don't translate well into English...but Lord have Mercy?
@~Anastasia~ , I'd be interested to hear what happens in your parish - and if the changes are implemented.
The liturgical changes in question, to be clear, are specific to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America.
OCA has a fair number of liturgical uses due to it encompassing a minority of the Russian languages parishes, and about half of the Bulgarian church in North America, and half of the Romanians; Romanian usage tends to be closer to Greek, Bulgarian, closer to Russian (the Bulgarian pronunciation of Church Slavonic sounds much more like the Russian than the Ukrainian pronunciation, e.g. Gospodi instead of Hospodi); the Bulgarians however use the Revised Julian Calendar. Also if memory serves, the Albanian Orthodox in America under Archbishop Fan Noli, who for a time due to the brutal repression of all religion under the communist regime of Enver Hoxha (who strove to create the world's first completely atheist state by making religion illegal), represented more or less the entirety of the visible Albanian church, are part of the OCA. So the OCA has parishes on the Old Calendar, parishes on the New Calendar, parishes with traditional language, parishes with contemporary language, and what I consider to be the very strange liturgical experiment that is the New Skete monastery (the monks of New Skete published a programme for liturgical renewal in the journal of the Faith and Order commission of the World Council of Churches in the late 90s, and I did write a point by point criticism of it which if you wish I can link to, as I took exception to most, but not all, of what they proposed, and I also took exception to the venue used to promote it; the timing was unfortunate as it coincided with the extremely conservative Church of Georgia withdrawing from the WCC, and it struck me as the sort of thing that fuels the fires the Old Calendarist schism, not reconciliation-oriented).
I would also lament several OCA mission parishes have problems with liturgical music for various reasons, including cradle singers from different ethnic backgrounds and thus different musical traditions, and some fairly weak arrangements of the service, some of which are a bit too watered down in an effort to promote congregational singing.
The OCA does benefit from the legacy of Fr. Alexander Schmemann of eternal memory, who was one of the most brilliant liturgical minds of the 20th century; as a scholar of the liturgy, I think only Dom Gregory Dix of the Anglican Benedictines, and Robert Taft, the RC scholar who wrote "A Short History of the Byzantine Rite," are comparable, although the actual program for liturgical reform Schmemann had in mind I only agree with in part; I disagree with roughly half of what he wanted to do, and I suspect you would as well.
ROCOR has a formidable repuation for severity, but in my experience this is undeserved; I have consistently found their clergy to be gentle and loving, and in terms of liturgics, their jurisdiction is the crown jewell of Eastern Orthodoxy in North America, at least as far as the Slavonic tradition is concerned (for the Hellenic, the equivalent would be the very excellent canonical monasteries and convents within GoArch that are under the spiritual patronage of Elder Ephrem, who like ROCOR has a formidable reputation but is in my experience kind and gentle; also, Holy Transfiguration Monastery founded by Elder Ephrem's spiritual brother the former elder Panteleimon; HTM is Old Calendarist and broke ties with ROCOR in the 1980s as the latter began to investigate a sex scandal; both Elder Ephraim and former Elder Panteleimon are spiritual children of St. Joseph the Hesychast, but lamentably for several years Elder Panteleimon succumbed to the passions regarding novice monks, but fortunately has resigned and committed himself to repentance, so that's good, but HTM and HOCNA, the Old Calendar Greek parishes associated with it that used to be associated with ROCOR, are still isolated; however, Holy Transfiguration Monastery publishes the most widely used Pentecostarion and other texts arranged for Byzantine chant, and unlike Elder Ephrem's monasteries, uses the Julian Calendar, so in some respects one might experience something closer to Mount Athos or St. Catharine's.
The amusing thing about ROCOR's liturgical excellence is that it is largely accidental; everyone in ROCOR is committed to liturgical maximalism, but for the bishops this has meant promoting Kievan Chant, Znamenny Chant and other ancient Russian forms amenable to increased comgregational use, and discouraging the use of the Obikhod (the 19th century common arrangements), but the more Russian parishes, which are largely ethnic and expatriate, have zealously clung to the Obikhod and various settings of the liturgy by prominent composers, as a connection to Mother Russia, and the result is a very pleasing, if delicate, balance.
ROCOR also has the Church of the Nativity, which is the most prolific canonical Old Rite parish in North America (formerly priestless, they became equivalent to the Edinovertsie of Russia), and hanging by a thread, a Western Rite which took the bold decision of attempting to revert to the Western Rite liturgy as it existed in England under the Saxons before the Norman invasion, by reconstructing a Roman Rite from various historical sources. Hieromonk Aidan Kimmel did much of this work, but he has since moved on to the Eastern Rite, and I would note his Eastern Rite liturgikons are some of the best I've seen. His fantastic website Occidentalis is defunct, but still accessible via the Internet Archive, and I have it in mind to try to get him to restore it, as it had an unrivalled collection of resources.
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I think in the long run the Orthodox-Catholic-Anglican reconciliation will look something like what the ROCOR Western Rite Vicarate was aiming for prior to the administrative scandal involving Archbishop Jerome Shaw and Fr. Anthony Bondi, which nearly killed the Western Rite (and which might yet lead to its eventual dissipation in ROCOR).
Specifically, a move towards a liturgical space characterized by an iconographic rood screen or iconostasis firmly separating the chancel or altar from the nave, and fewer pews in the nave, allowing the laity greater freedom of movement during the liturgy; the faithful will ne more at liberty to move about to light candles or venerate icons and relics, and less committed to the synchronized movements and gestures that characterize the unison "exterior participation" of Vatican II and the Novus Ordo; this will give way to a much less organized interior participation, but conversely, certain ancient forms of chant and plainsong that can lend themselves to varying levels of congregational participation will become the norm.
I think, and pray, that in the coming decades our churches will be darker, quieter, free from sound systems and relying purely on acoustics, with much more freedom of movement, much more iconography, and much more attention directed to liturgical beauty, of the vestments, of the floral arrangements in the nave, of the liturgical architecture, the lighting, preferrably by candle or oil lamp (with electrical lighting minimized); much more attention to detail with liturgical gospel books, and much more of an emphasis on liturgical music.
I did disagree with the ROCOR WRV approach to liturgics in one key respect, that being their opposition to the organ. Organ music is foreign to most of the Byzantine Rite in the prevailing monastic use, but the Hagia Sophia had one, in the Narthex (although we dont really know what it was for, but those who claim it had a purely secular function I find unpersuasive, given that the narthex was a sacred space and some services were celebrated within it, and also, we do not know whether or not the organ was audible in the nave); organ music is also integral to the Greek Orthodox music of the Ionian Islands, and to much of their music of the diaspora; organs are not anti-Orthodox in my opinion, and I believe they are also certainly without a doubt a native and integral part of English church music, and the works of Herbert Howells, Healey Willan and other Anglican composers strike me as conducive to piety; that being said, I would not want organ music to intrude into the Byzantine chant of Elder Ephrem's monasteries, or into the Slavonic Orthodox / Ruthenian / Ukrainian Catholic liturgical tradition, where they are not needed and are not an authentic part of the liturgical patrimony.
Their use however in those rites that have them is in my opinion firmly condoned by no less an authority than Psalm 150. In like manner, the cymbals used in the Coptic Church, and other instruments found in the Ethiopian church, in my own Oriental Orthodox tradition. I would note the Armenian church has used organs for some time, and to good effect; a rubric from 1920 authorizes their use in Syriac Orthodoxy, but I believe this rubric had in mind pipe organs; where it is invoked, it is generally used to authorize electronic keyboards and frankly I think our music and that of the Assyrian Church of the East sounds better a capella. The Syriac and Chaldean Catholics use cymbals, and I believe we used them prior to the Sayfo (our word for the Turkish genocide against Christians of all ethnicities in 1915).
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I apologize for the meandering nature of this post, but my goal was both to answer your concerns as a member of the OCA, and also reflect on how I hope the liturgy of ecumenical reconciliation between the Orthodox, the Anglicans and the Catholics will take shape.
