A 2006 paper delivered by Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA, speaking to the heresy of ethnophyletism — that an ecclesiastical jurisdiction be based on ethnic, national or linguistic considerations rather than local criterion.
The confusion of ethnic identity and Orthodox Christian identity, expressed by competing ecclesiastical jurisdictions, is the incarnation of phyletism. Due to this confusion of the Gospel with ethnic or political identities, multiple parallel communities, each with its own allegiance to a foreign mother church, divide the Orthodox Church in North America and elsewhere into ethnic and political denominations. This distorts the Apostolic vision, and has severely compromised the catholicity of the Orthodox Churches, in which all Christians in a given territory are called to submit to a local synod of bishops.
The problem is not so much the multiple overlapping jurisdictions, each ministering to diverse elements of the population. This could be adapted as a means of dealing with the legitimate diversity of ministries within a local or national Church. The problem is that there is no common expression of unity that supersedes ethnic, linguistic and cultural divisions: there is no synod of bishops responsible for all the churches in America, and no primacy or point of accountability in the Orthodox world with the authority to correct such a situation.
Episcopacy, Primacy, and the Mother Churches: Metropolitan Jonah by Anonymous JD8lbVnu on Scribd
Extracting the above ideas of the church from the New Testament would be a task of tasks.
Well, the Orthodox are open about granting authority to the Church, by the Holy Spirit, to develop these things. Other churches, often holding a narrow view of sola scriptura, claim to deny the Church authority to develop stuff like this while accepting, for example, the canon of Scripture set from within the tradition of the Church. The Orthodox are honest at least. Even so, this ecclesiology is not non-Scriptural at all… For example, “there is neither Jew nor Greek”etc and Paul’s direction to Timothy and Titus to appoint godly men as presbyters and overseers in “every town” assumes coherence and a Church which subordinates ethnicity (amongst other things) to the reality of the Body of Christ. Granting ethnicity as a key identifier in a local church is a bad thing. Entrenching it in North America is deeply problematic for the Orthodox, but it is a problem more generally. This paper should have given ACNA and Nigeria pause before embedding ethnicity into our ecclesiastical structure. It is step in the wrong direction. Ethnic church may well serve a practical initial purpose in mission, especially in our multi-ethnic metropolitan areas, but the aim needs to always be beyond that stuff to the transcending unity in Christ.
I’m missing the context for this if there is any. This is certainly a problem for the Orthodox diaspora…but one I’m all too happy to overlook given the chaos of Anglicanism.
I believe Jonah was fired as Metropolitan.
Yes, he was. The circumstances were never fully explained.
FWIW Met. Jonah was born an Episcopalian. He was forced to resign over several accusations of mishandling clergy accused of sexual misconduct. Not his own behavior mind you, just mishandling cases under his authority. Without denigrating those facts, I recall some suspicion that it wasn’t the whole story. Jonah was an American-born convert and – as this essay shows – he was a strong supporter of moving American Orthodoxy from the diaspora, subject to the ethnic politics of multiple mother countries, to a unified American synod and ultimately complete autocephaly. This was a particular threat to the Patriarch in Moscow who has and arguable claim to jurisdiction over Orthodoxy in the US but who fantasizes the he is the true Ecumenical Patriarch.
The “Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia” has phyletism built into its very structure.