The Orthodox Christian Network Blog

This is a great video on the teaching of the Orthodox Church on the nature of the Gospel, the End of the Age, the nature of Israel, and Armageddon. American Orthodox tend to absorb Protestant views of all these topics from our environment. The truth of the Orthodox Church is very different from what most of think we know about all these topics.

OCN is at the forefront of using modern media to bring the riches of the historic Christian faith to the world.

My family members are Evangelicals of the Pentecostal variety. I was raised in that faith, but being Orthodox for almost 10 years has distanced me quite a bit from the world of megachurches and televangelists. Still, visiting home frequently means coming face-to-face with it, as my retired dad usually watches several hours of televangelism a day. He's good about keeping the TV off when my kids are awake, but after they are in bed, he often turns on programs he's recorded during the day.

Join Father Chris at St. Demetrios for the weekly Orthodox Study Class. This class is part of the series, "So You Think You Are Going to Heaven?" 

Watch Now>>>  Click here to get the study guide that accompanies it!

Icons in Sound is a relatively new program on the Orthodox Christian Network. The host, Vlad Morosan, is an expert on Orthodox liturgical music. I feel like this is a show that practically every Orthodox Christian needs to listen to, and listen to every week.

Why? Because we don't go to church except on Sunday.

Modern businesses and ministries run off software. We need it to do everything from sending emails, to preparing presentations, to finding new members/customers online.

In this blog, I would like to take a moment to recommend some great Open Source Applications which can really make your business life easier, and which won't stretch your budget.

When a European journalist based in Ammam Jordan calls a writer in Central Florida for a comment on church bombings in Mosul, only to end up on a conference call with an Assyrian activist in Beirut - you know things have changed. The world is just not the same.

According to CIO magazine, a recent survey of over 200 CIO's for medium and small enterprises revealed that 83% of them were leveraging some kind of Web 2.0 technology. That is excellent news for those of us who are into the Web design space and don't care much for static Websites.

Unfortunately, many business professionals and Christian ministers will read that statistic and ask, "What is Web 2.0?"

Like a lot of other Orthodox Christians who spent time in a Greek parish, I've done my share of festival duty. Several years in the Gyros booth, a couple in the parish bookstore, one doing church tours - been there done that.

In late 2007, Dr. Clark Carlton, author of the well-known five-volume Faith Series of books on Orthodoxy, published an Open Letter to Orthodox Christians on behalf of Ron Paul. In his letter, published on LewRockwell.com, Dr. Carlton lays out his case for why Orthodox Christians should support Republican Ron Paul for president.

Dr. Carlton believes that our unique experiment in self-governance is at a cross-roads, and that only rediscovering Constitutional principals as espoused by Ron Paul can save our Republic.

I got to do something really nice last week. As an Orthodox Christian and Web professional, I'm always thrilled whenever I get to help out new ministries get started. That is why being able to help the online presence of a new ministry dedicated to helping our missionary families was such an honor.

If I say the phrase, Orthodox author to you, what name comes to mind? Tolstoy? Dostoevsky? Perhaps a Theological writer like Bishop Kallistos Ware or Father Alexander Schmemann?

But, if you searched for the phrase Orthodox author using Google for the first few weeks of December 2007, you wouldn't find any of those famous authors at the top of the search results.

Instead, you would find Heather Zydek and Father Leon Castner.

I heard my wife screaming on the phone. I ran into the room, thinking something major was going wrong. Like a home invasion, or a fire or something.

Turns out, she was yelling at technical support because she couldn't get the Website our umbrella school uses to track grades and attendance to take her recent updates.

The old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words" may be a cliche but in the case of technical training - it's absolutely true.

In today's environment, ministries expect all kinds of interactivity out of parishioners, online contributors, employees, service providers, and just casual users. Blogs, Discussion Forums, online communities, and various directories all expect users to fill out forms, key in data, and even upload pictures.

Every Web designer has that moment of grace at least once. A moment when you look at the layout, the colors, the text, and the images - and the page just works. Everything is just perfect. I had that happen recently. I remember how ecstatic I was. This was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or at least so I thought.

A few years back I was attending a Greek Orthodox parish. At coffee hour one Sunday, I asked a recently Chrismated couple how their Thanksgiving had been the week before.

"It was good," the husband said, "But it was hard eating vegetarian when my family was having turkey."

I laughed, because I'd just spent Thanksgiving at the home of an Orthodox priest with a big, fat turkey in the deep fryer.

Having a first period class in college was bad enough. But, when the class was Russian History during the Middle Ages with an elderly professor nearing retirement, well that was downright torturous. Especially when the professor was a man known for his dry wit.

I remember sitting there one morning, bleary eyed, as he stood in front discussing the Great Schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches and its effects on Eastern Europe.

I could hear the frustration in her voice as we talked. The head of a non-profit, she was upset about her Website. It hadn't been updated in a year, and she desperately needed to get control of it. She had fundraising product to sell, supporters to keep updated, and prospective member information to distribute.

Unfortunately, time and again, all of my questions were answered with, "I don't know." After twenty minutes, it became clear that she didn't know who owned her domain name, where it was registered, who was providing her hosting service, what platform her existing Website was using, or even how she was processing payments.

In short, we were going to have to spend days, maybe weeks, of frustrating effort to track all that information down, and then even more time trying to get control of it all. This would lengthen her project timeline, increase her internal costs, and frustrate everyone.

I don't think it would have concerned me that much, if it hadn't been at least the fifth time I'd dealt with just this same situation in less than three months. At this point, I'd have to say this is a trend, and one that needs to be stopped. A little education is in order, and this article is my attempt to help you as a business owner, ministry head, or non-profit administrator stay out of this situation.

A few years back, I had the opportunity to deliver my standard presentation on Jihad to a Greek Orthodox Sunday school class. Towards the end of the presentation, I started fielding questions. A few of the ladies in the class were really interested in the role of the Middle East in fulfilling Biblical prophecy. I was taken aback by the questions. I knew the ladies were cradle Orthodox, but the tone and content of the questions betrayed both a knowledge of, and a belief in, the Dispensationalist view of the ‘End Times.'

Techies love acronyms. So much so, in fact, that we often sound like we're speaking a foreign language to normal humans. That's too bad, because a lot of times the acronyms obscure information about really, really useful tools.

As an Orthodox Parish Webmaster, 2006 marked the year that I wanted to take the parish's Web presence into the 21^st Century. First I did a Bulletin Board/Discussion Forum . Then I did a large-scale

Images are important. Orthodox Christians know that better than any other Christian community, which is why we struggle to keep our churches adorned appropriately. Many of our icons, of course, depict scenes from the life of the Church. Great events in the Christian past are rendered in

I took over my first parish Website in 2000, when I was still a catechumen. Back then I was working primarily in the mainframe space, and the Web was both new and somewhat scary. I got an extra copy of Frontpage 2000 at the office, and started putting icons and gold coloring on pages of my own for Holy Trinity in Maitland, Florida.