Eastern Orthodoxy Isn’t High Church

Given the way the terms are presently used, Eastern Orthodoxy is more “low church” than “high church.”

If you walked into a 90 member Baptist church in Podunk, Kentucky on a Sunday morning and told a long-time member named Tina, “So, your liturgy is pretty low church, huh?” she wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. She’d say, “I don’t know what you mean, but we’ve been doing it this way for as long as I remember.”

But that’s the same thing a little Greek grandmother in Santorini would tell you if you said, “So, the liturgy here is pretty high church, huh?”

“High church” and “low church” have relatively little to do with the complexity of worship and quite a lot to do with the naivete of the worshiper–though I’m using the word “naivete” according to Donald Kagan’s usage of the term.