Authors

Discussion

When the young bishop Tikhon (Bellavin) arrived at his new cathedral in San Francisco at the end of 1898, in his very first address to his new flock, he called on both clergy and laity to be his co-workers, cooperating together with him in building up the diocese. From the beginning of his episcopal career, Tikhon did not exhibit a top-down model of authority, but rather empowered the clergy and laity in his diocese to take broad initiative. This worked well in North America, where lay initiative was important for other denominations of Christianity, but it was an unusual way for an Orthodox bishop to relate to his diocese. Moreover, though not explicitly using the language of sobornost’ (conciliarism), Tikhon’s approach embodying it in practice before it had become a central term in church reform (after 1905). During the 1905 Revolution, when the issue of church reform and convoking a Council of the Russian Orthodox Church became the order of the day, Tikhon immediately proposed to his diocese that a Council (Sobor) be convened in North America as well, which took place in 1907. The diocesan periodical was replete with debates about what the upcoming Council should look like, and the clergy agreed that they wanted to find a way of institutionalizing the type of conciliar leadership that already existed under Tikhon—but might not under his successors. The experience of a conciliar church governance in North America proved vital to Tikhon’s further career. He became the first popularly elected archbishop of Moscow in part because of his distinctive way of relating to his clergy and laity. In his first address to the Council of the Orthodox Church of Russia after the Council elected him as patriarch in 1917, he declared that he would exercise his leadership of the Church in a councilor fashion. He continued to empower the laity in Church affairs as patriarch, which became decisive once the Bolsheviks seized power. The Decree of Separation of Church and State (Jan 1918) refused to recognize the institutional Church as such, making the laity the only legal interface between the new regime and the Church. Tikhon encouraged the laity to take charge of their churches, and also to form brotherhoods—something with which he had extensive experience in North America—to defend their local parish. All of these efforts became decisive in the survival of the Orthodox Church during the Bolshevik assault against it.