St.Mary’s Orthodox Church, Faridabad, Haryana India

The witness of the Orthodox Church is a quiet one. It is founded more on a life of worship of love and of service than on preaching and proselytizing . This worship – orientation is its basis for all thought and action as well as the reason for its survival through recurrent terms of trial.

For the Orthodox , tradition is ever alive and is indeed the witness of the Holy Spirit, His unceasing revelation of good tidings. For the living members of the church, tradition is not so much an outward historical authority as the continual voice of God, not just the voice of the past but the call of eternity.

There is not better guarantee for the members of the church that they are following the right path than for them to preserve the organic unity with the saints, the holy men and women of the past generations who are known to have lived in communion with the Holy Spirit. The principle of apostolic succession upheld by the Orthodox Church has to be grasped in this light, as a living bond between successive generations of church members, preserving the unity of faith and life, in spite of the constant flow of time.

It is this concept of unity in which the individual voluntarily merges his or her life in the wider fellowship of the whole body, that has helped the Orthodox to preserve the truth of the Christian revelation. The identification with the familial community, rather than discipline through centralized authority , is the life – breath of the church. From this flows the communitarian ethos of the church and the fine balance achieved between democratic functioning and Episcopal maturity. The role of the bishop is to sanction in the name of the church an action performed by the Holy Spirit, expressed as the unanimous will of all the members of the church, present and invisible, gathered to celebrate the Eucharist. This principle sustains the democratic orientation of the Orthodox community, indeed of all Eastern Churches.

The Constitution of the Orthodox Church in India ( which has retained the traditional name , Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church was brought into force on 26 December 1934, with some amendments made later in 1951 and 1967.