St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church

Serving Emmaus and the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

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Looking for an Orthodox Church in the Lehigh Valley?

May 1, 2016 By St. Paul Emmaus

palm-sunday-2016

Welcome home to St. Paul’s!

Address: 156 E. Main St., Emmaus, PA 18049
Telephone: 610-965-2298

Weekly Schedule:
  – Sunday: 8am Matins, 9am Divine Liturgy, followed by Coffee Hour (all year) and Church School (September to May)
  – Wed, Fri: 8:30am Matins
  – Wed: 6:30pm Vespers, followed by Adult Education (September to May)
  – Saturday: 5pm Great Vespers & Confessions

Whether you are new to Orthodox Christianity or are visiting from another Orthodox parish, we’re glad that you’ve stopped by our website and hope that you’ll come and visit us in person if you haven’t done so already.

A few quick notes for first-time visitors:

  • You are welcome! We love having visitors join us to worship the Holy Trinity in prayer and song.
  • We won’t make a public spectacle of you or ask you to do anything uncomfortable.
  • We lay no expectation on visitors of financial contribution to our parish’s ministries.
  • We love kids! Our children worship together with us—they are not segregated out during our services. If your child gets a bit out of hand, please do not feel embarrassed to make a visit to the narthex or parish hall until the child is ready to rejoin everyone else in worship.
  • Our building is fully handicap-accessible and includes handicap parking in the front of the building. If you need any help, let us know!

Located in the friendly and historic borough of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church is a warm, welcoming Orthodox Christian church, believing in and worshiping the Holy Trinity according to the Holy Scripture and the unchanging holy tradition of the Orthodox Church. The parish is pan-Orthodox and multi-ethnic in composition, embracing the customs of Orthodox Christians of varying backgrounds, within the traditions of the Antiochian Archdiocese, using English as the language of worship.

St. Paul’s is a parish of the Diocese of Charleston, Oakland and the Mid-Atlantic, within the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, part of the ancient Orthodox Christian Patriarchate of Antioch, the place where the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). Our pastor is the Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick.

St. Paul’s welcomes the people of Emmaus, as well as residents and visitors from throughout the East Penn and Lehigh Valley metropolitan area. The parish community includes members of all ages and varied ancestry. Whatever your background or previous religious affiliation (including none!), you will fit right in at St. Paul’s.

All are welcome to attend any of our worship services, as well as taking advantage of educational opportunities to learn about the ancient, unchanging Orthodox Christian faith, delivered by Jesus Christ to His Apostles and kept for 2000 years without addition, subtraction or alteration.

Worship services, all in English, are held throughout the week.

Again, whether you’re new to Orthodoxy or are a long-time Orthodox Christian, whoever you are, whatever your background or experience, you are welcome at St. Paul’s!

Filed Under: Featured, Slider Tagged With: Allentown, Antiochian, Bethlehem, East Penn, Emmaus, Lehigh Valley, Orthodox Church

May 6-27: Orthodox Evangelism Lecture Series

April 20, 2015 By St. Paul Emmaus

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In the month of May, a series of three lectures on evangelism in the Orthodox tradition will be offered at St. Paul Orthodox Church, presented by the Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick.

All lectures follow Vespers (evening prayer), which begins at 6:30pm on Wednesday nights.

  • May 6: Baptism Into Data: Orthodox Christian Reflections and Comparisons with Evangelical Protestant Evangelism
  • May 13: Taking the Light Ahead: Lessons from Missionary Saints of the Orthodox Church
  • May 20: Evening Liturgy for the Ascension (in place of Vespers; no lecture)
  • May 27: The Gospel Message: The Heart of the Orthodox Christian

Admission is FREE.

Filed Under: Education, News & Events, Slider Tagged With: education, Evangelism

Pascha 2015 Message of Bishop Thomas

March 27, 2015 By St. Paul Emmaus

resurrection-detail

GREAT AND HOLY PASCHA 2015

Beloved brother Hierarchs, Reverend Clergy, God-fearing Monastics, and all my Brothers and Sisters in Jesus Christ our True God:

Christ is risen! Indeed, He is risen!

There is nothing after Christ and nothing other than Christ. If you are not an extension of Him or an expression of Him, then you are nothing. At Pascha, I become Him or I am nothing. If I have loved Him, then I grow through Him and I grow in Him. I do not want anything in His place because He is everything. All the saints are in Him and unto Him, and if you look at their faces, do not look for them. Search for the face of Jesus traced upon them. How should I conduct myself at Pascha? My only affair with my soul is to bring it to the Lord. With Him it comes into existence. The Father is the beginning and the end and in Him the Christ of history pours forth. I am nothing if I do not become a person of Pascha, one who looks to the Father, the end point.

– Metropolitan Georges (Khodr) of Mount Lebanon, “Who Shall I Be at Pascha?”

As we celebrate Holy Pascha, we also each ask, “Who shall I be at Pascha?” This feast defines who we are, not just as a climax or triumph of the liturgical year, but as the very core of our life and, indeed, not just the core, but the whole of our life. Our task as Christians is to become an “extension” or “expression” of Christ, to become so like Him in communion with Him that the face of Jesus is also traced upon us.

We become ourselves at Pascha. We gain our true selves in the Resurrection of Jesus, that death-conquering act which shook the universe and spelled the end of the power of hell and the devil, freeing us from their domination which distorts us as persons. As the Holy Scripture tells us, “Since, therefore, the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death He might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (Heb. 2:14-15).

Yours in the Risen Christ,

Rt. Rev. Bishop THOMAS (Joseph)
Auxiliary Bishop, Diocese of Charleston, Oakland, and the Mid-Atlantic

Filed Under: News & Events, Slider Tagged With: 2015, Bishop Thomas, Pascha

On the New Martyrs of the Middle East: An Orthodox Christian View

March 13, 2015 By St. Paul Emmaus

The Martyrdom of St. Stephen
The Martyrdom of St. Stephen

by His Grace Bishop Thomas (Joseph), Ed.D.

Beloved in Christ,

Last weekend I visited parishes and college students in the Baltimore, MD area. While I was there, Orthodox clergy and faithful asked that I offer a response to what’s going on in the Middle East. Attached is my response. Special thanks to Fr Andrew Damick for his contribution to what you’ll read here.

To introduce this, I’ll simply ask you to pray “for the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the Holy Churches of God, and the union of all men.”

In recent months, images and stories of Christians being killed for their faith in the Middle East have flooded our news sources and dominated our social media. We see beheadings and shootings, sometimes available as gruesome videos on the Internet that are intended by their makers to inspire some to join their cause and others to cower in fear. We have seen bishops kidnapped, priests shot in the street as they ministered to the suffering, and innocents lined up and had their heads sawn off with knives.

Christians are not the only ones suffering in the Middle East—Muslims, Druze, Yazidis and others are also being targeted by the armies of takfirism. They are also dying for their faith, and even though we Christians do not share their religion with them, we still suffer with them in solidarity, because Christ still died and rose from the dead for them, even if they do not believe it.

We ask God, “Why?” We ask each other, “What can be done?” We wonder what kind of response there can be to this horrifying new reality, the spirit of takfirism, the mindset that makes religious accusation of others into a way of life, enforced by death and suffering for those who do not measure up to the ideology of these armies that sweep across that ancient, sanctified land.

How are we to understand what is happening? There is no shortage of analysis in the news and debate among our political leaders. But their answers do not satisfy, do they?

Christians who belong to the Orthodox Church are well acquainted with martyrdom, even if we ourselves do not live in places where our family and friends are being killed for Christ. Martyrdom forms the whole narrative shape of our history. Our calendar of saints is filled with thousands of martyrs’ names, and there are millions more whose names we do not know. It was martyrdom itself which gave rise to our whole concept of having publicly venerated saints.

And while we often think of martyrdom as something belonging primarily to the early history of the Church prior to its legalization in the fourth century Roman Empire, there were many martyrdoms that followed as once-Christian lands were conquered and a new order set up. And the twentieth century also saw martyrdom of Christians with the advent of Communism especially in Eastern Europe, on a scale likely greater than all previous martyrdoms combined.

But it is not much comfort to look at these terrifying images from the Middle East and to say, “Yes, we have seen this before.” There is nevertheless beauty and hope that we can find in all this, and it comes from this historic experience of martyrdom which Orthodox Christians know intimately.

The persecutors of Christians have always seen them as a threat to their own societal order. Most Christians have not been killed merely as an act of hatred. Rather, Christians were seen as a threat to pagan Rome. They were a threat to the Muslim conquerors, first the Arabs and then the Ottoman Turks. They were a threat to the Soviets, whose extermination of Christians was the most “successful” of all. This threat was manifest in how the martyrdoms usually went—the opportunity is given to conform to the religious/ideological order of the day, whether pagan or Muslim or Communist, and death is given to those who refuse to conform.

The current persecutors of Christians are likewise functioning in the same way—their vision of a new Caliphate for Islam in the Middle East has no room for either Muslims who are not conforming to their interpretation of Islam nor for Christians or people of other religions, and their denunciations and accusations of those who refuse to conform motivate them to kill. This is the source of this Arabic term takfir—the accusation of infidelity to the proper order of society.

We should note here that not all pagans, Muslims or even Communists have treated Christians as a threat. There have been periods of peace in all those societies, where co-existence was possible. But we are addressing here specifically those for whom peace and co-existence is not possible, those for whom anyone who does not bow to their ideology must be eliminated.

So why is the Christian a threat? It is because he believes in the resurrection.

Christianity is the only faith in the world whose seminal, defining event is the death and resurrection of the God whom we worship. And we believe that we can be joined to His death and therefore also His resurrection. We can join Him in the conquest of death itself. And if death itself can be conquered, that means that no king, no emperor, no premier, no president and no caliph can claim ultimate power over us.

Just look at the responses of the martyrs: They sometimes laugh in the face of martyrdom. Sometimes, they sing. Sometimes, they go out preaching. They so very often go out with the name of Jesus on their lips, praying even for those who are killing them. They go out with joy!

So while we feel the pain of their loss and grieve in our hearts for them and their families, and while we pursue all that we can to bring peace to that troubled land, we do not “grieve as those who have no hope” (I Thess. 4:13). An earthly power may slay the bodies of Christians, but he can have no ultimate power over them, for they have joined their risen Savior in the conquest of death itself.

We grieve the death of the martyrs, but our grief will be swallowed up in rejoicing. We rejoice with them in their victory over temptation, their victory over the cares of this world, their victory over even death, “the last enemy” (I Cor. 15:26).

Together, let us hear and write indelibly on our hearts these powerful words from our holy father John Chrysostom:

O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown! Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life reigns! Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave! For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen. (Paschal Sermon of St. John Chrysostom)

Filed Under: News & Events, Slider Tagged With: Bishop Thomas, martyrdom, Middle East

St. Paul's Represented at Enthronement in Brooklyn

December 11, 2014 By St. Paul Emmaus

On Saturday, December 6, St. Paul’s pastor Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick attended the enthronement services of the newly-elected Metropolitan Joseph, which were presided over by Patriarch John X of Antioch. Also in attendance were other St. Paul’s faithful and many hundreds of the clergy and faithful from through the Archdiocese, as well as most of the Metropolitans of the Holy Synod of Antioch and many other bishops.

Filed Under: News & Events, Photos, Slider Tagged With: Metropolitan Joseph, Patriarch John X

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St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church

Planting the Seeds of Orthodoxy,
Cultivating Christian Community

Telephone


610.965.2298

Address


156 E. Main St.
Emmaus, PA 18049

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