I would like to get the opinion of
@dzheremi on this issue because the Coptic Orthodox Church recently successfully eradicated a major outbreak of praise and worship music and thwarted a larger conspiracy of evangelicals who were trying to take over parishes in the extra-diocesan areas of the United States and also those parts of Egypt where the episcopacy was vacant, by getting rid of the extra-diocesan areas and appointing diocesan bishops to cover all the territories of the church in Egypt and the US, for example, the previously vacant cathedra of the Diocese of Muqattam, where His Holiness Pope Tawadros (Theodore) II (who is good friends with his Greek Orthodox counterpart, also named Theodore II) appointed a super-conservative bishop, HG Abanoub, who quickly restored tradition. When he arrived the cathedral had been remodeled to look like a movie theater and people hadn’t been to confession in over fifteen years in some cases.
HG Bishop Abanoub does not strike me as a particularly conservative bishop -- just a regular one dealing with a situation that was obviously out of control by the time he was appointed to deal with it. I've heard the same sorts of things that he told the worshippers at Muqattam from other bishops like HG Bishop Serapion of L.A. and HG Bishop Suriel of Australia (as he was at the time), neither of which are thought of as being especially conservative. I get the feeling that the conservative/liberal dynamic that might make sense in other churches is only kind of half-formed with regard to the Coptic Orthodox Church, at least insofar as I can tell from my vantage point. By that, I mean that everyone seems to (eventually) know about the trouble spots where things are clearly too liberal (that's precisely how HH knew where to send the group of bishops to investigate complaints in parts of the USA and Canada), but as far as places being
too conservative, I don't know where those would be. Maybe some people would say about the places overseen by "H.E. who shall not be named" of Damietta, Kafr el-Sheikh, and the monastery of St. Demiana, but even then people usually mean that in a "I wish he'd stop putting his foot in his mouth and making things more difficult than they need to be" sort of way, rather than saying that he's too liturgically conservative or whatever.
Anyway, I don't know what you want me to say about what HG managed to do at Muqattam that he hasn't already said himself, so here are the videos I always share of him yelling at people and generally cleaning house, as it
absolutely right given the circumstances. (It should be clarified here, as we are in EO territory so people here might not know this, that it is considered
extremely unusual in the Coptic Orthodox Church in particular to abstain from the Eucharist, so going
years without it or without confession when you are in a place where both are frequently availed of is an incredibly serious matter; it's not like some other churches wherein cultural attitudes or entrenched practices might make it so that people will only receive the Eucharist a few times a year. You are to receive, and you are to receive frequently. So if there were ever a situation wherein it would be seen as appropriate to address people as HG does below, this would be it.)
For some reason, the captions that used to be automatically included in the second video are now no longer available, but the uploader provided a handy translation of what HG is saying in the upload information box, which reads (with a small amount of syntactic clean-up by me):
"Here we will sing Orthodox hymns, which all 20 million Coptic Orthodox rejoice in. He who wants to sing Protestant, or non-Orthodox, hymns is free to leave along with those we have already sent out, and here we will sing Orthodox hymns."
That really is the long and short of it: If you don't want to follow the Orthodox faith, including chanting its hymns, you are free to leave. Here we will sing Orthodox hymns, as all the Church does and rejoices in doing. Period, end of story.
There's really no excuse for
not doing that, when you think about it.
