This chapter is only two pages long. It describes the situation when people start their own churches or governing bodies, and by doing that are splitting themselves apart from the Church. Factors that are common in escalating schisms are political support from secular authorities and movements, zealous overreactions to changes in a local Church, such as the ecclesial calendar, and disagreements about obtaining status as an autocephalous (self-governing) church, which would describe something like a local Church emerging out of another local Church that once had some rights and privileges over the other. For this reason, among others, politics is a grave matter to bring into the Church or temples. Metropolitan Hilarion provides a several brief examples from the Balkans and Eastern Europe to illustrate how politics can interfere with and perpetuate schisms. Governments may help to heal schisms as well. But only as a proxy, and not the direct mechanism for settling church affairs.
A complication involved in jurisdictional disputes is that governments do not distinguish between “canonical and uncanonical.” Like a person’s own body, it needs to be regulated with food, temperature, intimacy and work. The growth and independence of churches also need to follow some regularity governed by canons (rules) that are applied by those in apostolic succession: the bishops over a Church. Another simple metaphor is one’s regulation of personal and social relationships. We navigate them, hopefully, with some ways of regulating ourselves and interact based on conscious or unconscious rules of behavior. It’s realistically a messy and imperfect way of living in this dimly lit world of this age. Nevertheless, we strive for perfection of love that banishes fear and deification in Christ Jesus. Patriarch John X spoke publicly in 2015 during an interview about peace and schism in Eastern Europe. He likened schisms and the people who promote them as family members who are sick and in need of healing. Just as when all the leaders (primates) of the Church met at Jerusalem to agree on what happened and what ought to be decided about gentile Christians, so too John X was expressing the principle of love that is conciliar, collegial, not according to the world of coercion and self-will, or absolute autonomy. When someone in our family falls deathly ill, we should dialogue with each person involved in care taking, since stress, emotions, intense disagreements are inevitably going to rise up.