Welcome.
This is the website for St John Orthodox Church. Our parish community is located in Cedar Park, Texas, a rapidly-growing suburb of the state capital, Austin.
We hope that you find the information on this site helpful. If you have questions, please contact us. However, the only way to actually experience the joy and beauty of Orthodox Christianity is to participate in a worship service, so we hope that you’ll take that step as soon as you’re ready.
We look forward to meeting you.
The Triodion, the three week period of preparation leading up to Great Lent, will begin on Sunday, February 17. That means it’s time to start thinking about how we are going to fast, when we will make our confession, how often we will participate in the weekday Lenten services (most weeks, there are services on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings), and which of the Saturdays of Souls we will be attending.
On Saturday, March 16, and Sunday, March 17, we will host our first Open House Weekend for 2019.
This year for St. Patrick's Day we will be hosting the Celtic Games at St. John's in Cedar Park directly after the Liturgy! So come with your kilt or a pair of jeans and t-shirt to change into an get ready to throw heavy objects for sport. The games will include a modified "Caber Toss" (half the size of a normal Caber), "Stone Throw" (a combo of golf and hammer throw), Snake Toss (obviously with rubber snakes) and this year we will also be playing a new game Joe has named "King of the Maze" which involves friendly pushing, shoving, and pulling to take over your opponents territory before he/she does.
From time to time, folks will ask me, “Do the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit really speak to us?” And when I assure them that the Most Holy Trinity does, indeed, communicate with us, the next question is always some version of this: “Well, how do you hear the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?”
Listening to the Most Holy Trinity is a skill, and, like any other skill, it can be learned. But there are two dimensions to this particular skill set: If you want to communicate with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the first thing you have to do is learn how to be quiet; the second thing you have to is learn the language of poetry.
Editor Scott Coleman wants to know what the Christmas Season means to me. The best way I can express that is by telling you what I’m going to be doing on the morning of Wednesday, December 26.
Like all Orthodox priests, I go to work on Christmas Day, but on the Day After Christmas, I get up while everyone else is still asleep. I go into the kitchen; I fire up the oven and one of the burners on the stove; I pull a cookie sheet and a frying pan out of the cabinets, then I reach into the refrigerator and get a pound of thick-sliced, super-smoked applewood-seasoned bacon, a tube of those ready-made biscuits, and a big tub of butter.
“Fact is, I had no reason to do it, and I just thought…(expletive deleted), life is boring so why not?”
That’s what the 1000 Oaks shooter posted on Instagram, when he paused in the midst of his stunning crime. The twenty-eight year old had already killed eleven people; he would go on to gun down a policeman and then take his own life.
We used to spend a good deal of time and energy wondering why someone would do something so terrible. We don’t do that much anymore, and that may be a sign that we’re actually getting used to this kind of random violence.
I finally figured it out. Y’know how a lot of times one person will remind you of someone else, but you just can’t quite put your finger on who that someone else is? That’s the way it’s been with me and our current president, Donald Trump. Of course, The Donald has been around for a long time. I never paid much attention to him until he started his presidential campaign; however, ever since then, I’ve been dogged by the thought that he just reminds me of someone else.
This time around Editor Scott Coleman wants to know whether the perspective of ‘once saved, always saved’ can be reconciled with the belief that we must repent and seek forgiveness on a regular basis. This is an issue that Protestants have been arguing about ever since that movement first got started 500 years ago.