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"lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world-age. "

--Lord Jesus Christ (Gospel of St. Matthew)








Stories spill over into stories, the way the smooth face of my lake spills over from color to color. Where does the colorful overflowing of the water under the sun end, and where does the overflowing of stories into stories end?.... What the stars write across heaven, the grass whispers on earth. What the water gurgles in the sea, fire rumbles beneath the sea. What an angel says with his eyes, the imam shouts from his minaret. What the past has said and fled, the present is saying and fleeing.... When I say Your name, I have said everything and more than everything.

--St. Nikolai Velimirovic, "Prayers by the Lake"

Bucknell Hall Group 

Our Mission

The Orthodox Christian Fellowship provides a community at Bucknell for Orthodox Christians and those from all backgrounds who are interested in experiencing the deep spiritual beauty of early Christian traditions as an alternative to dominant cultural models of consumerism, materialism and objectification. It does so recognizing that Christianity calls us to a profoundly counter-cultural stance in our society.

The Bucknell OCF encourages a personal and experiential sense of academic community, drawing on international backgrounds of the worldwide Church adapted to local cultures. This extends scriptural standards of living and loving in our daily lives to include growth in empathetic relationship with other human beings; with God's visible and invisible Creation; and, especially, with God's grace or energies through the personal Logos, Jesus Christ.

The OCF sponsors regular liturgies and services on campus during the academic year, fellowship opportunities, and seeks to develop service work and positive engagement of Orthodox Christian life with academic life and work.

The Bucknell OCF is a pan-Orthodox group welcoming those of all backgrounds as visitors, and as members and communicants those who embrace the Orthodox faith in seeking redemption and forgiveness through baptism and chrismation and daily ascetic effort under a spiritual guide in a canonical Orthodox church. Given the lack of a Coptic Christian organization at Bucknell, we particularly welcome to our services and fellowship those Bucknellians of Coptic background as well.

The Bucknell OCF has been established as a Bucknell student group with an attached campus minister and spiritual adviser, Father James Chuta, through the blessing of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), and with the help of the Bucknell Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life. In addition, the on-campus OCF faculty adviser is warden of the nearby Russian Orthodox Church Outsdide Russia (ROCOR) mission parish in the Lewisburg area, which has the blessing of Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. Both the OCA and ROCOR participate in the cross-jurisdictional North American Orthodox Episcopal Assembly that sponsors Orthodox Christian Fellowships at campuses nationwide. The OCF maintains close ties and joint members with both Holy Cross and Holy Protection through its spiritual and faculty advisers, as well as with the Greek women's monastery in White Haven, PA, Holy Protection Monastery.

 

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