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The All Saints Community
The human being is a communal being. God is community - the perfect community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - and we, having been made in His image, are made to live in community.
Love, in all genuine expressions, needs another to be love. The church, as a body, as an ecclesia, is the restored communion of people, not just with God through His Son, Jesus Christ, but also with each other in Jesus Christ. The Church is community, restored and revealing the community of the Godhead. The Church is the sacrament of community.
For these reasons and many more, All Saints takes community life very seriously. The open Gospel in the icon of Christ on our iconostasis reads, "You did not choose me, but I chose you, that you might go and bear fruit. " We might think that we chose a community, for this or that reason, but in reality God has chosen us to live within and learn to love the community in which He has placed us.
We believe that community should first and foremost we be a worshipping body, and should, as importantly, be a studying one. But a really, really important ingredient of any Orthodox community life (one which is generally overlooked) must be simple fun. We laugh, sing, play games and spend time together. Friendship, one of the four Greek loves (and the most important), is born from this fun, and matures in the worship and Paradosis also inherent in our communal life.

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Clergy of All Saints of Alaska
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The Orthodox Prayer Book
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