St. Paisius Orthodox Church

Our Services

Service Schedule

We hold the following services on a weekly basis:

Saturday:

  • Vespers, 5:00 p.m.
  • Confession is offered after Vespers

Sunday:

  • Hours and precommunion prayers, 9:20 a.m. Confessions are heard during hours.
  • Divine Liturgy, 10:00 a.m. Post-communion prayers and a parish meal follows.

All services are held at 2902 Evans Street, Fort Wayne, IN.

For services for Lent, Holy Week, or the Great Feasts, or for schedule changes, please consult our calendar.

Visitors are welcome at any service.

About the Services

Divine Liturgy

Sunday Divine Liturgy is the main service of the week, and is the center of human life. The Liturgy culminates in the distributing of the Holy Gifts (the Eucharist, or Holy Communion) to faithful Orthodox Christians.

The liturgy is divided into three parts. The first part is the Liturgy of Preparation. This involves the priest and any assisting clergy, as they vest and prepare for the service. The second part, the Liturgy of the Catechumens, is where the public liturgy begins, and includes the reading of the Epistle and Gospel for the day. It is called the Liturgy of the Catechumens because, during the time of persecution in the early Church, those who were not baptized (including catechumens, i.e. those who were preparing for baptism) were only permitted to attend this part of the liturgy, and would leave at the words “catechumens, depart!” We no longer require non-Orthodox to depart, but the words remain, as a testament to the persecutions the Church has undergone. Finally, there is the Liturgy of the Faithful, where the bread and wine offered up by the priest are transformed into the Body and Blood of Our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, and are offered to Orthodox faithful.

The liturgy primarily consists of scriptural texts. Much of the text of the liturgy is lifted straight from the Psalms, from the Gospels, and from the writings of St. Paul. What remains are litanies (where the Church asks for God’s mercy and help for ourselves, for others, and for all people) and several hymns composed by later generations of hymnographers.

There are several variations of the Divine Liturgy used throughout the Church year:

  • Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: Used most Sundays and weekdays
  • Divine Liturgy of St. Basil: Used during the Sundays of Lent and a few other times during the year, such as on Christmas Eve.
  • Divine Liturgy of St. Gregory (or Presanctified Liturgy): Used during weekdays of Lent and other fasting periods “presanctified” because it uses Gifts (the Eucharist) that were consecrated the previous Sunday.
  • Divine Liturgy of St. James: Celebrated in some places on the feast day of St. James, the Brother of Our Lord. This is a modified form of the oldest Christian liturgy, used by the Church in Jerusalem when James was bishop.

The two forms of the Liturgy we use most often, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Liturgy of St. Basil, are in fact largely variations or simplifications of the Liturgy of St. James. Thus, our Sunday worship is in direct continuity with the worship of the early Church.

Vespers

The service of Vespers is where the Church recalls the events of the Old Testament: the Creation of the world, the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, their expulsion from Paradise, the lives of the Patriarchs and Prophets and their hope of salvation.

Vespers is appointed for the evening, ideally at or around sundown. In the Orthodox Church the day begins at sunset, as it did for the Israelites. Therefore vespers on Saturday evening is actually the first service of Sunday, and is resurrectional in character. Vespers, in fact, is a very ancient service, tracing back to the evening prayer in the Temple.

The principal hymn of vespers, “O Gladsome Light,” was already well-known in the fourth century. It is sung when the lamps are lit, and calls our minds upwards from the earthly light of lamps and candles to the heavenly Light, Jesus Christ.

As in other services, the majority of vespers is taken from the Psalms, with some hymns interspersed. Sometimes, selections from the Old Testament are read at vespers, in keeping with its Old Testament themes.

Hours

In keeping with the words of David in the Psalms—“Seven times a day have I praised Thee” (Ps. 118:1641), and “At midnight I arose to give thanks unto Thee” (Ps. 118:62)—the Orthodox Church has appointed for eight times of liturgical prayer throughout the day: Vespers, at sunset, Compline before going to bed, Midnight Office at midnight, Matins in the early morning, the first hour at sunrise, third hour around nine o’clock, the sixth hour around noon, and the ninth hour around three o’clock.

Outside of monasteries, not all of these prayers are done in Church. However, on Sundays, we do pray the third and sixth hours before Divine Liturgy.

These short services commemorate events in sacred history. The third hour commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles at Pentecost, and also Pilate’s judgment of Christ, as well as the scourging and mocking of Our Lord, all of which happened around the third hour, according to Scripture. The sixth hour commemorates Christ being nailed to the life-giving Cross, which we know from the Gospels happened at noon.

  1. In Orthodox Bibles, the numbering of the Psalms is slightly different. Psalm 118 for us would be Psalm 119 in the Masoretic numbering familiar to Protestants. ↩︎