Fr. Vazken Movsesian, an innovative priest in the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church, who dropped by this morning for coffee and conversation at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park, received his theological education in the late seventies in Armenia, which was to say the Soviet Union. Friends ribbed him about this back in Cold War days. Not everyone will remember that the Soviets, officially atheist, only relinquished control of the country in 1991.
According to tradition, Christianity arrived in Armenia in the first century. In A.D. 301 it became the world’s first officially Christian nation. The Soviets ruthlessly suppressed and harassed the church. But it persisted. Vazken said the 70-year Soviet episode was nothing compared to the memory hole carved out by genocide at the hands of the Turks.
By the time his grandfather came through Ellis Island in 1932, almost everyone in family was dead. The United States named him Movsesian. Vazken and untold other Armenian-Americans don’t know their pre-genocide family names. If the doctor asks for medical history, he can go no further back than his father. After the genocide, in which 1.5 million died from 1915-23, only a bishop, priest, and monk remained in the AOC’s succession.
Born and raised in east Hollywood, Vazken got a degree in psychology and social ethics at USC before seminary at the Monastery of Holy Etchmiadzin, the heart of the AOC, where he and future Burbank-based Archbishop Hovnan Derderian became classmates and fast friends. “I helped him with English,” Vazken said, “and he helped me with Armenian.” He caught the technology bug while pastoring a church in Cupertino, near the Apple campus, from 1982-96, launching a video and distance worship ministry long before it was fashionable.
In 2010, after Vazken had run a pioneering youth ministry in Glendale, when he became friends with the Rev. Canon Mark Weitzel at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale, the archbishop tapped him to help plan St. Leon’s Cathedral in Burbank while continuing his high-tech ministry. Check it out at epostle.net, where he tapes a daily message. The archbishop calls it the voice of the global church.
A natural-born pastor, for 25 years he has organized an annual service for parents whose children have died. I got to know him as the host of the archbishop’s annual ecumenical and interfaith Advent and Christmas service at St. Leon’s, where he graciously presides and gives me a thumbs up even when my remarks wax political. Though the AOC tends conservative along the same lines as Roman Catholicism and indeed many Anglican neighborhoods, he trusts in the open hearts of the young people he and the archbishop, another famed youth minister, have worked with throughout their ministries.
He smiled when he talked about appropriating young people’s slang term OG, standing for “original gangster” and meaning authentic, to describe the historic firsts of Armenian Christianity. He was off and running when he realized OG could also mean “original gospel.” He says Jesus was the first tweeter, since his greatest hits, including the golden rule, were confined to well under 140 words — especially the heart of the OG, he says, which is love.