The subject of this article is the problematic situation in the life of parish communities of the Russian Orthodox Church. On the one hand, the community is considered by various church actors to be an important component of church and social life, on the other hand, according to sociological research, a very small number of Russians actively participate in parish life. The question is, what is the cause of the situation?Today, the Church has a well-established idea of what a community is, namely a social entity characterized by horizontal connections between participants and their help either to each other or to someone outside. This understanding prevents comprehension of the source of the problem: people who come to church bring their ideas of good and right into religious life, which makes it possible to consider the parish community not as spontaneously emerging aid networks, but as a sum of actors taking different moral and practical stands. Their positions need to be correlated with each other in order to make relationships between people in the community productive. We assume that it is this need that marks the community limits: people will leave it if these ideals prove impossible to either reconcile or accept.Relations between people can be built through a reflexive correlation of moral and practical positions: a decision made about a particular problem or situation can be objectified and applied to another situation (this would usually be a decision about the establishment of a just social order). However, actors may also refuse to work out an objective and fair solution to avoid conflict here and now. This situation is very common in the Orthodox Church and is marked with the words “humility”, “patience”, “forgiveness”. A problematic situation turns out to be one in which actors move from a position of “having ideals and agreeing on them” to a position of “humility.” In the first case, we are talking about an Orthodox solution to the problem of justice; in the second case, we see the refusal to resolve the conflict through the search for a just solution. If the actors repeatedly have to move from the first position to the second and back, then the second position begins to be perceived as a concealment of injustice, unfair behavior, etc. We assume that these frequent movements in many cases may explain leaving communities.It is possible that the Orthodox Church has its own implicit theology of justice, but so far this ideal has been poorly reflected. This also adds to fluctuations between the two aforementioned positions. Our hypothesis is that in order to increase the number of community members and strengthen their solidarity, the Orthodox Church should work out a solution to this problem.