Orthodox Mission in the World of Today

An Orthodox mission is a calling of the Church to follow Christ and lead to Christ. Since it was founded, the Church has been destined to teach, save, heal, transfigure, and deify humans and the whole creation. This mission has remained unchanged for the two millennia now and will continue so. Mission is the only and necessary mode of being for the Church as a Body of Christ and all genuine parts of this Body. Without evangelism, translated into a word and an action, without life consistent with the Good News of Jesus, Christianity is inconceivable, while Christian life is impossible.

An Orthodox mission has always come across fierce counteraction or, as it is commonly called now, challenges. These challenges lie in sinful passions, inspired by the evil forces. The Church is opposed to by demons and the people, who are under the devilish domination, and even by the believers when they yield to diabolic temptations. Sins and passions being nested in human hearts are the main enemy of the Christian mission.

Today this enemy appears as secularization of social life, relativization of morality, consumerism pseudo-culture, individualist liberalism and materialism. By turning away from God, the contemporary world is turning away from a human. We are witnesses and victims of the deepest crisis of the human and humanity, named anti-humanity or dehumanization.

The point is this crisis affects the whole world to a greater or lesser degree, one way or another. This is its fundamental distinction from all previous crises in the history of the mankind and its greatest threat. It hits, in the first line, highly economically and technologically developed countries. We are living in a global, informational, liberal and post-modern time – the time that makes no difference between good and evil, norm and anomaly; that leaves less and less place for traditional values and shared households; that has been waging a continual suicidal war, fighting with eternal traditions and principles.

In such a world it is extremely hard to preach, for the world does not hear you. Not just because it doesn’t want to, but because it is unable to understand the Gospel. An initial conflict between the Church and the world is exacerbated by the modern culture’s renunciation of Christianity and religion as it is with a shift to de-Chrisitianization and anti-religiousness. Due to this the Church and the world are currently speaking at cross-purposes.

The Church has always been guided by the century-old Legend, Tradition, Dogmata, reflected in the Holy Scripture, works of the Holy Fathers, praying and liturgical life. The Church is a bearer of dogmatic consciousness, based on the belief in absolute authority of the Divine Revelation.

In a post-modern relativist culture the notions of tradition and authority are actually renounced and become subject to ironic and playful attitude. A key value of such culture is novelty, which proves to be perverted and distorted being the implication of the ruined old and customary.

Owing to the above, there arises a reasonable question: does it make any sense to preach to such disbelieving world? Does the Orthodox mission have any prospects? Perhaps, the Church should lock itself in silent defense, reservation, away from the reality, its culture in order to preserve itself for those who stay loyal to the Church, at least for the sake of the salvation of the chosen?

Of course, no. The Church is called to sensible missionary exposure to the world. According to the commandment of Jesus Christ, It has to be in the world, but not belong to this world. The last commandment of the Lord before his Ascension was the one about the mission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19, 20).

This commandment is forever and for all circumstances. It contains not only a commandment, but also encouragement, support for an Orthodox missioner. So if God is with us, who can stand against us?! Therefore, we shouldn’t give up and fall into despair. For the Lord is with us, to the very end of the age, and there is no way we can suffer a defeat with God.

Our task is to be disciples of Jesus Christ. It means to “preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction” (2 Тimothy 4:2), not getting infected by the spirit of this world or casting pearls before swine. God will reward our efforts with fruits.

Nowadays thanks to the global media and the Internet we have a possibility to preach all over the world. It would be bad not to take advantage of it. We must use cutting-edge information technologies and resources as effectively possible to bring the people to the position which is alternative to an atheist mass culture.

A lot has been done in this direction both at the overall church level and local, diocesan and parochial levels. There are a number of church sites, social media, TV channels and other media. Orthodox subject-matter has been steadily increasing its niche in secular mass media. All this enables the Orthodox Church to run an educational, awareness-raising, missionary, and informational activity. It’s important to attract children and youth via the Internet and IT resources.

However, whatever the achievements might be, one shouldn’t flatter themselves. Surely, thanks to all technologies preaching can reach everybody’s ear. Yet how it’s going to work further, whether Logos will be accepted or rejected depends on a human only. This is a secret of human freedom we are unable to conceive or impact. The Lord Himself has respect for human freedom and never constrains or abuses it. We must remember about it when we want to get a person to come to church and do it through preaching, rather than imposing pressure.

A church missioner is neither a manipulator nor a PR-technologist: he does not deceive those he turns to, he does not push them to take the side which is profitable for him. A true Orthodox missioner dose not cheat people, he appeals to human freedom in an honestly and openly. Faith comes from hearing. Only those who have heard can come to the Church. But this is not enough – one needs to freely want to accept what they can hear in preaching.

In order to attract attention, to get contemporary people interested, it’s necessary to use one and the same platforms to engage the society into a dialogue, the key ones being patriotism, traditional family, upbringing, education, life security and health care, and, of course, mercy and charity.

Orthodoxy is a pillar of statehood and culture. However, one has to be careful not to succumb to the temptation of nationalism, when the nation and the state are placed higher than the Lord Jesus Christ and His Church, when an earthly life is preferred to a celestial one. It must be borne in mind that our true homeland is the Kingdom of God.

Particularly favorable to the Orthodox mission is a sphere of mercy and charity, inseparable from Christian evangelism. Mercy and charity constitute a universal language being clear to everybody and able to convince everybody without any words. That is why this is the right language to be spoken for Jesus Christ and His Kingdom.

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