On the Importance of Missions

Christ is Risen!

I'm on the mailing list for St. Vladimir's Seminary, so every once in a while they send me a request for donations.  Once a year, they include a small theological tract with the mailing.  This year, that tract spoke to the missional vocation given to all Christians through baptism.  I found it highly encouraging, and wanted to share a few thoughts from it with you all.

The pamphlet's author, Fr. Hatfield, has spent significant time in missions - first as a Protestant (in South Africa) and then with Orthodoxy (on the board of the Orthodox Christian Missions Center, and as a co-chair of the OCA Department of Evangelism).  He's working on an expanding set of courses in missiology for St. Vlad's. 

He opens with an audacious quote: "Christian initiation and its attendant rite of baptism is the proper and primary business of the Church."

Think about it for a minute.  Yes - we would say the Eucharist holds center, but the early church tended to view the Eucharist as the continuation of the Baptismal regeneration.  We are indeed commanded to eat the bread and drink the cup often, but Christ's final words to His community as His ascension were "Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."  After the Church had gained ascendency over the empire, Baptism became less of a focus and Eucharist (especially in the West in the 800's) rose dramatically in its centrality.  This is not to say that either one has been dismissed by the Church at any time - both are vital.  But, as Fr. Hatfield explains the quote, "The Orthodox Church is in the business of making converts."  He quotes Archbishop Anastasios of Albania as saying: "A Church without mission is a contradiction in terms... Indifference to mission is a negation of Orthodoxy."  Hatfield then makes the strongest claim in the text, expanding the idea to say: "A Christian not engaged in mission is simply not a Christian."

More after the jump