Your Beatitude, Your Eminences, Your Graces, God-fearing Monastics, Reverend Fathers, Brother, Sisters, and guests:  Christ is in our midst!

I thank you all for the privilege, honor, and joy to serve as the Chair of the Department of Evangelization.

The Department of Evangelization bears witness to the One, Holy Catholic, and Apostolic Church to all who ask, seek, and knock, while encouraging every Orthodox Christian actively to engage his or her missionary vocation.

In a single sentence, it could be said that the Department of Evangelization is everyone’s department, since it is every baptized Christian’s vocation to bear witness to what he or she has seen and heard, to speak of all the good that God has done in his life, to share the “G"ood “N"ews of the Gospel in word and deed with everyone who will listen.

Yesterday, Fr Barnabas Powell asked me: what is one exciting work of the Department?  Allow me to share two:

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1. The planting grant is a remarkable program producing enduring fruit.  In the last decade, about 2 dozen missions have benefited from the generosity of the wider Orthodox Church in America, allowing for a full-time pastor from the infancy of the missions.  The vast majority of them have grown into full parishes filled with missionary and evangelical fervor.  The current bunch includes:

• St Katherine’s, Encinitas, CA, Fr Andrew Cuneo

• Holy Archangels, Annapolis, MD, Fr Robert Miclean

• Holy Apostles, Lansing, NY, Fr James Worthington

• St John’s, Tempe, AZ, Fr Andre Paez

• St James’, Beaufort, SC, Fr James Bozeman

Hopefully you have seen their smiling faces at our Departmental Booth in the hall.  We have a few gifts to share with you there, including a bumper magnet to inspire others to (SLIDE)  ASK YOU ABOUT ORTHODOXY.

Currently there are five grants, representing five dioceses, in a variety of settings including big cities, rural towns, and a mission whose beginning was the fruit of ministry to The United States Naval Academy and St Johns College.

God bless these pastors and their faithful, as they seek to do what was done for you and for me so that we might be Orthodox Christians.  And thank you for your generosity to them.

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2. A second Example is Mexico.  His Eminence, Abp Alejo, mentioned this yesterday briefly. A large chunk of the missionary and evangelical work in Mexico is in VERY rural settings.  Rural like many of us have never seen.  So rural that indoor plumbing is rare, and the travel to such villages can take 6 or 8 hours in most-difficult terrain in very sketchy transportation.  In one of these villages, we are building a missionary outpost:  a home for a resident priest, which can also sleep up to a dozen or so visiting missionaries.  This village, San Esteban, can and does serve as a missionary hub to many other neighboring villages within an hour by car from there (at 10 mph in the mountains).  Until the completion of this home, Fr Seraphim, the assigned priest, has only been able to visit there and any of these villages a few times per year.

These are a few examples of the good work that we see each day with the assistance of the Department.

There are scores and scores of such Good News scattered all across Canada, the United States, and Mexico in the Missions and Parishes of the Orthodox Church in America.  I look forward to hearing about such work in the workshop this afternoon and tomorrow.  In fact, I will give you all an assignment:

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Please think today:  What is one way that God is working in your very own life?  And What is one way that he is working in the life of your parish or mission?  Your homework is to tell one person about this today.

That is very Good News.

CHANGING GEARS:

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Many well-intentioned people are looking the silver bullet of evangelism or church growth.

There is no silver bullet for evangelization.  No program will fix it.  No bequest will buy us success.  And, as His Grace Bishop David recently wrote, St Herman and his fellow missionaries had nothing BUT the Gospel—and look at what amazing success they had.

What is needed?  What is the root of evangelism?


• A broken and contrite heart.

• A new and right spirit.

• A profound attitude of gratitude to God.

• A genuine love of one’s neighbor.

We have to renew our understanding of what we believe and why;  Archimandrite Gerasim, in his homily at Vespers last night called it

“An unapologetic apologetic”. 

We need to be confident and unashamed of our Orthodox Faith.

We also need to know what we are facing—just as the early Christians did.

Today, one enemy of Christianity is cleverly called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”.  Here are the five points:

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I have heard Fr Stephen Freeman summarize this view saying:

GOD HAS COME TO MAKE BAD MEN BETTER.

BUT This is not Orthodox Christianity. 

Our problem is not a lack of goodness or an abundance of badness.  Our problem is death.

God has not come to make bad men better. 

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He has come to raise dead men to new life.

Consider one more perspective:

There is a lot of talk about ORIENTATION in the news today.

Orientation can mean “facing a certain way”.  But what it actually means is FACING EAST.  And “Orient” is a name we ascribe to our Lord Jesus Christ.  Orientation means to face Jesus Christ!

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Much of what our culture calls “ORIENTATION” is actually what we would call “disorientation”.  The Healing of disorientation—also called sin—begins facing the direction of that sin: West, renouncing it three times, and even spitting upon it, and the devil.

The Christian life then begins by RE-ORIENTATION:  Facing east again—actually in the liturgical celebration, and spiritually in our return to face Jesus Christ once again.  Facing Jesus Christ, we can answer his invitation to draw near to him, however unworthy we may retain, even after renouncing our dizziness.

This is New Life.  This is the gift of illumination that each of us has been given, the road to which we are each called to share with everyone who will listen.

You and I have been given the gift of heaven on earth.  The Lord God himself, Jesus Christ, has entrusted the vineyard of North America to each of us, city by city. 

Around us, people are dying in the streets—and in churches!  They are killing one another.  Our supreme court normalized the killing of children four decades ago.  There are reports *this very week* of the trafficking IN THIS COUNTRY of the body parts of aborted babies. 

The US supreme court recently normalized disorientation.  Pornography is absolutely destroying men—and boys.  The average 1st exposure to pornography among males is 12 years old.  AVERAGE FIRST EXPOSURE.  Half of all Hotel guests order pornography on their televisions.  There are 1400 rooms in this hotel.  Christians are not exempt.  These are all recipes for death.

Add to these horrors that Our neighbors are lonely and largely unknown to us.  Many elderly in retirement homes are neglected or abandoned.  Prisons are full (and rumor has it that the fastest growing religion in prison is ISLAM).

But at the Liturgy tomorrow we will once again sing, “We have seen the true light, we have received the heavenly spirit, we have found the true faith: worshipping the undivided Trinity, who has saved us!”

Do we believe it or just sing it?

If we don’t believe it, it is disingenuous to sing it, and to call ourselves Orthodox Christians.

If we do believe that we have seen the true light, that we have received the heavenly spirit, and that we have found the true faith, then we have an obligation of love and a debt of gratitude to pay by sharing the true light and the heavenly spirit with everyone who will listen.

If we believe this, we will cease to bicker as tight-fisted selfish people, and begin to be open handed and generous.

As His Eminence, Archbishop Mark said in his profound opening words to this Council:

We will start asking questions like, “how may I serve?”

How may I give?

How shall we use God’s abundant resources?

How can I make room for our neighbors in the church?

To what is God calling us?

and finally—for this presentation—I will add:

Do I really see myself as the first of sinners?

In all probability, in the coming years, the Church may grow smaller.  But there are at least two possible reasons for a shrinking church: 

1. the first is because yet again, we might go away from our Corporate Gathering and return to the status quo, where large sections of the OCA shrivel due to selfishness, stinginess, and xenophobia.

2. the second would be because a time of flight would occur by those who, being faced with the call to abandon sin and death find the invitation intolerable.  The sickness they know is far more comfortable than the healing they do not know. 

If the church shrinks for the first reason, we need to begin our corporate confession right now, if there is any hope of avoiding the resurrection of judgment.

If for the second reason, we have the chance to sharpen our pastoral scalpels, to clean our pastoral surgical suites, to disinfect our ecclesiastical hospital because NO human being wants to die.  And once others realize the health and healing and goodness, and hope of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, many will flock to find the healing you and I are finding.

The key is repentance and martyria, witness.

The questions are these: 

1. how has God worked in YOUR life? 

2. How is he saving YOU?  Healing YOU?  Changing YOU?

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Alexei Krindatch has done many in-depth studies of Orthodoxy in North America.  This map shows, by county, the absence of Orthodoxy in the United States.  I like to call this map “the Fields are white for harvest.”  Every white spot represents ZERO Orthodox Christians in that county.

The final question is :  To where shall we go to share the love of God and his salvation?

With the answer to these questions, from this AAC:  Go home, and tell your friends all the Good that God has done for you, and invite them to come and see!

Evangelization is saying “I love you because God first loves us.  Let us find his healing and forgiveness together.”

Thank you.