A Model of Mission

Why St. Innocent became, more than any other figure, the model of Orthodox mission: the way his method anticipated principles — vernacular Scripture and worship, indigenous clergy, inculturation, non-coercion — that the wider Christian missionary world would not generally embrace until the twentieth century; his place in the lineage of Orthodox missionary method from Saints Cyril and Methodius to St. Nicholas of Japan; and the contemporary scholarship, above all Michael Oleksa’s, that has presented the Alaskan mission as a theology of mission in its own right.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

Ahead of His Century

The principles set out in the previous file (see The Principles of Mission) read, to a modern eye, like a charter of twentieth-century missiology — and that is precisely their significance. The convictions Innocent practiced in the 1820s and codified in 1840 — that Scripture and worship belong in the vernacular; that the goal is an indigenous, self-governing, self-propagating Church led by native clergy; that the Gospel must be inculturated rather than imposed as a foreign culture; that conversion must be free and never coerced — are very largely the principles that the broader Christian missionary movement would arrive at only generations later, after the colonial missions of the nineteenth century had run their course (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, chs. 5–7; Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today).

This is not anachronism read backward into a saint. It is what the scholarship finds when it looks closely. Innocent did not merely tolerate the languages and cultures of the Aleut, the Tlingit, and the Sakha; he treated them as fit vessels for the Gospel and as the proper medium of an indigenous Church. Where so much nineteenth-century mission, Western and Russian alike, tended to equate Christianization with the imposition of the missionaries’ own civilization, Innocent worked to keep the two distinct — to give peoples Christ in their own tongue and leave them their own selves.

The Orthodox Missionary Lineage

Innocent did not invent this approach; he stood in, and powerfully renewed, an old Orthodox tradition. The pattern of vernacular Scripture and worship reaches back to Saints Cyril and Methodius, the ninth-century apostles to the Slavs, who created the Slavonic alphabet and translated the Liturgy so that a people might worship in its own language — the foundational precedent for the whole Orthodox missionary method (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. on the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance; Stamoolis). Their work was won against open opposition: in the so-called “trilingual heresy” their critics held that God might lawfully be praised only in the three languages of the inscription on the Cross — Hebrew, Greek, and Latin — and the brothers’ rejection of that claim fixed for the Orthodox East the principle that no tongue is unworthy of the Gospel (Trilingual heresy, summarized at en.wikipedia.org; OCA, Saints Cyril and Methodius, oca.org). It is hard to overstate how consequential this inheritance was. A missionary formed in that tradition did not have to be persuaded that an Aleut or a Sakha might worship in his own speech; he began from it as from an axiom. Innocent’s Aleut alphabet and Yakut Liturgy are the same act that Cyril and Methodius performed for the Slavs, repeated on the North Pacific frontier nine centuries on — and the irony is exact, for the Cyrillic letters in which the Sakha first read the Gospel were themselves the legacy of the brothers’ work.

He also belongs to a particular nineteenth-century flowering of Russian missionary energy that runs alongside and after him. His near-contemporary in the Altai, the Archimandrite Makarii (Glukharev), pursued a comparable vernacular method among the peoples of southern Siberia, learning the local languages and translating Scripture for them; that two such figures arose in the same generation, independently reaching for the same approach, suggests it welled up from the tradition itself rather than from any one man’s genius. And Innocent’s work points forward to St. Nicholas (Kasatkin) of Japan, the apostle of the Japanese Church, who from 1861 labored for half a century to build an indigenous, Japanese-speaking Orthodox Church — translating the Scriptures and services into Japanese, forming a native clergy, and leaving behind a Church led and staffed by the Japanese themselves. Nicholas’s method is recognizably of the same family as Innocent’s: vernacular worship, inculturation, and an indigenous hierarchy as the goal rather than a permanent foreign chaplaincy. Together these figures constitute a Russian missionary tradition of inculturation of which Innocent is the great pioneer, and which links the ninth-century mission to the Slavs with the modern Orthodox missions of Asia and America (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today).

It is this lineage that lets us say with precision what was and was not original in Innocent. The principles were not new — they were Cyril and Methodius’s, and behind them the apostolic pattern of Pentecost, when each heard the Gospel in his own tongue. What was distinctive was the rigor, breadth, and documentation with which Innocent applied them: he did not merely translate but built an alphabet and a literary language; he did not merely tolerate native custom but studied it with an ethnographer’s care; and he did not merely hope for native clergy but founded the seminary and performed the ordination that produced them. Above all, in the Instruction to Missionaries he set the method down in writing as a coherent rule for others to follow (see The Principles of Mission). The tradition supplied the principles; Innocent gave them a charter.

Oleksa and the “Theology of Mission”

The modern recovery of Innocent as a model owes most to the Alaskan priest-scholar Michael Oleksa, whose Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission (1992) presents the entire Alaskan mission — from the 1794 Kodiak monks through St. Herman, St. Innocent, and St. Jacob Netsvetov — not as a quaint colonial episode but as a coherent and instructive theology of mission (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, throughout). Oleksa argues that the Alaskan mission embodied a distinctive vision: that the Church, in entering a new culture, baptizes and fulfills what is good in it rather than destroying it, and that the native peoples of Alaska were genuine partners in, not merely objects of, the work of the Gospel. On this reading Innocent’s method is not just admirable history but a living resource for how the Church might evangelize any culture.

The theological core of Oleksa’s reading is the conviction that the Incarnation is itself the model of mission. As the eternal Word took up a particular human nature — a language, a body, a culture — without ceasing to be God and without destroying the humanity He assumed, so the Church entering a people takes up that people’s language and culture, redeeming rather than abolishing them. On this view the vernacular Liturgy is not a concession to weakness but a small enactment of the mystery of Pentecost, where the Spirit gave the apostles to be heard each in his own tongue, and an image of the Incarnation itself, where the divine becomes audible in the particular. The dignity Innocent accorded Aleut and Sakha speech and custom thus follows from the center of the Christian faith and not merely from a humane temperament. This is what allows Oleksa to call the Alaskan mission a theology of mission rather than a mere history of one: it is the working-out, on the North Pacific frontier, of how the Church understands its own God to act in the world (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, chs. 1–2, 5–7).

That reading has carried weight beyond Orthodoxy. Innocent appears in the broader literature of mission studies — for instance in the comparative missiology of James Stamoolis — as a key witness to a non-coercive, inculturating model of mission, and the Boston University History of Missiology project lists him among the significant figures in the global history of Christian mission (Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today; Innocent (Veniaminov), Boston University, History of Missiology [bu.edu/missiology]). The convergence is striking: by the late twentieth century the wider Protestant and Catholic missionary worlds had, after the reckonings of the post-colonial era, largely arrived at the same convictions — indigenization, vernacular Scripture, respect for receiving cultures, the handing-over of leadership to native churches. To read Innocent’s 1840 Instruction against the mission-studies consensus of the 1980s is to find a nineteenth-century Russian bishop already holding much of what the rest of the field would take a further century and a hard self-examination to reach. That is the precise sense in which Oleksa and others present him not as a museum piece but as a resource: the questions modern mission has had to ask, Innocent had in large part already answered.

The Limits of the Model

A serious account must also mark the limits, and they are real. The first is a limit of efficacy: the model worked best where, as among the Aleuts, the people were already disposed toward the Church, their society shaken and reoriented by a generation of Russian contact before the missionary arrived; among the Tlingit, a powerful and independent people who had not been so reduced, it made little headway until the smallpox catastrophe of 1835–37 had broken their confidence in their own shamans and reshaped the field (see Smallpox and the Turning). That the method advanced fastest where the ground had already been disturbed is a sobering qualification of any triumphal reading, and it should be stated plainly: gentleness and the vernacular were not magic, and where a people remained whole and self-assured the mission largely waited.

The second limit is one of entanglement. The mission as a whole remained embedded in the Russian-American Company’s commercial empire — it travelled on the Company’s ships, depended on the Company’s sufferance, and ministered to a population the Company existed to exploit — and, later, in the imperial advance to the Amur (see The Immense Diocese). Innocent’s principles pulled against the logic of that setting, but they did not escape it; the same bishop who refused to coerce baptism blessed the foundation of an imperial frontier town. The third limit is one of realization: the indigenous Church Innocent envisioned was only partly built in his own lifetime, resting on a thin layer of native clergy and a handful of seminaries, and its full flowering would be the work of later generations — and would survive, in Alaska, even the empire that had planted it. To hold Innocent up as a model is not to claim the Russian mission was without coercion, entanglement, or failure — it is to say that his principles, where they were followed, pointed a better way, and that the modern Church has been right to recover them. That is the honest sense in which St. Innocent is the model of Orthodox mission.

References

Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The Alaskan mission as a theology of mission; the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance; inculturation; the native peoples as partners.)
Stamoolis, James J. Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986 (repr. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press). (Innocent within the Orthodox missionary tradition of vernacular and indigenous mission; Cyril and Methodius; the Russian missionary lineage.)
Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (Innocent’s method and its place in the history of mission.)
Innocent (Veniaminov). Boston University School of Theology, History of Missiology (bu.edu/missiology). (Innocent in the global history of Christian mission.)
Saints Cyril and Methodius, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), The Orthodox Faith, Church History; and Trilingual heresy (en.wikipedia.org). (The ninth-century Slavonic alphabet and vernacular Liturgy; the rejection of the “trilingual heresy” that God might be worshipped only in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin — the foundational precedent for the Orthodox vernacular method.)