The Principles of Mission

The missionary method of St. Innocent, drawn from his practice and from the Instruction to Missionaries he composed in 1840 for the priests of his new diocese: the Gospel and the services in the vernacular; catechesis before baptism and no coercion; deep respect for native cultures and a refusal to confuse Christianization with Russification; and the raising up of a native and creole clergy so that the Church might become indigenous rather than remain a colonial import.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A Method Born of Practice

St. Innocent’s missiology was not a theory worked out in a study but a method distilled from fifteen years of practice on the Aleutian frontier before he ever wrote it down. By the time he became a bishop in 1840 he had already lived the principles: he had learned the Unangan language and preached without an interpreter, given the Aleut a written tongue and Scripture in it, built churches with native craftsmen, and formed his judgment of native peoples not from prejudice but from a decade of close acquaintance (see The Aleut Mission and Language and the First Aleut Book). When he set the method down on becoming a bishop, he was codifying what he had already done (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 6; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5).

The Instruction to Missionaries (1840)

That codification is his *Nastavlenie* — his Instruction to a priest appointed for the conversion of unbelievers and the guidance of converts in the Christian faith — written in 1840 for the missionary priests of his vast new diocese, and applied to particular field missions such as that to the Nushagak in southwestern Alaska (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 6; Oleksa, ed., Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, which prints the English text). The Instruction is one of the foundational documents of Orthodox missiology and the clearest statement of the principles by which Innocent worked. The English text is most accessible in Michael Oleksa’s anthology Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, the proper place to consult its actual wording; the summary that follows reports its principles as the scholarship reports them, without reconstructing its language from paraphrase.

The document deserves a moment’s notice for what kind of writing it is. It was composed by a bishop at the very threshold of his episcopate, in the same season as his consecration, and addressed not to scholars but to working priests about to be sent into the field — men who would face, alone and unsupervised, the daily decisions of when to baptize, what to tolerate, and how to bear themselves before peoples they did not yet understand. Its tone is therefore practical and pastoral rather than systematic; it reads as the distilled counsel of a man who had already made those decisions on Unalaska and Sitka and now wished to spare his priests the errors he had learned to avoid. That a missionary rule of this seriousness was issued at all, by a frontier Russian bishop in 1840, is itself remarkable, and it is why the document has become a touchstone for later Orthodox reflection on mission (Oleksa, ed., Alaskan Missionary Spirituality; see A Model of Mission).

The governing principles are these:

1. The vernacular. The Gospel, the catechism, and so far as possible the services are to be given to a people in its own language. A faith preached and prayed in a foreign tongue remains foreign; the Word must become native speech. This was the conviction behind the Aleut alphabet and the Yakut Liturgy alike (see The Immense Diocese). The principle is not Innocent’s invention but the oldest reflex of Orthodox mission, descending from Saints Cyril and Methodius, who in the ninth century gave the Slavs an alphabet and translated the Liturgy into their tongue against the “trilingual” claim that God might be worshipped only in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (see A Model of Mission). Innocent stands squarely in that tradition: where much of Western Christendom long held the sacred languages to be few and fixed, the Orthodox East had a precedent, more than nine centuries old, for the conviction that every people may hear and pray in its own speech.

2. Catechesis before baptism, and no coercion. The missionary is to instruct before he baptizes, and to baptize only those who sincerely ask. Innocent’s instruction was that no one should be drawn to the font by force, fear, or material inducement; the missionary is to wait until a genuine desire for the faith appears, and to win assent by persuasion and example rather than pressure (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 6; Innocent (Veniaminov), Boston University, History of Missiology [bu.edu/missiology]). In an imperial and colonial setting where conversion could so easily be coerced or bought, this insistence on freedom of conscience is among the most striking features of his method.

3. Respect for the convert and his culture. The missionary is to approach the people with patience, gentleness, and genuine respect — to learn their ways, to avoid contempt, and not to demand the abandonment of innocent customs as the price of baptism. Innocent did not confuse the Gospel with Russian culture; he sought to plant Christ among peoples, not to make them Russians. His own often-quoted judgment, formed among the Aleuts, that the so-called “savages” were in morality “much better than many of the so-called enlightened ones,” expresses the disposition behind the whole method (Veniaminov’s writings, quoted in Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4). The distinction he drew — between Christianization and Russification — is the sharpest point of his missiology and the one most often blurred in the colonial missions of his age. To make a man a Christian is not to make him a Russian; the demand that converts adopt Russian dress, names, language, and manners as a condition of the faith Innocent regarded as a confusion of the Gospel with an empire. Only where a custom was actually sinful was it to be opposed; a custom that was merely strange to Russian eyes was to be left in peace. This was a costly discipline in a setting where the easy course was to treat baptism as enrollment in Russian civilization, and it is the chief reason his mission produced Aleut and Sakha Christians rather than imitation Russians.

4. The integrity and example of the missionary. Much of the Instruction concerns the missionary himself: his prayer, his patience, his freedom from greed, his readiness to endure hardship, and the example of life without which his words are empty. The convert is won as much by what the priest is as by what he says.

The Theology Beneath the Method

These are not four detached tactics but the working-out of a single theological vision, and it is worth naming the convictions beneath them. The first is an understanding of the human person as already, before any missionary arrives, the bearer of God’s image and the object of His love — so that the peoples of the Aleutians and the Lena are not blank pages but souls in whom the missionary expects to find conscience, virtue, and a capacity for God. It was on exactly this ground that Innocent could write, out of his Aleut years, that “the more I become acquainted with the savages, the more I become convinced that, as far as morality is concerned, the so-called wild ones are much better than many of the so-called enlightened ones” (Veniaminov’s writings, via Oleksa, ed., Alaskan Missionary Spirituality; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4). The second conviction is that grace does not violate freedom: because faith is the free turning of the will toward God, a baptism extracted by force or fear is not merely uncharitable but theologically void of the very thing it should signify — hence the refusal of coercion. The third is that the Church, in entering a culture, comes to fulfill and not to destroy: it baptizes what is good in a people’s customs and speech rather than demanding their erasure, on the pattern of the Word made flesh, who took up human nature without abolishing it. The non-negotiable line falls only where a custom is sinful, not where it is merely foreign. From these convictions the four practical principles follow as naturally as conclusions from premises (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, chs. 4–5; Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today).

A Native Church, Not a Colonial Chaplaincy

Underlying all of this was an aim larger than any single conversion: Innocent meant to build a native Church, not a colonial chaplaincy. He worked to raise up a clergy from among the native and creole peoples themselves — founding a seminary at Sitka for that purpose, and ordaining men like the Aleut-creole priest St. Jacob (Iakov) Netsvetov, the first native Alaskan priest, who carried the mission to peoples Innocent never reached (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 6; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5; see Toward the American Church). A Church served by native priests, praying in native languages, and standing on its own feet — this was the goal toward which the vernacular, the catechesis, and the seminaries all pointed.

The aim of native clergy carried its own deep theology. In the Orthodox understanding the Church is not fully planted in a place until it can stand on its own — until it has within it the episcopal and priestly orders that make it a complete eucharistic body rather than a dependency served from outside. A mission that imports its priests forever remains a colonial chaplaincy; a mission that ordains the converts’ own sons becomes a Church. This is why Innocent’s labor to consecrate a seminary at Sitka and to ordain a native priest was not an administrative convenience but the very point: the indigenous Church he wanted was one that could generate its own life, pray in its own tongue, and outlive the empire that had brought the first missionaries. The ordination of St. Jacob Netsvetov was, in this light, a more radical act than any single sermon — the Church in Alaska beginning to reproduce itself from within (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 5; see Toward the American Church).

It must be said plainly that the actual practice of the Russian mission did not always live up to these principles, and that the mission as a whole was entangled with the fur trade and imperial power (see Smallpox and the Turning and The Immense Diocese). The Instruction was a counsel of the ideal, written by a bishop for priests scattered across a frontier he could rarely visit; how far any given missionary honored it depended on the man, and some did not. Coercion, neglect, and the confusion of Christianizing with Russifying were real temptations of the field, and the Russian-American Company’s interest in a docile, baptized labor force did not always pull the same way as the Gospel of free assent. To present the principles as the uniform reality of the mission would be hagiography of the cheap kind. But the principles themselves — vernacular, non-coercion, respect, indigenous clergy — were genuinely Innocent’s, genuinely practiced by him, and remarkably far in advance of much missionary thinking of his century, Orthodox or otherwise. They are the reason that twentieth-century missiologists, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, returned to him as a model (see A Model of Mission).

See Also

References

  • Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The 1840 Instruction to Missionaries; vernacular, catechesis, non-coercion, respect, and native clergy; the Sitka seminary; Netsvetov.)
  • Oleksa, Michael J. (ed.). Alaskan Missionary Spirituality. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987 (repr. SVS Press, 2010). (The English text of Innocent’s Instruction — the proper source for its actual wording.)
  • Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The theology of the method; respect for native culture; the “savages better than the enlightened” judgment; the indigenous-church aim.)
  • Innocent (Veniaminov). Boston University School of Theology, History of Missiology (bu.edu/missiology). (Non-coercion; baptism only of those who sincerely ask; sympathetic study of native custom.)