Many local Orthodox Churches, with thousands of clerics and monks, are circumscribed within their ethnic boundaries. They do not even dare to think of sending even a few properly prepared missionaries — with an appropriate ecclesiastical understanding — to work in other places, to strengthen the already existing, often small, cells of Orthodox believers. This exclusive, turning-inward to one land or one people simply does not correspond to the meaning of apostleship, of mission, as it is defined in the New Testament.
In North America especially [in Britain too], the Orthodox witness is offered within a dynamic society with universal interests. In such a society Orthodoxy is in a state of mission — and she cannot, certainly, be content with a museum-like preservation of the glorious Orthodox past of far away homelands. Something substantially new and important ought to arise from this situation. We live in an age of extraordinary human creativity, the fruits of which are especially apparent in the realm of scientific achievement. I believe that a basic characteristic of our human nature, of being created in the image of God, together with freedom, reason, and love is creativity. In each new generation, with its unique challenges, we are called to offer the eternal treasure contained in the Church, thinking and acting creatively, and in organic continuity with the original, the apostolic tradition.
— Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, ‘Mission in Christ’s Way’, pp. 266–267.
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