Orthodox evangelism

So I've been listening recently to The Ark, which is a contemporary Orthodox music Internet radio station. (It's billed as "Orthodox Christian music" but a good 50% of it is Evangelical music.) It's the closest thing to a contemporary Catholic music I have run across. Besides, I'm Eastern, anyway.

Anyway, today I heard my first ad on there targeting Catholics. The argument ran like this: Take away the last 1,000 years of changes from the Roman Catholic church, and you have the Orthodox Church. If you have been seeking a church that removes the last 1,000 years of change in the Roman Catholic church, come join the Orthodox Church.

Now I don't have a problem with someone who wins a soul away from a church through fair and square convincing them that your faith is the true faith. Christianity is an evangelistic religion, and I do not begrudge anyone who believes that someone cannot be saved unless they know the truth as they know it, and so proclaim to someone their perspective on the truth so that they might be saved. At least such people have strong convictions and I respect that. Also, we are responsible for evangelizing and catechizing our own people. If we don't do that well, and someone from another church does it better, then I have absolutely no sympathy for us.

That being said, the Orthodox tend to throw a temper tantrum any time we gain converts from them. There have been many conflicts over this. To be fair, in some cases we induced conversions through material goods (and sometimes cold, hard cash) and that's not right, but I don't think this is true of every case that the Orthodox complain about. So I consider it hypocritical for them to complain about our "proselytizing" while trying to steal our sheep.

(I suspect that the people who run this station have strong links to a group of Evangelicals who independently reconstructed something like the Orthodox church, and then when they realized the church they were seeking already existed, converted to Antiochene Orthodoxy sometime ago. I guess I'd call these the the Franky Schaeffer group, only because he's the most notable convert of that period. This would explain the emphasis on evangelism, which frankly is a concept pretty foreign to Orthodoxy.)

But in any case, let's address their claims. They say that if you take "Roman Catholicism" (and of course it is always "Roman" Catholicism), and remove one millennium of changes, poof, you'll get Orthodoxy. This is being disingenuous. Both faith and practice have been distinct between the West and the East from the beginning. Compatible, yes, but distinct. If you said remove 1,000 years and you'd have the Western half of Orthodoxy (a Western half that does not genuinely exist today in Orthodoxy), I might agree.

But what I found quite amusing that they were specifically appealing to Catholics who thought that we needed to strip 1,000 years of changes away from "Roman" Catholicism. Frankly I haven't run across too many such people who think, "Gee, I love Catholicism, but if you stripped away half it's history, it would be so much better." I'm not going to go so far as to deny that there are such people, but I'd argue that they'd have to be so far convinced of Orthodoxy anyway, that their invitation is probably not going to have a big impact on the outcome.

But let's address this issue of the 1,000 years of "changes" in Catholicism. Orthodoxy is a religion that prides itself on its tradition; in fact, if it were possible (and I'm sure your average Western religiously-educated person would be agog to hear this), Orthodoxy is more tradition-bound than Catholicism. Orthodoxy is also resistant to change, even more so than Catholicism. To use an example, the cycle of readings in the Byzantine rite is so old that it excludes the book of Revelation because its canonicity was still in doubt when the cycle was fixed. The last major reform of the liturgy was around the 4th century, when St. John Chrysostom redacted the liturgy that bears his name. Now what I find remarkable is that the practice of the Orthodox Church has changed much less now in that past millennium than it changed during the classical period of Christianity. In other words, Orthodoxy is stagnant. In the past 1,000 years, not only hasn't Orthodoxy changed like Catholicism, it hasn't changed at all; not to adapt to new technologies, not to face new challenges, nada. I do not see this as a virtue. But they don't have a choice; they have no leader who can approve, coordinate and execute such changes. Catholicism is dynamic; Orthodoxy is static. I wouldn't be bragging about being stuck in the 11th century (really, more like 5th or 6th).