Evangelisation through Theophany

"Theophany" means, “showing forth of God”

I had an interesting telephone conversation with an Orthodox friend, we spoke about evangelisation. For Catholics we tend to think about it in terms of RCIA, The Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, properly a series of Rites that lead to Baptism, Confirmation and the reception of the Holy Eucharist, in practice most of the “Rites” are omitted and it becomes the name given to the course in adult formation that ends up in reception of sacraments of initiation. In theory it supposed to be a series of preparatory encounters with God preparing the initiate for Enlightenment at Baptism, it is supposed to be the “Rite” itself (albeit with an explanation) that leads the initiate from the world of the paganism to Christ.

My friend was telling me about an article he read in an Orthodox magazine about “Evangelisation through Theophany” in Russia. One of the problems that the Orthodox Church has there is that there are vast remote areas where the Church was extinguished during the communist era, so there are no priests, no churches, no sacraments and little understanding of the Gospel.

The Orthodox answer: hire a train, put on it a half a dozen priests and monks, convert one of the carriages into a chapel.

The process: the train arrives in a village or town, is shunted into a siding, the priests hire a local hall, posters are put up there is a procession through the town with vested priests carrying icons and liturgical banners, they go to the hall, there is a short talk about Orthodoxy, a blessing and distribution of icons or prayer cards, few faith based folk songs, a general invitation to baptism in the train’s chapel. Baptism in the orthodox world means all the sacraments of initiation, even babies are given communion, on the following day prayer books are distributed containing a brief explanation of the creed, baptism is given, the newly baptised are entrust to Christ and His Mother and the train moves on to the next village.

The follow-up: when I asked about it, my friend says, “They are entrust to Christ and His Mother, they do the evangelisation!”

It didn’t quite satisfy my modern western sense of evangelisation, There is a church-barge on the Volga provided by Aid to the Church in Need, which I presume does a similar thing.

I read somewhere, someone saying that the Council of Trent turned a Church from a place of worship into a school room. This Orthodox process seems the complete opposite, obviously even for most Orthodox this is not the ideal, but it is expedient, it is essentially about “Rite”; the procession, the distribution of icons, the rite of initiation itself. It was presumably more or less what happened when St Francis Xavier arrived on his ship, preached, showed pictures of Christ and his mother, distributed images and then proceeded to baptise people by the hundreds, and then moved on.

In the TLM at High Mass the Gospel was sung, not to the people, who had already heard it and responded, that is why they were in the Church, but to the North, the abode, at least of the Latin Rite of the Pagans, for years it wasn’t translated because the act of proclamation was a type of theophany, an act of God revealing himself, being present at his event was saving.
What I find interesting is that this is a different kind of evangelisation, the world of icons and processions, of sung Latin Gospels, of the Rites of Christian Initiation are about encounter with God. In some sense they are an encounter with “being” rather “doing”, like the silent Canon of the old Mass it is an encounter with a God who works in the depth of the soul, who yes, uses human agents but Himself is the real agent of change and of grace.

The photograph is of the Gospel being sung in the Dominican Rite from an article on todays NLM

I wonder if we have something to learn here.