E.N. The Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Aleksei II, in one of his statements, said that missionary work for the Russian Orthodox Church appears to be most important. Already, enough time has passed, and how is it that there is not any missionary work in the Church, in a Church with a great potential and a great tradition of missionary work.

V.E. The traditions are great, but the character of the missionary service changes in conformity with time and place. Let us say Metropolitan Makarii (Nevskii), the teacher of the people in Altai [a region in Siberia]; but this teacher of the people in Altai proved to be without strength to teach the revolutionaries, the baptized, and the educated in the Orthodox family. The Lord gives us time before anything. From my own practice, I was many times convinced that the momentum of consciousness is a powerful task. The Lord teaches us by the measure of our internal instruction of God’s Grace. Therefore, our so-called missionary activity is indeed long protracted among our fellow men, modern day men, who belong to the same cultural traditions or some very close to them. It is needed to assemble patience for many decades, and for each to conform his spiritual task as something to remember. For example, for one person it can right away be given the independent studying of books, and another may throw these books behind you saying that it is in general not serious, and so on.