"A missionary is more than a development aid worker: she has the wellbeing of the entire person in mind."
+ Jan DeVolder, The Spirit of Fr Damien
"The community that preaches the divine word would by its very life serve as proof of what it is proclaiming."
+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
"A magazine article I read recently detailed the adventures of a group of students from an evangelical college in the southern United States who had headed down to Florida during ‘Spring Break’. Their intention was to confront the bacchanalia of the festivities with God’s Truth. While their witness had the virtue of requiring courage to undertake - they deliberately provoked anger; endured being mocked as prudes-it was also odious. The reader could not help but conclude (as the writer had intended) that their desire was to coerce consciences. These young people, while certainly Christian, were not very Christlike; they were representatives of God but not of God. The writer of this piece - I suspect - does not believe that God is real yet she is right to have essentially concluded that to view other human beings as unclean, as these students clearly do, makes a mockery of Christ’s commandment to “love one another as I have loved you” [John 13:34]....
....St John the Compassionate and St Silouan - were both men whose love for others made them, in turn, impossible not to love..."
+ Constantine Pappas, "How St John the Compassionate Mission is like abortion"
"Acts of mercy must be concrete, physical actions. They cannot be "in word and speech, but in deed and truth"
Acts of mercy are acts done to Christ himself who was hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, in prison and "sick" i.e. wounded for our transgressions on the Christ, taking up of our wounds, and dying our death.
Christian acts of mercy must be done silently, humbly, secretly, not for vanity or praise, not to be seen by men, "not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing", etc.
Christian acts of mercy must be sacrificial. By this, we understand that we must not simply give to others what is left over. We have to be sharing our possessions with others in ways that limit ourselves in some way.
Acts of mercy should be done without qualification or condition to everyone, no matter who, what or how they are.
Christians, when possible, should do acts of mercy in an organized manner, through organizations and communities formed to do merciful deeds...
Being the poor, Christians are not only to help the poor; they are themselves to be the poor, in and with Jesus Christ their Lord."
+ Fr. Thomas Hopko, An Orthodox Understanding of Acts of Mercy
