"Even spirituality is marketed. We have a natural hunger for God, but those things that are natural are inevitably swathed in the unnatural voice of the passions. Thus we need God – but we need Him for our passions. Thus we find the God who will underwrite our narrative. The story of conversion becomes our organizing moment (“watch how I follow God”). Religious music is packaged to appeal. The aesthetics of religious experience can thus be more important than the content itself. Nothing is safe from the passions. The highest, most noble pursuits can be as driven by passion as the lowest bestial desires. The consumer shops for his God."
+ Fr Stephen Freeman, http://glory2godforallthings.com/2012/11/23/shopping-for-god/
I think Fr Stephen's post also has bearing on Orthodox missiology. Perhaps our missional ontology is antithetical to reductionism and division of secular and profane.
In any case his warning about external aesthetics is also something that we Orthodox must also consider and discern so that we don't reduce, package, brand or distort the Way according to our fallen passions (ie rigorism, ultra-traditionalism, ultra-liberalism, ethnocentrism, appeal to heterodox methods and presuppositions, etc).
This is not to judge methods, presuppositions and approaches that non-Orthodox groups use, especially if they are authentically living out what has been handed to them (ie. within their tradition). However, the oft quoted adage is "we know where the Church is; we do not know where it is not," so I think there are at least three lessons concerning missiology and the dangers of packaging:
1) that we BE authentic to our Orthodoxy (ie. our authentic Christianity, lex orandi, lex credendi),
2) that we become aware, refer to and live out our Orthodoxy before we can claim to 'baptize' materials or methods into our Lived Theology and
3) that we pray to resist the temptation to reduce our Orthodox Lived Theology.
Je nai nan. Lord have mercy on us.
Other posts by Fr Stephen that touch on the temptation to reduce:
