Why don't we Orthodox convert Belgium?

He was an intense and rather abrupt young man, from the former USSR. Doing a doctorate somewhere in England. I am by now used to intense young Russians, so I kept my cool. Why, he asked me, was the Russian Orthodox Church not doing missionary work in the Belgian community, challenging the Catholics and Protestants? He had a point. Why indeed not? 

The straight answer – and at the risk of spitting in my own soup – is that the results are not convincing. Even if there are certainly individual cases of holiness, they are not reproducible. 

It has to do, I think with the inevitable mix of religion and culture: simply the Russian Orthodox, or the Greek Orthodox or the Romanian Orthodox Church are the way the Russians, Greeks and Romanians have dealt with God within their existing cultural frameworks. I am not sure that Orthodoxy really matches with the cultural framework of either Belgium (my host country) or England (my home country). 

Almost the only way to become an Orthodox and survive in the long run, is either to adopt another culture (I know a couple of priests who have adopted the Russian culture pretty successfully), or to adopt it to your own culture. And when you do, I do not really know whether it is distinguishable from Roman Catholicism (in Belgium) or the best in the (Anglo-)Catholicism I remember here a conversation with a fellow English exile here, also a convert to Orthodoxy, a few years back, where, well into the second bottle of wine, we decides that Orthodoxy was the best way to be Anglo-Catholic outside England. 

There is a third version, which is carrying around a sort of tailor-made culture all of one's own, a bit like a snail carries its own house everywhere with it. This culture is good for one’s own personal spiritual life, for a small circle of like-minded friends, and eventually to the odd visit to Mount Athos, but totally unrelated to the cultural environment in which such Orthodox converts  live and work. Very often you recognize them by their full shelves of Orthodox books, or their presence at the nth conference on the repetitive theme of how to be Orthodox in Belgium. But ultimately, they are hermaphrodites, and spiritually unable to reproduce. But that’s the subject of another post….