OCMS and Orthodox Witness
As an evangelical Christian research centre committed to supporting Christians of all traditions in effective witness through research and study, OCMS has worked in the past with a small number of students from Orthodox majority countries. These have been both evangelicals and Orthodox believers. In 2019 OCMS staff began to strengthen links with Orthodox scholars around the world as a foundation for what is now our Orthodox Project.
Orthodox Christians have a long history of mission which has often played out in challenging contexts, in the midst of a hostile Roman empire, in the face of expanding Islam, attacked by Western Christians and under Communist rule. Their witness to Christ is ‘bathed in the blood of the martyrs” from that of St. Mark in Alexandria in 68AD, to the thousands of Russian Orthodox Christians who died in the Gulag of the 20th century and the 21 Coptic believers beheaded by ISIS in the sands of Tunisia. Orthodox missionaries brought the gospel to Syria, Ethiopia and North Africa, to Armenia, Georgia and Russia, to China and Japan, and to Ireland and Britain. The history, as well as the contemporary experience, of Orthodox mission is a rich resource for a research centre like OCMS.
OCMS welcomes students and scholars from all Orthodox Churches to participate in its doctoral, guided research and other programmes but we currently have a specific focus on developing partnerships with Ethiopia and Romanian Orthodox scholars, as well as evangelicals working in these two contexts.
As a part of this research focus, in 2020 OCMS signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative.
