





































Ecclesial Futures
2024 – Volume 5 – Issue 1

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Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef17726

A R T I C L E

DOI: 10.54195/ef17726

Orthodox Perspectives on the Church as 
an Evangelizing, Eucharistic Community: 
A Case Study of the Orthodox Parish 
of St John of Kronstadt, Bath, UK
Alison Ruth Kolosova

Abstract
This article presents a case study of the Orthodox parish of St John of Kronstadt in Bath, 
UK, an Orthodox Christian lay community founded in 1980 in response to the inspira-
tion of St John of Kronstadt and Fr Alexander Schmemann. Based on interviews with 
parishioners and the author’s own experience of the community, the article deline-
ates the main features of the parish’s communal life of liturgical prayer, hospitality and 
witness in the wider community. The second part of the article explores the broader 
contribution of St John and Fr Alexander to the development of Orthodox ecclesial and 
missional understandings and practices in the contemporary world. It delineates the 
historical, ecclesial and theological contexts in which their teachings and practices orig-
inated and argues that amidst these contexts we can trace the origins of the  Eucharistic 
ecclesiology and understandings of human personhood and community which have 
pervaded Orthodox theology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These have 
laid the groundwork for the perspective that Christian mission and witness are a 
continuation of the Eucharistic community’s experience of the Kingdom of God, the 
‘liturgy after the liturgy’. The article concludes with a plea for greater dialogue based on 
the common ground between Western missiological discourse on the nature of post- 
Christendom evangelism and the ecclesial experience of Orthodox diaspora commu-
nities.

Keywords: Orthodox witness, John of Kronstadt, Alexander Schmemann, Eucharistic 
ecclesiology, Liturgy after the liturgy

In recent decades, a recurrent theme of ecumenical missiological writings has been 
what Christian mission and evangelism could and should look like ‘after Christen-
 dom’, in societies where the Constantinian alliance of church and state has shat-
tered and national identity is no longer so bound up with the Christian faith (Stone 



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2007: 10–1; Paas 2019: 28–54, xvi-xix). Such reflections focus almost exclusively on 
Western Christendom and so fail to appreciate how keenly this crisis of living in a 
post-Constantinian era was already felt in the 1920s and 1930s by theologians forced 
to emigrate from their homelands after the 1917 Russian revolution. For example, 
Fr Sergius Bulgakov, a founder and later dean of the St Sergius Orthodox Theolog-
ical Institute in Paris, wrote in the early 1930s of the crisis historic Orthodoxy was 
facing owing to the fall of the Russian Empire. He wrote intuitively: “We have perhaps 
witnessed the end of the Constantinian period in Church history.” Yet despite the 
challenges of exile and marginalization facing the émigré community in Paris, he 
continued on a positive, prophetic note: “The Orthodox Church is now faced with 
new problems, new perspectives, it contains not only the end but the creative way 
which leads to [the future]…. This creative inspiration … will bring in a new era of 
creative Christian life” (Bulgakov 1988: 193–4)
This article aims to illustrate one form that this “new era of creative Christian life” 
has taken by presenting in the first part a case study of the missional experience of 
the Orthodox Parish of St John of Kronstadt1 in Bath, UK where the author lived in 
1985–86, 1989–90 and 1994–96. Since then she has visited the parish once or twice 
a year, as well as being in regular correspondence and online communication with 
both parishioners and clergy. In early 2023, several members of the parish’s clergy 
and laity responded to specific questions about the forms that community and evan-
gelism take in the community. The aim of the case study is thus to assess how one 
Orthodox community has sought to flesh out their understanding of mission and 
community in a context outside of traditional Orthodox homelands.
The aim of the second part of the article is to trace the roots of the Bath community’s 
understanding of mission and community by providing an overview of the historical, 
ecclesial and theological influences on two figures who have contributed greatly to 
shaping the Bath parish. The community is named after Fr John (Sergiev) of Kronstadt 
(1829–1908), while Fr Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) was dean of St  Vladimir’s 
seminary in New York when Fr Yves Dubois, one of the parish’s founders, was stud-
ying there. Each of these highly significant figures, in different ways, has also contrib-
uted to the wider development of Orthodox ecclesial and missional understandings 
and practices in the contemporary world. Father (now Saint) John provided one 
particular ecclesial response to the challenges of urbanization, secularization and 
poverty in the docklands of late nineteenth-century St Petersburg, capital of the 
Russian Empire throughout which he became a legend in his lifetime. By contrast, 
Alexander Schmemann’s teaching, writings and pastoral ministry emerged out of 
the experience of rediscovering Orthodox ecclesial identity in the post-revolutionary 

1 Hereafter referred to as “the Bath Orthodox Parish” or “the parish”.



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Russian émigré communities of Western Europe and the USA where he is therefore 
better known.
Methodologically, this section sets in historical and ecclesial context their lives and 
personal writings as well as drawing on recent scholarship about them and the 
broader context of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries. By providing this context, the article aims to explain the origins of 
broader Orthodox perspectives on Christian mission predominant in the twentieth 
and twenty-first centuries and influential both in traditionally Orthodox contexts and 
in the diaspora. It highlights the understanding of the local eucharistic community as 
both goal and springboard of the Christian church’s witness, which is expressed both 
through the liturgy and what has frequently been referred to as the “liturgy after the 
liturgy” (Bria 1986: 12, 38–42; Yannoulatos 2010: 94–6).
The initial case study of the parish of St John of Kronstadt will focus on both these 
aspects of the Orthodox understanding of mission: the parish’s communal life of 
liturgical prayer and the way it lives out the “liturgy after the liturgy” through hospi-
tality and other forms of witness in the surrounding community.

Case Study of the Orthodox Parish of St John of 
Kronstadt, Bath, UK
Despite bearing the name of a Russian saint, the Orthodox Parish of St John of 
Kronstadt belongs to the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain which is under 
the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The parish was founded in 1980 
and since then, hundreds of people, some of them passing through, others putting 
down roots, have been impacted by the ways it lives as a community which seeks to 
witness to and draw people to the love of God. While on a typical Sunday you might 
find 50 to 70 people at the morning communion service, and on a major feast day 
you might find a hundred or more, it is not numerical growth which has been the 
main goal of the community. The focus has been rather on deepening relationships 
with Christ and with each other and out of this the community’s evangelizing role has 
naturally emerged.
The priest Yves Dubois, one of the Parish’s founders, points to Fr John of Kronstadt 
and Fr Alexander Schmemann as those who particularly inspired the model of 
Christian community which has developed. The ministry of Fr John set a pattern for 
 Christian engagement with the local community while his concern for a relationship 
with Christ through constant prayer and frequent communion has provided the 
model for pastoral ministry and spiritual growth. Fr Alexander Schmemann taught 
that the future of Orthodoxy was in English-language parish communities led by a 
priest with a secular job, with a chapel in the house of the priest’s family, and commu-
nity meals after Sunday Liturgies.



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This latter model has led to three great practical challenges which in the long run 
have proved to have positive consequences. The first such challenge is that the parish 
has never had a church building of its own. Community worship started in Fr Yves’ 
family home, together with the family of Ann and Trevor Johnson, today Fr  Seraphim, 
and an Orthodox nun, Mother Sarah Overton. One large room was turned into an 
Orthodox chapel with an iconostasis and icons, oil lamps, censers and relics of the 
saints, with worship and prayer always being followed by a communal meal in the 
kitchen downstairs.
This “house church” model eventually became impractical once the congregation 
grew, and in recent years two local Anglican parishes have provided a venue for litur-
gical worship, with community meals in the church hall. This has helped to develop 
good relations with other Christian confessions and stopped the parish from being 
too insular. For example, St John’s, Bathwick Anglican parish and the Orthodox 
parish which they currently host are at present working on a joint fundraising project 
for Ukraine. Ecumenical relations have been an ongoing concern with one priest, 
Fr Richard Penwell, and Mother Sarah currently representing the parish in Churches 
Together in Somerset.
The parish’s not having its own building has also resulted in the community having 
a strong element of mobility and a capacity to take Orthodox worship (liturgical 
prayer, icons, choral singing, candle stands) into many situations: to a local prison, to 
Greenbelt, on annual pilgrimage to the Saxon church at Bradford-on Avon and other 
holy places, to different homes and venues.

The second, related challenge resulting from Schmemann’s vision is that none of the 
pastoral team has ever been employed full time by the parish or the wider Orthodox 
Church. They have all had ordinary secular employment alongside their ministry in 
the parish, which has had the advantage that all of them have been working along-
side local people and this has led to them and the parish becoming much more 
engaged with the local community than it could have been otherwise.

The third immense challenge has been the consequence of aiming to be an 
English-language Orthodox Christian community open to people of all and every 
nationality, rather than a parish formed to provide pastoral care largely for those 
from one particular country and national tradition which has often been the case 
with Orthodox diaspora communities. While there have always been a significant 
number of native English members, the community has drawn people from many 
countries: Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, the Middle East.
On the one hand this has been a great source of enrichment to the community and 
has given the opportunity to many people of Orthodox background to often “redis-
cover” their faith in a new and meaningful way in a foreign land. Worship services 



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have always been in English, but phrases of other languages and their musical tradi-
tions are drawn into the worship. This change has been very demanding on choir 
leaders and members getting to grips with the complexities of Orthodox liturgy, all 
in four-part harmony without the accompaniment of organ or other musical instru-
ments. Despite the challenges this presents to an amateur, even if highly musically 
literate, choir, many newcomers are drawn to Orthodox worship by the beauty of the 
music and the prayerful atmosphere it creates.
On the other hand, the multi-ethnic and multilingual aspect of parish life has meant 
that the wider political and ecclesial conflicts that have plagued the Orthodox 
churches in recent decades have been potential and actual sources of tension. The 
current war in Ukraine has put an obvious strain on relations within the commu-
nity, although at the same time it has also brought out the community’s strengths in 
looking after anyone who turns up on their doorstep. Several members are Ukrainian 
or have Ukrainian relatives whom they have taken into their homes.
At the heart of the community is communal worship with all the ways that Orthodox 
liturgical worship appeals to the whole person, body and soul: the visuality of icons, 
four-part choral singing, dousing with holy water, anointing with consecrated oil, as 
well as preaching by both clergy and laity. There are six people on the preaching 
rota and sermons are also distributed by email so that they reach far more people. 
One parishioner emphasized to me that she felt that the community witnessed to 
Christ particularly through its liturgical worship, the focal point of which is the Eucha-
rist in which all participate, adults as well as children, who take communion weekly 
from the time they are baptized. Frequent weekly communion is practised, with each 
communicant participating in the sacrament of confession every month or so.

Everyone I have spoken to agrees that communal meals have been a key element 
of both building strong relationships within the community and of welcoming 
newcomers. Meals have taken different forms as the community has grown. For many 
years the whole community, sometimes 50 or 60 people, would visit different family 
homes each week and that family would make the meal. Nowadays, there is always 
a sit-down meal in the St John’s church hall after the Sunday morning communion 
service, with each person bringing some part of the meal. While such meals often 
take place inside, towards the end of the pandemic, when restrictions had been 
lifted, this meal often took place outside in the street and at times had the atmos-
phere of a street party, leading passers-by to stop and ask what was happening. 
Last year’s Parish Report mentions in particular the “Agape Vespers and meal” on 
the Sunday evening of Easter when traditional paschal foods from all around the 
world are eaten together. Of other special celebrations, the report says “we were 
blessed with the weather on many of the occasions and were able to spill out into the 
sunshine, and enjoy music and dancing after our meal” (Parish Report 2022).



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A special role in the community is played by the Convent which is the home of the 
parish’s nun, Mother Sarah, as well as her frequent lodgers and visitors. There is a 
regular cycle of morning and evening prayer at the Convent which means the commu-
nity’s life and outreach are rooted in communal prayer, as well as the personal 
prayers of each community member. Mother Sarah’s home also offers hospitality to 
those who would like to experience Orthodox prayer and community life. I have been 
there on occasions when a specialist in Islamic Sufi mysticism came for such an expe-
rience, or when a group of Catholic nuns came to discuss the monastic life.
Mother Sarah is a rare phenomenon in the Orthodox Church as a woman who is 
involved in full-time pastoral work both within and outside the parish. For many 
years she has been a chaplain at Bath University and while her experience as a 
pastoral counsellor has been available to all the students of the university, it has led 
in particular to many links with students of Orthodox backgrounds who have found 
a spiritual home for a few years in the parish and consequently grown in their faith 
at an important stage of their lives.

There is a constant trickle of newcomers to the parish, not only students. A recent 
influx of newcomers with no particular previous church background is attributed to 
the online presence of such figures as environmentalist and writer Paul Kingsnorth, 
and artist and podcaster Jonathan Pageau. Each newcomer, if they so wish, can be 
involved in a catechetical process of instruction in the fundamentals of the Christian 
faith as well as discussing issues which arise from the experience of worship and 
community. This nurturing is also a continuing process which takes place in both 
Bible studies and a reading group which anyone in the parish can be involved with.

While much of the parish’s witness arises out of its community life, there is one 
section of last year’s annual report called “Hospitality and Evangelism” which details 
some more specific forms of outreach into the local and not-so-local communities. 
Among these are the Arts Festivals which have emerged out of the very identity 
of the community which has many people with some kind of artistic background: 
artists, icon painters, people who are skilled in pottery, embroidery, photography, 
stone masonry, musicians and singers. There is an art exhibition as well as inter-
views with artists and painters, a café with soup, tea and coffee, concerts with the 
Mosaic choir, a group of semi-professional young Orthodox singers of different 
national backgrounds, and a ceilidh to conclude the weekend.
Listed under the heading “Evangelism” in the Annual Report are environmental 
activism and community action concerning climate change, for example petitioning 
the government about burning of peatlands, and reducing its environmental foot-
print by aiming for zero waste. Further evidence of environmental concern was the 
theme of the annual parish weekend away in 2023, “God’s Creation”. Other forms 



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of outreach in the local community over the years have been involvement in the 
ecumenical Genesis Trust which works among the homeless in Bath, or teams of six 
or seven people who have gone to lead worship at a local prison. Currently the parish 
is working with local charities and agencies supporting Ukrainian refugees.
Youth and children’s work has always been a strong aspect of parish life. This is the 
way that the community evangelizes its own children and young people so that they 
develop into believing, witnessing adults, rather than just dropping out. There is a 
Sunday school, children’s sermons once a month and an annual summer camp organ-
ized by the Archdiocese known as “The Greek Camp” which many in the community 
credit with enabling their young people to develop their own faith as it gives them a 
wider peer group and sense of the Church. Many of the parish’s young people have 
not only attended the camp but gone on to be its leaders and in many cases it has 
led to long-term friendships outside of the Camp. The Camp has been a factor in 
the formation of the Mosaic Choir. In the same area of youth work, although further 
afield, the parish has developed an ongoing relationship with an Orthodox school 
and orphanage in Kenya to which it sends part of its annual income.

This case study has shown how the writings and vision of St John of Kronstadt 
and Fr Alexander Schmemann played a significant role in the founding of the Bath 
Orthodox Parish and its central tenets of Eucharistic spirituality, hospitable commu-
nity and pastoral care, core values which continue to undergird the parish. Yet as it 
has become rooted in both the local and wider ecumenical ecclesial communities, 
both in the UK and worldwide, with a younger generation of parishioners of diverse 
national backgrounds arising, the parish has acquired its own distinct ways of being 
a missional community. These currently embrace liturgical prayer and hospitality, 
social concern and service, environmental activism, international partnership, 
artistic expression, and ecumenical and inter-faith relationships.
In the second part of this article we shall explore in greater depth the broader 
 influence of Fr John and Fr Alexander on Orthodox ecclesial and missional under-
standings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We shall focus in particular on 
their understanding of the local ecclesial community and its missional role.

Fr John of Kronstadt and Fr Alexander Schmemann: 
Historical, Ecclesial and Theological Context
Although Fr John and Fr Alexander were born almost a century apart, they both need 
to be understood against the backdrop of the Great Reforms of the 1860s and the 
1917 Russian Revolution. The emancipation of the serfs (1861) was arguably the most 
significant reform, bringing with it rapid social change and a mass influx of rural 
workers into the Russian Empire’s cities where homelessness, unemployment and 



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poverty became problems on an unprecedented scale. Other aspects of modernity 
– industrialization, more opportunities for education and literacy, the greater circula-
tion and influence of printed texts, the rise of politically radical movements to combat 
social injustice – all presented new challenges to the closely allied Tsarist govern-
ment and Russian Orthodox Church (Hedda 2008). Fr John’s charismatic ministry was 
one particular ecclesial response to these challenges that had an immense impact at 
all levels of Russian society.

Fr John of Kronstadt: Eucharistic Fervour and Mutual Responsibility
Fr John Sergiev was born in 1829 into the family of a poor church sacristan in the 
far north of Russia. He was ordained priest at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Kronstadt 
(the docklands where many of the capital’s working population eked out a living) in 
1855, the year that the Great Reforms began. His diaries during the first five years of 
his ministry are largely meditations on the words of Scripture which he copied out 
with the aim of internalizing them. He frequently applied them literally, as he did 
with the Gospel commands about sharing one’s wealth with one’s neighbour. Conse-
quently he often came home without his boots as he had given them away to a bare-
footed pauper. Commenting on the seawater which flowed in pipes into Kronstadt 
homes, he wrote, “As the sea-water belongs to everyone, does not my money belong 
to everyone who is poor? What kind of blindness is it that I persist in regarding it as 
exclusively my property?” (Kizenko 2000: 13, 68). He frequently irritated the St Peters-
burg aristocracy and shopkeepers with his criticism of the disparity between rich 
and poor, seeking to arouse a sense of mutual responsibility which would persuade 
them to part with their wealth. He did not restrict the biblical notions of the church 
as a “body” and “community” to the church, but applied them to all human society,

Ants build anthills in which they are warm and sated even in winter; … bees build 
beehives…. Similarly, because people are made to live in communities and because 
according to God’s intent people must make up one body of whom individually they 
are its members, the strong must bear the burdens of the weak … I appeal to you in 
the name of Christianity, in the name of loving mankind … let us help these shelterless 
poor, … let us not deny our solidarity with them as human beings … Will we allow ants 
and bees to have the advantage over us? (Kizenko 2000: 74).

The House of Industry he eventually set up became a model for many such workhouses 
throughout the Empire. Medical care, food, clothing and shelter were provided to the 
homeless, while the unemployed could learn various trades (Morariu 2018: 2). As his 
fame grew in the 1880s and 90s, charitable causes throughout the empire appealed 
to him as a patron, and with the creation of the Duma, he called on it to address 
poverty and the causes of alcohol abuse (Kizenko 2000: 76–7, 84).



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These expressions of his evangelical social consciousness arose out of an intense 
liturgical, especially eucharistic spirituality. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it had 
been common practice in Russia to take communion once a year as a civic duty. 
Fr  John, however, encouraged not only frequent communion but a fervent aware-
ness of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine. He wrote,

When you receive the Holy Life-giving Mysteries [i.e. take communion], steadfastly 
represent to yourself Christ Himself under the form of the bread and wine … send in 
thought into the depths of your heart and there lay and mentally preserve the Life-
giving Guest … the Body and Blood show themselves to be life-giving, burning embers 
in the believer’s heart, according to the measure of the heart’s preparedness. (Sergieff 
1984: 483).

His diaries also reflect the intensity which Fr John considered fitting for a priest 
serving the Liturgy:

The celebration of the Divine Liturgy requires a man … whose heart is wholly embraced 
by the flame of the Holy Ghost, by ardent love for God and mankind, for every human 
soul, and above all, for the Christian soul, so that with a sincere heart he may ever rise 
to God in prayer. (Sergieff 1984: 341)

He himself served the Liturgy in an ecstatic manner, weeping, shouting and crying 
out the words in order to engage his parishioners. He sometimes changed the words 
of the usually strictly unchanging liturgical text to remind them of Christ’s genuine 
presence among them. By the 1890s, in order to make frequent communion more 
possible, the church hierarchy had allowed him to turn the sacrament of confession, 
usually held one-to-one with the priest, into a mass event with thousands of people 
crowded together, calling out their sins (Kizenko 2000: 53, 60).
Fr John’s intercessory prayer eventually became legendary, with peasants walking 
to Kronstadt and shiploads of devotees arriving with prayer requests concerning 
healing, employment, finances, family and marital troubles. Kronstadt became a 
major pilgrimage destination with Fr John revered for his holiness as the “spiritual 
father” of the entire Russian people. In 1894, when Fr John was asked to minister to 
the dying emperor Alexander III, he became an international celebrity and the first 
publication of extracts from his diaries in English translation dates to 1897 (Sergieff 
1984; Morariu 2018: 2).
There was a more controversial side to Fr John. The assassination of Tsar Alexander 
I in 1881 and the rise of the revolutionary movement led to him espousing the poli-
tics of the far right, while his support for monarchist right-wing organizations such 
as the Union of the Russian People led to the radical press targeting him as a symbol 



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of reaction. In his final years, groups of more radical adherents to his teachings, the 
Ioannites, were drawn to Fr John’s apocalyptic warnings that Russia must recover its 
Orthodox faith before it was too late. While Fr John disavowed them, they gathered in 
communes, defending autocracy, while condemning both mainline Orthodoxy and 
liberal politics (Kizenko 2000: 13, 197–8, 283–4; Morariu 2018: 3–4).

Fr Alexander Schmemann: the Roots of his Liturgical and Missional 
Understanding
Despite these controversial sides to Fr John’s politics, Kizenko points to the long-term 
consequences of Fr John’s ministry when she writes “A more regular and thoughtful 
observance of communion was perhaps his most significant contribution to Russian 
piety … the revival of Eucharistic theology in Russian Orthodoxy which has lasted 
to this day, may be traced to this quiet revolution” (Kizenko 2000: 59). The footnote 
to Kizenko’s sentence refers to Fr Alexander Schmemann’s The Eucharist: Sacrament 
of the Kingdom (Schmemann 1988a), although Schmemann’s book does not overtly 
acknowledge the inspiration of Fr John. However, Schmemann’s aristocratic parents 
and grandparents had lived in St Petersburg at the height of Fr John’s ministry, 
and Fr John certainly influenced the Russian émigré circles of Schmemann’s youth. 
Fr  Sergius Bulgakov, who had a profound influence on the young Schmemann in 
émigré Paris, attributed to Fr John a “prophetic” ministry which was a “manifestation 
of the spirit and its power” (Bulgakov 1988: 51; Plekon 2016: 2, 4).
Schmemann’s eucharistic ecclesiology and the liturgical missional vision which 
flowed out of it also had their roots in other strands of ecclesial response to the chal-
lenges of the pre- and post-revolutionary decades. In the late nineteenth century, a 
movement for church reform criticized the synodal system of church government 
introduced by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century which had subordi-
nated the church to secular state control. The movement was accompanied by 
heated discourse revolving around the concept of sobornost’ and how to restore 
conciliar practices to the life of the Russian Church. The term sobornost’ has multi-
faceted meanings and has been translated variously as conciliarity, catholicity or 
synodality, while it has been used with a wider range of meanings embracing the 
relationality of the human person, and the communal perception of knowledge 
and truth (Bulgakov 1988: 60–1). The term emerged out of the writings of the mid- 
nineteenth-century Slavophile philosophers who stressed that divine truth can only 
be collectively or communally perceived, while the ultimate source of truth is the 
Holy Spirit who dwells precisely in the entire ecclesial community, the laity as well as 
the hierarchy of bishops (Khomiakov 2018: 71, 98, 151).

As the twentieth century dawned, critics of the synodal system made proposals to 
restore independence and conciliarity to the Church by replacing the Synod with 



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a council of bishops and restoring a patriarch as primate of the Russian Church. 
They also urged conciliarity at the diocesan and parish levels by holding assemblies 
composed of, and elected by, both clergy and laity to deliberate on local matters 
and restoring greater freedom and a missional role to the local parish community. 
The reform movement culminated in the All-Russian (Moscow) Church Council of 
1917–18, the impact of which has been compared with the Vatican II Council (Kallistos 
2019; Destivelle 2015: xv). It voted to restore the patriarchate and formulated wide-
ranging decrees concerning many aspects of church life, including liturgical reform, 
the parish community and mission (Cunningham 1981; Destivelle 2015; Paert 2025).

The persecutions of the Soviet period prevented a large-scale application of the 
Council’s decisions within the Russian Church itself. Yet its deliberations, which gave 
unprecedented voice to the laity, have in varying degrees influenced the Orthodox 
churches of Eastern Europe and the diaspora over the last century. (Stavrou 2018; 
Paert et al. (eds) 2025) The legacy of the Council was brought to Western Europe by 
many emigres including participants in the Council such as Sergius Bulgakov who 
became a leading theologian in Paris (Destivelle 2015: xv, 63, 413 n.129).

It was into the ecclesial and theological world of the Paris emigration that Schmemann 
was plunged as a seven-year-old boy in 1928. While he attended the Russian 
 Cathedral in rue Daru, during his childhood and youth he was profoundly involved in 
the Russian Student Christian Movement (RSCM) which sought to strengthen Russian 
émigré youth in their faith. The RSCM, which celebrates its centenary in 2023, had 
been strongly influenced by the small lay-led groups for Bible study and prayer of the 
World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and the Young Men’s Christian Associa-
tion (YMCA). These organizations became active in Russia after John Mott’s visit to 
Finland in 1899, and so initially attracted Finnish Lutherans, yet their small groups or 
“circles” soon drew Orthodox young people as well (Understanding Sobornost 2023).
It was in the emigration, however, that the “circles” of laity took on a more distinc-
tively Orthodox confessional orientation. Among the founders and leaders of RSCM 
was the above-mentioned Sergius Bulgakov who stressed that the entire ecclesial 
body was responsible for the renewal and mission of the Church (Understanding 
Sobornost 2023). The RSCM was inspired by the notion of sobornost ’ with its implica-
tions for the relational nature of human beings who become more truly “persons” 
through the experience of ecclesial community.

Life in Christ … is never given in isolation or separated from other men, but in a union, 
living and immediate, in the unity of many in one whole (the image of the Holy Trinity, 
consubstantial and indivisible)…. He who lives in union with others, who frees himself 
of the “I” … he it is alone who can receive the truth (Bulgakov 1988: 63–4).



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This understanding of personhood and the ecclesial community as both mirroring 
and participating in the community and unity of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity 
was to become a major theme of many Orthodox theologians of the twentieth 
century (Louth 2015: 54–5, 218–22; Zizioulas 1985; Kallistos 1990: 33–4).

RSCM also had a strong emphasis on liturgical worship and frequent communion 
(Understanding Sobornost 2023), and Schmemann’s Journals testify to how his sense 
of the central place of the Liturgy grew out of his experience in émigré Paris and 
RSCM (Schmemann 2021: 51; see also Louth 2015: 51–2; Plekon 2016: 8). Schmemann 
studied and later taught at the St Sergius Institute which was founded after the 
second RSCM conference which voiced the need to educate the laity. Among his 
teachers, and later colleagues, were both Bulgakov and Nikolai Afanasiev, whose 
influence is evident from the themes of his writings that recur in Schmemann’s later 
works.

In Afanasiev’s The Church of the Holy Spirit, the opening chapters are devoted to the 
“royal priesthood” of all believers and the Spirit-filled ministries of all the laity. “The 
gift of the Spirit which every believer receives during the sacrament of reception into 
the Church [i.e. baptism and chrismation] is the charism of royal priesthood…. The 
priestly ministry of all members of the Church has found expression in the Eucha-
ristic assembly” (Afanasiev 1994: 3–4).
Afanasiev’s teaching about the fullness of the Church being present as the local 
Christian community gathers for the Eucharist has led to Afanasiev being considered 
the father of “eucharistic ecclesiology” which dominates Orthodox ecclesiology to 
this day (Kallistos 2019 provides a classic example; Plekon 2022: 247).

All of these themes are woven together in Schmemann’s vision of the eucharistic, 
evangelizing community which he presents in For the Life of the World, originally a 
study guide for a conference on mission in December 1963. Schmemann emphasizes 
the missional purpose of the “priesthood of all believers” who are called to transform 
the life of the world by taking on Christ’s intercessory role, offering the world to God 
and calling the world into communion with him (Schmemann 1988b: 15).

To be in Christ means to be like him…. And as he “ever lives to make intercession” for all 
“that come unto God by Him” (Heb. 7:25) so we cannot help accepting this intercession 
as our own…. Intercession begins here, in the glory of the messianic banquet, and this 
is the only true beginning for the Church’s mission (Schmemann 1988b: 44–5).

Dwelling on the meaning of the word leitourgia (Gk: the work of the people) Schmemann 
wrote that it “meant an action by which a group of people become something corpo-



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rately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals…. Thus the Church 
itself is a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in the world after the fashion of Christ, 
to bear testimony to Him and His Kingdom” (Schmemann 1988b: 25). This ongoing 
“leitourgia of mission” is the church’s witness to all that it has experienced of union 
in and with Christ, and of the Kingdom of God at the Eucharistic table (Schmemann 
1988b: 45–6; Plekon 2016: 5, 8).
This understanding of the liturgy of mission flowing irrevocably out of the Eucha-
ristic liturgy became the main Orthodox understanding of the church as a missional 
community in the late twentieth century, in large part due to Schmemann’s colossal 
influence. It also owed much to Greek and Romanian theologians of mission, espe-
cially Metropolitan Anastasios Yannoulatos and Fr Ion Bria, who popularized this 
notion of mission as “the liturgy after the liturgy”. There has been some debate as to 
who initiated the term (Yannoulatos 2010: 94–6; Marcu 2016: 191–200; Sonea 2020) 
although as all three theologians were moving in the same ecumenical circles from 
the 1950s to the 1970s, it is safest to say that there was undoubtedly a great deal of 
multi-directional influence.
Schmemann’s influence can most clearly be seen if we compare Schmemann’s vision 
with the statement on Orthodox mission drawn up under the leadership of Bria, Go 
forth in peace: Orthodox Perspectives on Mission.

The goal and aim of the proclamation of the Gospel, and thus of mission, is the estab-
lishment of eucharistic communities in every locality [which], centred around worship 
and the celebration of the holy eucharist, will initiate the kingdom of God and become 
the focal point for active and concrete witness … the eucharistic community will witness 
most effectively through its own example of openness and unity, as well as through the 
spirituality and holiness of its individual members. (Bria 1986: 12)

Bria’s language is more accessible than Schmemann’s and yet it is the core features 
of Schmemann’s vision which shine through.

Conclusion
The Bath Orthodox Parish, as the above case study has shown, can be viewed as one 
expression of what Sergius Bulgakov referred to as that ‘new era of creative Christian 
life’ which has arisen out of the post-Constantinian crisis faced by the Russian and 
other Orthodox Churches after the First World War and 1917 Revolution. Orthodox 
theologians such as Alexander Schmemann have provided vision for the way forward 
out of the crisis, drawing on the spiritual, theological and ecclesiological heritage of 
the Russian Church before and after the 1917 Revolution, including the Eucharistic 



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Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef17726

spirituality of Fr John of Kronstadt, the discourse and practice of sobornost’ associat-
  ed with the 1917–18 Moscow Council and the Russian Student Christian Movement.
This article points to the common ground shared by Christian communities seeking 
a renewed vision and practice of evangelism “after Christendom” and Eastern Chris-
tian communities who have migrated owing to war, revolution and political and 
economic crisis throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such 
common ground suggests that dialogue between eastern and western missiological 
traditions should be strengthened and more attention paid by both scholars and 
practitioners to the missional experience of Orthodox Christian communities, both 
Eastern and Oriental, who have found a home in the Western world.

About the Author
Dr Alison Ruth Kolosova is a Research Fellow in Church History at the School of 
Theology and Religious Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research is supported 
by Estonian Research Council Grant PUT 1599. Contact: alison.ruth.kolosova@ut.ee

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