As the author sited the Gospel words: You are witnesses to this...
This is very true, the apostles are the real witnesses of Christ the incarnate God, They listened to His teachings, saw His miracles,His betrayal,Death and Ressurection and His appearences during the 40 days.Also on the 50th day during Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended on them in the form of flames.So they had experiencial knowledge of God, This helped them greatly during their mission to spread the Gospel, This was the reason why they had such boldness to proclaim the truth in front of rulers and a mass of pagan people. They were ready to even give up their lives and endure the worst possible tortures. Such was the zeal they had.So the key to a successful mission isn't really in the eloquence and knowledge of the missionary in and of themselves but in the grace of the Holy Spirit that dwelled in them, ''You are the light to the world '' Christ said to his disciples. For a missionary needs to acquire the grace of God. As the goal of the missionary is to lead people to Christ and not to themselves. It is the grace present in the missionary that touches the hearts of people, as people might even agree intelectually with the missionary's words but in their their hearts they will be reject it,They will say to themselves: ''although it sounds convincing but I feel there is something wrong''. On the other hand if the person accepts the message deeply in his heart even if he hasn't understood it intellectually he will anyway accept it as a fact that doesn't need demonstration as he will experience God's grace. There are many examples of successful missionaries: St Herman and Innocent of Alaska, St Nicholas of Japan, St.Seraphim Rose and many more, they all had in common this Divine grace, they weren't working autonomously it was God working through them and in them people saw Christ. So to become a real missionary a person has to first work with himself, The missionary should strive to acquire the grace of God otherwise if he doesn't have it in himself what will he carry to others? It will be just a dead letter and not the Living Spirit.The methods for acquiring it are the ascetic struggles and the sacraments, both are necessary for synergia (cooperation of God and man) to take place. So this is the key.
Fr Alexander Schmemann points this out that the Church is losing it's success to evangelise the world around. The obvious reason for this is the mass apostasy from God but mainly it is the fault of us orthodox, the Church is the Divine-Human organism of Jesus Christ it will always be a source of grace, the problem is that we orthodox instead of following the steps of the Holy Fathers decided to follow the steps of this world, We try to compromise with it. We forget that by loving the world we hate God, by the term world it is meant the collective passions and the sinful life by which the people are guided and not the nature that God created as St Isaac the Syrian says. So let us us return to the roots we left and let us embrace the way and phromena of the Holy Fathers who until this day showed us the way of the Gospel that we may be saved ourselves and bring this salvation to those who still desire it. That is our testinomy to this world to show the immutable transfigurative power of the grace filled Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who yesterday,today and forever is the same.
Amen