The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

The article discusses concepts of external and internal mission, and tra­ces the process of formation and change of the content of these concepts during the Synodal period. Until the end of the 19th century external mission was usually understood a mission outside the Russian Empire, and internal — as a mission within the empire. The mission to foreigners and pagans could thus be both external and internal. According to these criteria, the internal mission was not addressed to the Old Believers and sectarians. Since the end of the 19th century, the internal and external mission boundaries are defined by the Orthodox Church. To the addressee of the external mission came to include Muslims, Buddhists, Lamaists and other non-orthodox foreigners, the addressee of the internal mission were all disbelievers of Orthodoxy, not only the old-worshippers and sectarians, but also those Orthodox whose faith was considered unstable, wavering or quite formal. The article substantiates the hypothesis that this shift of the system of measurements “external” and “internal” from territorial boundaries to the borders of the church was consolidated after the holding of the All-Russia missionary congress in 1887, which is also called the Congress of Dissident and Antisectarian Missionaries. The changes occurred due to the numerical increase in the number of different spiritual movements on the territory of the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th — beginning of the 20th century. The sources used are legislative acts of the Russian Empire, documents of the Holy Synod, reports of missionaries who carried out their activities in various territories, as well as scientific research of the missionaries themselves, dedicated to the study of history of missionary activity in Russia.