Your concern is irrelevant to the intent of the Great Commission. The command "make disciples of all nations" clearly implies efforts at Christian conversion and "teaching them" implies explanations of Jesus' commandments. St. Francis famously taught, "Spread the Gospel to everyone you meet, and if necessary, use words." Jesus would approve of setting a good exqmple, but there is nothing explicit on this in the Great Commission.
Your concern about missionary abuse of indoctrination over the centuries is commendable but irrelevant to the point at issue.
Well to be fair, we don’t know yet what
@Akita Suggagaki means, precisely, because I would be greatly surprised if he was opposed to people converting to Christianity, and being invited to convert in a manner that is not a hard sell. I think, and please correct me if I’m wrong, AKita, that what you are talking about is aggressive proselytization of the sort engaged in by dangerous cults like the Hare Krishnas, J/Ws, Mormons and Scientologists, tactics which a few Christian denominations have stupidly adopted, causing grave harm to the Christian community as a whole.
That said, I think most missionaries have done more good than harm. I am proud of the fact that my great uncle was a missionary in Africa who worked to provide villages with clean water - these activities also brought about converts. For this good work he endured torture by the Lusotropical dictatorship of Antonio Salazar.
And of course
@RDKirk you are correct that the Great Commission requires us to make disciples of all nations. The Orthodox Church historically has accomplished this successfully, on a large scale, without resorting to violence or forced conversion, with the Eastern churches, specifically the Aramaic and Greek speaking Christians starting in the first century, including Jews, Greeks, Aramaeans, Phoenicians, Cypriots, Pontics, Assyrians and Chaldeans, and some Arabs, being responsible for evangelizing more Arabs, the Mesopotamians, the Indians, and the Egyptians, Armenians, Georgians, Caucasian Albanians, Numidians, Persians, Ethiopians, Serbians, Macedonian Slavs, Montenegrins, Albanians, Bulgarians, Russians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Byelorussians, Lemkos, Slovakians, Eastern Czechs, Eastern Poles, Eastern Hungarians, Bessarabians, Aromanians, and other ethnic groups related to Romanians, the Paulicians, who were Gnostics non-violently converted to Orthodox Christianity over a thousand year period concluding in the 19th century in Armenia (previously, a large number were converted who now live in Romania and Bulgaria), and more recently, the Siberians and several Alaskan tribes such as the Aleut people, and a great many Chinese, and many Japanese and Koreans, and also many Sri Lankans. That this was accomplished without violence is attested to by the large number of religious minorities that existed in the former Russian Empire, including Jews, Muslims, Khazars, Buddhists, Tengrists and practitioners of Suomi Shamanism, as well as those Alaskan tribes which retained their indigenous religion.
The Church of the East also managed to convert the people of Socotra, an Island off the coast of Yemen, and many people across Central Asia, China,
Likewise, the Lutherans (with the possible exception of the Baltic States and Finland, where it is conceivable persecution may have occurred during the peak of Swedish Imperial expansion, although I have seen no evidence of this), Moravians and Methodists have I think a very good track record of responsible missionary work, and for the most part, this also applies to the Anglicans, with some exceptions, particularly where Anglicans sought to convert adherents of other Christian denominations, although the Catholics were more aggressive in this regard, and the Calvinists also pushed the boundaries in this area, as did the Adventists. However violence on the part of the Catholics is the reason why there are no longer canonical Orthodox churches comprising the majority populations of Hungary, Croatia, Herzegovina, and why in Poland, Albania and India the Roman Catholics outnumber the Orthodox, and for a time totally suppressed them in the Czech Lands and Slovakia, where they are greatly outnumbered (with a large number of the Orthodox being Carpatho-Rusyns, most of whom, along with the Lemkos, in Europe, and many of whom in the US, are members of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church). Indeed the raison d’etre for the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and most of Byzantine Catholicism lies in the Union of Brest, which resulted in the formation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, under which the Orthodox were allowed to retain the Byzantine Rite liturgy (subject to Latinizations that crept in over the centuries but were largely reversed after Vatican II) while being Catholics in communion with the Pope.
Likewise, the schism between the Chaldean Catholics and the Assyrian Church of the East, which happened along tribal lines, and to a certain extent linguistic lines, since the Chaldean tribe of the Assyrian people is the only one that predominantly speaks Arabic in the vernacular likely involved Roman Catholic missionary activity, and the same can be said of the schism between the Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholics.
One noteworthy exception to this is the Italo-Albanian Greek Catholic Church in Siciliy, which is noteworthy as there are areas of Siciliy which historically were always under the jurisdiction of the Roman Pope, before the Great Schism, yet worshipped using the Byzantine Rite.
Interestingly enough, for a few hundred years after the Great Schism, a Byzantine monastery, Amalfion, continued to exist on Mount Athos, the peninsula which is the heart of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, much like the region around Monte Cassino and Cartheuse and Cluny, and Ireland as a whole, is to Western monasticism, and Scetis is to monasticism in general (and Tur Abdin historically is the center of Syriac Orthodox monasticism, but now the monasteries are mostly abandoned and barely inhabited due to the Turkish genocide in 1915, which targeted Syriacs as well as Armenians, and is known in Syriac as Sayfo, "the sword", and continued hostility towards Christians in Turkey since the end of the First World War). Sadly Amalfion is in ruins, but given the relative success of Western Rite Orthodoxy, my hope is it will eventually be reopened. Indeed, it probably would have happened already, except for the fact that the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, of all of the Orthodox churches, is the only one which has manifested open hostility towards Western Rite Orthodoxy, with even Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, having criticized it, the basis being, among other things, what I regard as a baseless fear that Orthodox Christians might inadvertently start attending Catholic and Anglican masses if Western Rite Orthodoxy is normalized, and it is the Ecumenical Patriarchate that controls Mount Athos; indeed, to enter the Holy Mountain, one must be male*, have short hair (unless one is an ordained monastic or cleric in the Orthodox Church) and have a visa from the Ecumenical Patriarch.
*Women need not despair, for the other major monastic center in Greece, Meteora, which is deservedly more popular with tourists and better equipped to handle them, and which features several convents, and indeed, all the other monasteries and convents in Greece, admit female visitors. Also, Valaam, the center of Russian monasticism, and also Zagorsk, are open to women, as are the Kiev Lavra and related caves, which are the center of Ukrainian monasticism. Really, only Mount Athos, of all the monastic centers in the Orthodox world, is closed to women, and this is because of two reasons: from the perspective of mystical theology, it is regarded as the private garden of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and from the perspective of pastoral theology, it is considered to be a refuge for men who have a particular struggle with lust for women and are unable to deal with their inclination to fornicate while remaining in the world; to a certain extent, all monasteries serve that need and related needs, but Mount Athos especially so, because of a lack of female pilgrims who are a common sight at nearly every other monastery. It should also be noted that monasticism is usually regarded as inappropriate for those who uncontrollably struggle with homosexuality; there is a canon law in the Orthodox Church that prohibits anyone from becoming a monk due to a lack of normal interest or desire for relations with women. This does not mean abuses do not happen.
There are exceptions, however: one prominent case where someone who had been homosexual found Jesus, repented and became an important monastic is that of Fr. Seraphim Rose, who lived a decadent life in the North Beach area of San Francisco in the 1950s before, by chance, discoveriing the Russian Orthodox Church during the episcopate of St. John Maximovitch of Shanghai and San Francisco, and with his help, converting and overcoming the passions. He founded the Monastery of St. Herman of Alaska in Northern California, near the border with Oregon, and was its abbot until he succumbed to cancer in 1980, during which time he translated several important works, such as Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, and also wrote several important books such as Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, written if I recall around 1975, which predicted the increase in popularity of the New Age movement and the Hindu and Buddhist religions and the dangers they posed, as epitomized by figures such as the Rajneeshis in Oregon in the 1980s (who had not arrived in America at the time of his death), the Hare Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation, and UFO cults, and this was proven spectacularly correct in the course of the 1990s, for example, with the tragic suicide of the Heaven’s Gate movement (which ironically was founded the same year Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future). He also wrote a brilliant and devastating critique of Nihilism, correctly identifying it as the underlying ideology from which arose various nightmares of the 20th century such as communism, anarchism, materialism, Nazism, fascism, and other poisonous belief systems.
