On 27 December 2021, which was the Third Day of Christmas, and also St Stephen's Day, we held a gathering at the Monastery of the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Gerhardville, north of Johannesburg and west of Pretoria. The gathering was mainly for mission congregations in the north of Gauteng who have no resident priest, and thus do not often have ( Read more... )

The Orthodox Church in Edendale was built, as far as I know, by our Bishop Damaskinos when he was a parish priest in Durban about 10-12 years ago, and is in the care of Reader Timothy Madlala, who attended the seminary in Nairobi. I had heard a lot about him (and the church) from other people, and so was pleased to meet him in person for the first ( Read more... )

I’m pretty busy right now, working on four books at once:

1. Fr Athanasius’s thesis on Orthodox dialogue with Bunyore culture
2. Michelle Coetzee’s book on the filioque impasse
3. Revising my own doctoral thesis on Orthodox mission methods for possible ( Read more... )

Father Frumentius and his wife stayed with us last Saturday night, and came with us to visit the congregation in Mamelodi on Sunday, where Fr Frumentius preached, and his wife spoke about the women’s conferences. Fr Frumentius speaks Northern Sotho, which most members of the congregation speak, so at last people will be able to make confession to a ( Read more... )

Today many Americans will be remembering those who were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York six years ago ( Read more... )

Yesterday we said goodbye to three young Americans who had spent three weeks in the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria. They had come as a short-term mission team from the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC) in St Augustine, Florida, at the invitation and with the blessing of His Eminence Metropolitan Seraphim, Archbishop of ( Read more... )

A team from the Orthodox Christian Mission Committee (OCMC) in the USA arrived in Johannesburg yesterday for a three week teaching mission in South Africa ( Read more... )

We are expecting a mission team from the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC) in our Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria in June. I'm looking forward to it - this is the first time such a team will have come to South Africa. I don't know who the members of the team are yet, but I gather two of them are from St Vladimir's Seminary in ( Read more... )

Yesterday was St Sava's Day and we went to Vespers and Litiya at St Thomas's Church in Sunninghill Park.

It was different from last year, when we had taken about 80 children from St Athanasius Orthodox School in Tembisa to the service. Since then, the principal of the school has been in jail, and has not been willing to see us since she came out ( Read more... )

This last weekend has been a historic occasion for Orthodoxy in Southern Africa, with the first diocesan youth conference and the tonsuring of the first South African monk in South Africa by His Beatitude Theodoros, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria ( Read more... )