Val and I left at 7:45 for the Obednitsa at Margaret Mphela's house in Klipfontein View. We had printed a couple more copies of the service, and bound them in filers. As we were leaving we phoned Angellos (Joel) Mokau to see if he was waiting at Eddie's Spares in town to meet us. But he wasn't, he wouldn't be coming. So we were too early, but that ( Read more... )

I left just after 6:00 to fetch the Mamelodi people for our trip to Limpopo province to visit an Ecoschool project I knew very little about. I fetched Grace Malahlela and her daughter Helen, and Theodora Ramolahle and her cousin Melitah Mphela ( Read more... )

Today we went to St Thomas's Serbian Orthodox Church in Sunninghill Park for the Hours and Readers Service, which we are doing, with the blessing of Archbishop Seraphim, on alternate Sundays while the priests, Fr Pantelejmon and Fr Spyridon, are away ( Read more... )

Our congregation at Tembisa seems to have disintegrated -- the people who originally asked for an Orthodox Church there have scattered. About half were Zimbabweans, and they seem to have returned to Zimbabwe and not been able to get visas to come back to South Africa. A couple of others got jobs, and their work took them away. The main leader is ( Read more... )

Today is Youth Day -- a public holiday on which we remember the young people who rebelled against apartheid education in 1976, and thereby helped to free the country.

There is a similar public holiday in Greece, called Polytechniou, which commemorates the students who two years earlier, in 1974, rebelled against the military junta that has seized ( Read more... )

Yesterday we took a bunch of kids from St Athanasius Orthodox Christian School in Phomolong, Tembisa, to St Thomas's Serbian Orthodox Church in Sunninghill Park for Vespers and Litiya for St Sava's Day.


( Read more... )

Monasteries have been part of the life of the Orthodox Church since the third century. During persecutions in the Roman Empire some Christians fled from the cities into the desert, as refugees. There they prayed, and some of them discovered that the spiritual struggle they faced in the desert was a bigger challenge than that against a hostile ( Read more... )

Yesterday we had the first Divine Liturgy in Mamelodi, for our mission ( Read more... )

Yesterday we went to Tembisa again, as we do on alternate Sundays, but this time Fr Spyridon came with us ( Read more... )

Over the last few weeks we've been busy helping to establish a new Orthodox mission congregation at Tembisa, about 50 kilometres away. They are friends and neighbours of Fr Simon Thamaga, who died last September. A group of friends and neighbours who attended his funeral were so impressed that they decided they wanted to join the Orthodox Church, ( Read more... )