It is an incomparably beautiful and comforting feeling to know the truth… It is a creative yet essential feeling to communicate the truth… What truth? The one that every human being, more or less, overtly or covertly, eagerly or reluctantly, has sought, framed by deep questions. Does God exist? Life after death? What is my destiny? To all these existential quests the answer is generously offered by the Christian faith and especially by Orthodoxy. In the “civilized Christian” world in which we live, and specifically in “Orthodox” Greece, to know Christ is possible and depends on the desire and intention of each individual. But the same is not true in the “Third” – as many call it – but purer World, where there are people who have not heard of Him, the Saviour of the world and their Father. The above mission has been undertaken in an organized way by the Orthodox Church, with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Patriarchate of Alexandria in the forefront, as well as by Orthodox missionary brotherhoods such as ours.
The effort of witnessing to Christ and His Principles in the corners of the earth consists of two important aspects: on the one hand, the spreading of the Gospel and on the other, its application through acts of love, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and generally helping the disabled. In this second ministry, the Orthodox Foreign Missionary Fraternity participated by sending four containers of humanitarian aid last year 2016: two to the long-suffering Sierra Leone and two to the Congo, with the main objective of strengthening the Theological School of Kinshasa, but also its charitable work. The aforementioned containers included:
- more than 75 tonnes of long-life food,
- necessities such as desks and chairs, furniture, soaps, medicines, medical tools, generators, school supplies, clothes, toys and, finally,
- ecclesiastical items, such as holy chalices, icons, priests’ vestments, holy table covers, liturgical vessels and books, etc.
For this offer, the Orthodox Foreign Missionary Brotherhood received tearful “thank you” from the project managers who received the containers and from the indigenous brothers who tasted the fruits of your love. Our response to their tears of gratitude is: we are “servants without mercy, the obeyers of the Lord are dead” (Luke 17:10).
We owe warm thanks to the young people, to the ladies and to all those who selflessly and even with joy offer their ministry in the warehouses of our Brotherhood in Filiro Thessaloniki, as well as to the brothers from Florina for the financial and material support of this effort. Konstantinos Metallidis
Theologian
