Supporting the Missionary Work
With heartfelt appreciation, I address, through these humble words, the Board of Directors and the members of the Orthodox Foreign Mission Fraternity, this sacred hive of love, offering, and apostolic zeal. My words spring from the depths of my heart as an expression of gratitude to you, our fellow travelers, supporters, and brothers in Christ, who for many years have been supporting the missionary, pastoral, and charitable work of our Holy Diocese in the African land of Tanzania.
When the Church sends the laborers of the Gospel to the ends of the earth, it does not send them alone. They are accompanied by the prayer, love, and sacrifice of all who live with an apostolic conscience. Amidst difficulties, material shortages, geographical isolation, but also the deep and sincere thirst of our brethren here, your prayers and offerings are bright beacons that chart paths of salvation.
And you, my beloved, have become true fellow travelers of Christ here in Central Tanzania. With special gratitude, I mention your generous donations, which have enabled the drilling of boreholes in arid areas suffering from water scarcity. Where once thirst tormented people and children walked for miles for a drop of water, now clean water flows from the boreholes you funded.
I also humbly thank you for the invaluable financial support that ensures the continuous operation of the Saint Nicholas Polyclinic at the Iringa Missionary Center. Thanks to you, our patients – poor people, parents, children, and the elderly – find healing, care, and relief, where once there was only abandonment.
The construction of holy temples, the daily soup kitchens for our hungry brethren, the performance of baptisms that offer the light of Grace to the new Christians of Africa – all these have been accomplished with your invaluable contribution. Every tile, every portion of food, every drop of water, every white garment of a newly baptized person, bears the signature of your love.
With humility but also hope, I dare to address one more appeal for your support: I earnestly ask for the continuation of your prayers and material support for the construction of two homes for our priests in the remote villages of Mapogoro and Masege, next to the Holy Temples of Saints Anargyroi and Saints Paisios the Athonite and Luke the Physician, respectively.
These priests, simple, poor, and self-sacrificing laborers of the Gospel, currently travel long distances daily through difficult and dangerous roads. Many times they are endangered by wild animals, by floods, by exhaustion. They do not have the blessing of a home near their flock; they cannot be immediately present in human suffering, at the call for confession, at the need of a dying person for the last Holy Communion.
The construction of these homes is not a luxury; it is an act of essence. It will give them security, dignity, and the ability to minister continuously, to bless, to support, to comfort. They will be beside the hungry children, the anxious elderly, the faithful who thirst for Christ.
My beloved brethren, what happens in Africa does not happen “far away”; it happens in the heart of the Church. You are that heart. With your prayers, your humble offerings, and your active participation in the missionary work. Let us continue together, because Mission is not the work of a few; it is the concern of the entire Church. It is God’s work, and we, by His grace, humbly become His instruments.
With gratitude and profound respect,
† Agathonikos, Bishop of Arusha and Central Tanzania
