I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was surprised (after all, I have known one or two missionaries in my time!). But if you had asked me what I thought Daniela and Valentin would want to talk about when they visited us at St Mary Magdalene, I don’t think I’d have come up with a four stage mission call; including a desperate desire to tell us Western Christians about the Orthodox tradition, and a corresponding wish to tell the Orthodox Christians about our traditions.
So, on Saturday evening, twenty of us gathered in the vicarage to enjoy and bring and share supper, and to hear what the Kozhuharovs had to say. They were sent, by an Anglican mission agency (CMS) as Orthodox Christians to Orthodox Christians – but in another country (the Kozhuharovs are Bulgarian, but were sent to Russia). This was the first stage: to teach people about their faith. Then came the desire to tell the Orthodox about their western Christian cousins. This latter desire has led Daniela and Valentin into problems in their work in Moscow: for a time they were stopped from lecturing as they were ‘proselytising’ their students with dangerous talk about other faiths – after all, we all know that the Western churches are wrong (not being Orthodox)! However, the Kozhuharovs have persevered with their multi-layered quest for union: the third call was to also tell us in the West about our Orthodox cousins. And this, in turn has led to the fourth part of their call: to do something practically.
We are not talking organisational unity here, but a quest for a meeting of people at parish to parish level, to allow for a meeting of minds and hearts; to allow what unites us in Christ to overcome the mistrust engendered by our differences and by our history; this, of course involves spending time with the other – now we are having to float the idea of visiting Bulgaria or Moscow!
And Daniela’s book? It seems that the Soviets took most of the documented history of the Bulgarian church back to Moscow – where it still resides, so Daniela simply wanted to tell the tale of her own church to her own church. And, after various complications to do with getting information out of libraries, this is what she has managed to do!
(For more information on link missionaries see: www.cms-uk.org)
“Rather than starting another Bible translation project, we decided it would be better to train others. That’s why we came to Kenya, training Africans not just to translate the Bible, but to lead others in doing so. The Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) serves to train Christian ministers from many denominations, including Anglicans. In the long run, I hope I too will be replaced by African colleagues. The more Africans involved in Bible translation, the more likely the vision for it will spread.”