Barbara wrote: ↑Sun 5 May 2024 7:23 pm
Christ Is Risen ! Isn't Bishop Ambrose active in parishes in Central Africa somewhere ?
Maybe one could consult the missionaries there, to keep an ear out for conditions and updates about prospects for starting a TOC mission in South Africa.
Whereabouts are you, eish ? A big city or rural ?
There are GOC-K parishes in a couple of places in Central and East Africa, and I think one or two other jurisdictions as I recall. There are problems with that.
1) I don't trust GOC-K. If I can't be one with ecumenists then even more I certainly can't be one with covidists. I can't pick and choose which heresies are okay to be in communion with because that would be hypocrisy. If someone thinks I'm too strict then so be it, but if anyone wants to insist that the teaching of injecting oneself with "medicine" made by murdering infants is not a heresy "condemned by holy Synods, or Fathers," then that is not someone I take seriously enough to even debate with.
2) Nearly all countries near the African equator have vaccine requirements for travel. Yellow fever, I grant, but I sure don't trust them any more. At this point if I take a jab after learning that they were lying to us about what they were doing for so many years, I would be co-responsible even if they told me there were no infants harmed. Some African countries might also still be difficult with covid jabs. I don't know if there's any official information available on the net, but certainly from speaking with acquaintances they still block you at the Zimbabwean borders.
3) The nearest parishes of any group would still be around Kolwezi or so. That's over a thousand miles.
4) Rural Africa can be hard to reach and I won't get time off work for bundu bashing.
5) Africa is huge. See previous point.
Everything I have found is excluded right off the bat, by vaccination requirements, except maybe in Tanzania where there might be something and it might be viable to travel.
The big city isn't too far away and South Africa is fairly traversable so long as one has a car. But then even if we can get something started here, the question remains: Who would even be parishioners? The Greeks aren't interested in suddenly leaving their eastern papist state church, and the general population does not know Orthodoxy. That means starting from nothing.
Ultimately it means that either we get missionary clergy--difficult but not impossible--or I could be all alone in communion with distant Christians. There might be a few individuals to be found here and there, if I knew where they were.