Moscow, August 27, 2018
patriarchia.ru An innovative missionary tool was presented at the recent 3rd International Orthodox Youth Forum “Past. Present. Future” in Moscow.
Fr. Andrei Strelkov is the creator of Russia’s only bus-church, which he has used to travel throughout Russia to remote villages that have no churches. Fr. Andrei has visited, celebrated the Liturgy, and preached in more than 30 such remote villages over the past seven years, reports the Union of Orthodox Journalists.
patriarchia.ru The missionary priest traveled 680 miles from the small Tatar city of Zainsk to attend the Moscow forum. The bus-church was presented in the “Missionary Work” section of the youth forum, and was personally inspected by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill.
Everything needed to serve the Divine Liturgy is ready to go inside the bus-church—Fr. Andrei only has to open the hatch in the roof and place the dome on the top.
patriarchia.ru A similar idea was rolled out over Memorial Day weekend last year in Colorado Springs, when Holy Theophany Church debuted its own mobile chapel, made of a repurposed mobile coffee kiosk.
As parish priest Fr. Anthony Karbo writes, the Colorado chapel was inspired by a mobile chapel taken out to the fields at Optina Monastery, where the harvesters could pray, as seen in the video below:
It was also inspired by the mobile Orthodox bookstore driven for many years by Fr. Michael Furry of St. Innocent of Alaska Church in Roanoke, VA.
A missionary boat-church also recently set off for remote villages in Siberia to celebrate the Divine services for villagers with no easy access to a church.
Follow us on Facebook!
