Waymart, Pennsylvania, July 2, 2025
Photo: Orthodox Christian Prison Ministry
Several inmates at SCI Waymart, the correctional institution down the road from St. Tikhon’s Seminary in northeastern Pennsylvania, were recently received into the holy Orthodox Church.
The joyous occasion came during the second residency of the Certificate Program in Prison Ministry offered by St. Tikhon’s Seminary and the Orthodox Christian Prison Ministry.
Three men were united to Christ in Baptism, and a fourth was chrismated, seminary dean Archpriest John Parker announced in his bi-annual address published yesterday.
Fr. John stated:
In partnership with the Orthodox Christian Prison Ministry, St. Tikhon’s Seminary now offers a Certificate in Prison Ministry, which accomplishes propaedeutic work in early calendar years, concluding with an intensive week-long residency program that simultaneously ministers to the inmate population of the State Correctional Institution Waymart, SCI Waymart.
We’re very happy to announce and I’m so happy to have welcomed Niko Petrogeorge, the Executive Director of OCPM, along with a number of his staff and faculty. Fr. John Kowalczyk, our long-standing professor of Pastoral Theology, and our chief link and bridge and servant of servants to that prison, which culminated last Friday in the Baptism of three adult repenting convicts and the Chrismation of a fourth.
So amazingly beautiful to have the gymnasium of a prison built in the same year as sour seminary, 1938, converted into a cathedral of praise to our Lord Jesus Christ as we blessed the waters, immersed those three repentant men in those waters of Baptism and watched as God made them new by the power of the Holy Spirit, along with the Chrismation of a fourth one. So beautiful and amazing.
Fr. John’s remarks on prison ministry begin at 9:35 in the video below:
Prison ministry has been part of the curriculum at St. Tikhon’s for several decades, under the guidance of Fr. John Kowalczyk. The Certificate in Prison Ministry that the seminary now offers in partnership with OCPM was announced in November 2023, and its first cohort of students graduated in June 2024.
The second cohort was in residency at St. Tikhon’s and SCI Waymart in early June this year.
Learn more about the Prison Ministry program here.
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