Black South Africans join Orthodox Church
42 members of the Zulu, Tsvan and Sutu tribes were baptised into the Orthodox Church in South Africa on the day after St Nicholas Day (19 December). The baptism took place after a year’s catechism in Tembisi, a suburb of Johannesburg. Serbian monks had been teaching catechism for some years at St Athanasius School, where the Africans were received into the church by the Serbian Metropolitan Seraphim of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Fr Johannes, a Zulu Orthodox priest ordained by the Metropolitan, already teaches at the school.
This story is inaccurate in almost every particular. The pictures were taken at a diocesan youth conference in Dec 2006, and the youth are from various parishes. The story of where the pictures was taken is here:
http://methodius.livejournal.com/2006/12/11/
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Thank you, Steve, for the correction!
We love your blog, by the way.
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In addition: Alexandria follows the new calendar and so the feast of St Nicholas would have been on 6 December; the (former) Metropolitan was not Serbian but Cypriot; and I presume that “Tsvan” and “Sutu” refer to Tswana and Sotho. As for the rest, Deacon Stephen knows the details better than I do but some of it sounds decidedly dicey.
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