CTE’s Principal Officer for Mission and Evangelism, Rev Dr Ben Aldous, reflects on the Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative meeting at the St Bishoy Monastery, Egypt.
“There are some ecumenical experiences that make a deep impact on one’s life. Spending four days (from 4 to 7 November) at the St Bishoy monastery due west of Cairo with 70 Orthodox and Evangelical leaders has been one of them. Being present in the desert where the writings of the Ascetic Fathers and Mothers were forged and where today monks still live in community, praying and worshipping and serving pilgrims to the site, was a profoundly holy experience.”
The Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative (LOI) was inaugurated 15 years ago at the Lausanne conference in Cape Town in 2010, where an incident during one of the plenary sessions revealed how little most evangelicals knew about Orthodox life and spirituality. Archbishop Angaelos, the Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, vowed such misunderstandings were not to happen again, and with the support of senior evangelical leader Mrs Leslie Doll, the initiative was formed, meeting once a year in various parts of the globe.
Rev Dr Ben Aldous reflects on two things, the first was making the sharing of faith stories a central component of ecumenical encounters. The second is around the idea of an ecumenism of repentance.
The full article can be found here: https://cte.org.uk/towards-an-ecumenism-of-repentance-loi2025/
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