scholarly journals Activities of Father Nikolai Velimirovich in Great Britain during the Great War

Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 143-190
Author(s):  
Slobodan Markovich

Nikolai Velimirovich was one of the most influential bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the twentieth century. His stay in Britain in 1908/9 influenced his theological views and made him a proponent of an Anglican-Orthodox church reunion. As a known proponent of close relations between different Christian churches, he was sent by the Serbian Prime Minister Pasic to the United States (1915) and Britain (1915-1919) to work on promoting Serbia and the cause of Yugoslav unity. His activities in both countries were very successful. In Britain he closely collaborated with the Serbian Relief Fund and ?British friends of Serbia? (R. W. Seton-Watson, Henry Wickham Steed and Sir Arthur Evans). Other Serbian intellectuals in London, particularly the brothers Bogdan and Pavle Popovic, were in occasional collision with the members of the Yugoslav Committee over the nature of the future Yugoslav state. In contrast, Velimirovich remained committed to the cause of Yugoslav unity throughout the war with only rare moments of doubt. Unlike most other Serbs and Yugoslavs in London Father Nikolai never grew unsympathetic to the Serbian Prime Minister Pasic, although he did not share all of his views. In London he befriended the churchmen of the Church of England who propagated ecclesiastical reunion and were active in the Anglican and Eastern Association. These contacts allowed him to preach at St. Margaret?s Church, Westminster and other prominent Anglican churches. He became such a well-known and respected preacher that, in July 1917, he had the honour of being the first Orthodox clergyman to preach at St. Paul?s Cathedral. He was given the same honour in December 1919. By the end of the war he had very close relations with the highest prelates of the Church of England, the Catholic cardinal of Westminster, and with prominent clergymen of the Church of Scotland and other Protestant churches in Britain. Based on Velimirovich?s correspondence preserved in Belgrade and London archives, and on very wide coverage of his activities in The Times, in local British newspapers, and particularly in the Anglican journal The Church Times, this paper describes and analyses his wide-ranging activities in Britain. The Church of England supported him wholeheartedly in most of his activities and made him a celebrity in Britain during the Great War. It was thanks to this Church that some dozen of his pamphlets and booklets were published in London during the Great War. What made his relations with the Church of England so close was his commitment to the question of reunion of Orthodox churches with the Anglican Church. He suggested the reunion for the first time in 1909 and remained committed to it throughout the Great War. Analysing the activities of Father Nikolai, the paper also offers a survey of the very wide-ranging forms of help that the Church of England provided both to the Serbian Orthodox Church and to Serbs in by the end of the Great War he became a symbol of Anglican-Orthodox rapprochement. general during the Great War. Most of these activities were channelled through him. Thus, by the end of the Great War he became a symbol of Anglican-Orthodox rapprochement.

Sabornost ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 177-186
Author(s):  
Mile Subotić

Metropolitan Theophan Fan Noli was a leader of the Church both in America and his native Albania. He was a pioneer in calling for a united Orthodox Church in America and in the use of English in services. Noli began his life of service in the Church in the United States organizing Albanian parishes. With the Balkan Wars and the independence of Albania, Fan Noli devoted more of his time to the cause of Albania. He was Prime Minister of Albania in 1924. After a change in political climate, Bishop Theophan was forced to leave Albania. He was able to return to the United States in 1932. Upon arriving he retired from politics and resumed his duties as bishop of the Albanian Orthodox Church in America. Bishop Noli considered his Albanian Church as a daughter of the Russian Orthodox Church in America and looked to it for the creation of a single Orthodox Church in America. He continued to lead his flock and to advocate Orthodox unity until his death in 1965.


Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


Author(s):  
Alasdair Raffe

This chapter examines the transformations in the status and character of Scottish Episcopalianism from 1662 to 1829. Despite being re-established in the Church of Scotland in 1661–2, episcopacy was abolished in 1689. Thereafter Episcopalians were a Nonconformist group, and only the minority of congregations whose clergy were loyal to Queen Anne and her Hanoverian successors enjoyed legal protection. But while the intermittent prosecution of the Jacobite clergy contributed to a steep decline in the number of Scottish Episcopalians, disestablishment allowed the clergy to reassess episcopal authority, and to experiment with liturgical reforms. After transferring their allegiance to the Hanoverians in 1788, the Episcopalians drew closer to the Church of England, formally adopting the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1804. By the end of the period, the Episcopalians saw themselves as an independent, non-established Church, one of the branches of international Anglicanism.


Author(s):  
Albrecht Geck

During the period between 1833 and 1845 the Oxford Movement was widely discussed in Western European countries. The via media, as Newman understood it, was received with great suspicion. Roman Catholics continued to consider Anglicanism as a heresy, but hailed the Oxford Movement as a means to lead the Church of England back to the mother Church in Rome. Continental Protestants feared that the Oxford Movement might destroy the essence of the Protestant churches. Although the criticism was not universal, it was brought forward by a variety of schools and the nature of the debate served as a mirror of the theological pluralism of the time.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 648
Author(s):  
Virginia Garrard

Historically, Protestant churches in Latin America regarded the ‘world’ as a realm of sin and impurity. The proper focus of the church, they believed, was on salvation, and building a community of the saved. In recent years, this has begun to change, as evangelicals have entered the political arena in force. Many are motivated by ‘Dominion theology’, a long hidden movement that works to bring a network of conservative Christians to political power in order to affect ‘dominion’ over the earth to hasten the Kingdom of God. Although its origins are in the United States, this is a global movement, hidden in plain sight. The movement has shown strength and drawn notable political allies all across Latin America, with notable cases in Central America and Brazil. This remains a minority and a much-contested movement in Latin American Protestantism, but its advocates are working hard to gain positions of influence.


Rusin ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 67-90
Author(s):  
M.V. Vedernikov ◽  

With the outbreak of WWI (1914–1918), the participating countries began to promote separatist movements on their own territory, which aimed to destroy the foundations of hostile multinational empires. Of particular interest to the Russian authorities were the compatriots of the Slavic peoples of Austria-Hungary, who loudly declared their desire to destroy the Habsburg Empire. One of the most active diasporas was the Czechs, who managed to meet with Nicholas II twice in the first month of the war and achieve the formation of the Czech squad. However, the Czech question, initially incorporating the Slovak one due to the ethnic and linguistic proximity, exposed significant contradictions. An active part of the Slovak political elite living in Russia opposed the formation of a single Czech-Slovak state, because they were close to the idea of Slovakia’s accession to Russia. To popularize these ideas, a Slovak-Russian society named after L. Štur was established in Moscow. It received support from the outstanding Russians as well as the largest Slovak diasporas in the United States. The assistance of such important actors forced the Czechs to look for ways to resolve the conflict with the Slovaks, which undoubtedly led to the mainstreaming of the Slovak question. However, the cessions of 1915–1916 failed to resolve the conflict. Drawing on new archival sources and current historiography, the author concludes that the presence of multiple conflicts contributed to the formation of the Czech-Slovak national idea, which was free from asymmetry, and made Slovaks equal partners.


2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 330-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bebbington

‘From some modern perspectives’, wrote James Belich, a leading historian of New Zealand, in 1996, ‘the evangelicals are hard to like. They dressed like crows; seemed joyless, humourless and sometimes hypocritical; [and] they embalmed the evidence poor historians need to read in tedious preaching’. Similar views have often been expressed in the historiography of Evangelical Protestantism, the subject of this essay. It will cover such disapproving appraisals of the Evangelical past, but because a high proportion of the writing about the movement was by insiders it will have more to say about studies by Evangelicals of their own history. Evangelicals are taken to be those who have placed particular stress on the value of the Bible, the doctrine of the cross, an experience of conversion and a responsibility for activism. They were to be found in the Church of England and its sister provinces of the Anglican communion, forming an Evangelical party that rivalled the high church and broad church tendencies, and also in the denominations that stemmed from Nonconformity in England and Wales, as well as in the Protestant churches of Scotland. Evangelicals were strong, often overwhelmingly so, within Methodism and Congregationalism and among the Baptists and the Presbyterians. Some bodies that arose later on, including the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren, the Churches of Christ and the Pentecostals (the last two primarily American in origin), joined the Evangelical coalition.


Author(s):  
Alexander Kitroeff

This sweeping history shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country's million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants. Assuming the responsibility of running Greek-language schools and encouraging local parishes to engage in cultural and social activities, the church became the most important Greek American institution and shaped the identity of Greeks in the United States. The book digs into these traditional activities, highlighting the American church's dependency on the “mother church,” the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the use of Greek language in the Sunday liturgy. Today, as this rich biography of the church shows us, Greek Orthodoxy remains in between the Old World and the New, both Greek and American.


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