UGCC is Developing its Conception of Evangelization

LVIV – “Evangelization is the permanent status of the church; it is its origin, it is renewing and developing the church, and it is carrying out the objective purpose of its existence,” begins the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church’s conception of evangelization project, reports the Information Department of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC). On June 29, 2010, in the Lviv Holy Spirit Seminary an academic conference dedicated to the conception of evangelization began its work.

The head of the Patriarchal Commission of the UGCC on Matters of Evangelization Bishop Taras (Senkiv) opened the event. He, in particular, said that before the UGCC stands an extraordinarily difficult task for to talk about the UGCC to others, we must understand and respect ourselves. “The history of our church is tragic enough. We have to put in a great amount of effort to understand our identity: who we are, where are coming from, where are we going, and what our main task is. Thus opening our potential and fulfilling our calling of the Divine plan to save all humanity,” said the bishop.

The project of conception of evangelization of the UGCC is the result of the year’s work of the commission. Its chairman selected two main ideas of the document – theology, which reproduces the act of the Holy Trinity, and Slavonic Christianity as a new identity of the UGCC.

Evangelization, according to the head of Commission on Matters of Evangelization, assists the rebirth of faith in a person and helps him mature. The dignity of a human is exposed in the creation of it in the image of God and the assimilation to the persons of the Holy Trinity. But the third type of Christianity – not Byzantium or Latin, but Slavonic – is capable of incorporating the work and spiritual achievements of the East and the West in order to create a universal method of propagating the Gospel.

“The UGCC has its sacred message. Its existence is not simply an episode in history. It is the first sketch of God’s providence. I feel our church is able to sound the appeal of Christ: ‘Follow after me!’; to do it well and clearly, making it enticing for others, so that humanity will want to accept these invitations and, taking us as an example, follow Christ,” underlined Bishop Taras.

The task of the conference, in the opinion of the bishop, is to produce collectively a conception, which will become a strategic plan for defining the areas of evangelistic activity, the future and of long-term tasks of the church, and methods of their realization. Afterward this conception will become the basis for the synod’s document about the evangelization of the UGCC.