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On Wednesday, October 12, Deacon Matthew Joyner, a senior seminarian at St. Tikhon’s, gave a plenary address at the 2016 Western Rite Conference for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
The lecture was entitled “Evangelical Necessity: An Apologetic for the Western Rite,” and was an expansion of an article that Dcn. Matthew published last February through Pravoslavie.ru.
“In my talk, I urged the Western Rite Communities to continue in their call to evangelize and ‘re-baptize’ the Western Culture,” Dcn. Matthew explained, “and to be undeterred by criticism, giving an apologetic for the Western Rite itself, and its ongoing growth and existence within the Orthodox Church.”
In attendance during Dcn. Matthew’s talk were His Eminence Metropolitan Hilarion, First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad; His Eminence Metropolitan Jonah, the dean of the Western Rite Communities; Fr. Mark Rowe, and many clergy of the ROCOR Western Rite Communities.
