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Orthodox Christian Mission Center

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The '''Orthodox Christian Mission Center''' is the official Orthodox Missions and Evangelism Agency established by the [[Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas]], and now an agency of the [[Episcopal Assembly of North and Central America]]. The headquarters of the OCMC is in St. Augustine, Florida. It supports Orthodox [[missionary]] activities world wide and currently includes training and sending missionary teams to countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, [[Uganda]], [[Tanzania]], [[Albania]], Korea, Puerto Rico, and Philippines. The teams preach, teach, and [[baptize]] as well as minister to the poor, hungry, suffering, and orphaned. They also strive to strengthen the infrastructures of the local churches through development of local leaders.
==History==
The roots of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center go back to the late 1950's, when students at [[Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology (Brookline, Massachusetts)|Holy Cross School of Theology]] began to accept students from sub-saharan Africa. Other members of the student body began a Missions Committee to raise support for their fellow-students, and to raise consciousness in general about the work of the Church in Africa. Among the leaders of this effort was [[Alexander Veronis]], later to become the founding President of OCMC.
As the students touched by this outreach graduated and began to serve parishes in the [[Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America|Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America]], their interest in mission followed them and began to have an impact across the Archdiocese. In response to a proposal at the 17th Clergy-Laity Congress in 1966, the Archdiocese organized the Standing Committee on Missions. This committee, composed of twenty volunteer clergy and lay members, conducted an annual solicitation for overseas Missions throughout the parishes of the Archdiocese, primarily directed at providing scholarship assistance to Mission students from Uganda, Kenya, Korea, and Mexico. Bishop Silas of Amphipolis was the Chairman of the Standing Commitee. Fr. Alexander Veronis and Fr. [[Fr. Alexander Doumouras]] served to coordinate the efforts of the Committee, but there was no salaried staff dedicated to the committee or to missions efforts.
===St. Augustine, Florida===
In 1984, the 27th Clergy-Laity Congress approved the creation of a permanent office for the mission effort, as well as the appointment of a salaried Executive Director. [[Dimitrios (Couchell) of Xanthos|Fr. Dimitrios Couchell]] was appointed by [[Iakovos (Coucouzis) of America|Archbishop Iakovos]] as Executive Director of what was now called the Archdiocesan Mission Center. [[St. Photios National Shrine]] in St. Augustine, Florida provided the first offices for the Center. The first edition of the Mission Center's semiannual publication "Mission," identified the continuation of scholarships to ten mission students as a key priority, along with direct support to the [[Orthodox Patriarchal Ecclesiastical School of Makarios III|Makarios III Patriarchal Seminary]] in Nairobi, [[St. Herman's Orthodox Theological Seminary (Kodiak, Alaska)|St. Herman's Seminary in Kodiak]], indigenous priests in [[Ghana ]] and Korea, and support for missionaries from the [[Church of Greece]] serving in Africa. By the end of 1985, the Mission Center had announced the appointment of the first full time missionaries to Africa (Fr. Daniel and Nancy Christopoulos), as well as sent a study team to Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya.
===Mission Teams===
* Fr. Gregory Horton
* Fr. David Hudson
* Spero Kinnas, M.D.
* Fr. Dimitri Leussis
* George Marangakes
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