With the blessing of Metropolitan of Minsk and Zaslavl Venjamin on the 6th of September at the parish in honor of St. Nicholas of Japan in Minsk a prayer service dedicated to the Day of Prayer for God’s Creation was held. Traditionally it is held by the Orthodox Church on the first Sunday of September.
After the prayer service, the Archpriest Pavel Serdyuk drew the attention of the parishioners to the fact that “today, with the blessing of the Church, a prayer is being performed for the creation of God. We hear the words of apostle Paul that the whole world around us suffers, waiting for the revelation of humans. The world was created for us, humans, and handed over to us and we all now see this measure of the disorder of the world, of the disorder of man and society.
Creation groans, the whole world around is waiting for human decisions. People operate in this world, and today we are standing before the Lord in His church and again and again are called to remember the duty that was entrusted to Adam — to preserve and cultivate Eden — our world».
In addition, the parish hosted a presentation of a new informational stand prepared by the Center for Environmental Solutions and dedicated to the relationship between man and the world around him as a creation of God.
The presentation of the stand was attended by Evgeniy Lobanov, the head of the working group on the implementation of the Program of Cooperation between the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection of the Republic of Belarus, director of the Center for Environmental Solutions. Eugeniy noted that “the parish of St. Nicholas of Japan is an example of a parish that thinks about God’s creation and sees its Christian service in caring for the world around it.
A lot of people think about the environment, about ecology, and they ask themselves, what depends on me, because I am not a plant owner, I live a normal life, and the environmental problems that I hear about such as climate change, a decrease in the number of animal species, what have I to do with this? But as Christians we must understand that in fact our life consists of a large number of small actions, when we choose what we buy in the store, how we treat garbage, whether we try to reduce its amount, whether we clean up after a picnic at nature. Nobody expect any great accomplishments from us, but the Lord expects us as Christians to do actively what is in our opportunities».
The presentation of the stand was conducted by Sergey Yushkevich, the specialist of «Church and Environment program» of the Center for Environmental Solutions. In the near future the stand will be installed on the temple grounds.
After the presentation of the information stand everyone was invited to a common meal.
The informational stand and ecological event on the parish was possible thanks to financial support of the Coalition Clean Baltic.