Aghios Andreas, Athens, 10th May 2005
1. "On behalf of the Orthodox Church of Greece, and at the same time on behalf of all the people of Athens and of all Greece, it is with great joy and fraternal love that I welcome here in Athens all the participants of the XIII Conference on World Mission and Evangelism of WCC. In this Paschal period, almost ten days after the celebration of the Holy Easter and the Resurrection of Christ allow me to greet you all with the ancient and existential greeting which constitutes the core of our identity and witness as Christians: XPICTOC ANECTH, Christ is Risen!
2. Our joy is even greater because this event has gathered in the same place sisters and brothers from all over the world and from a Christian constituency much wider than the WCC. This place is Athens, the capital of Greece, a country especially privileged by God's love. Our country was indeed privileged by the grace of our Lord to receive the Gospel in our mother tongue. In fact, the entire New Testament, the very heart of our Bible, was originally written in Greek. We are grateful and quite honoured that Athens was selected to host this important and timely conference. Our Church, which historically is a result of Apostolic mission, is to this very day deeply committed to witness and evangelism, focusing on the same aspect underlined by the Apostle St Paul in his historic speech to the Athenians at Areopagus (Acts 17:23-31), namely on the Resurrection. Our mission, the mission of the Orthodox Church, the mission of spreading the Gospel all over the world, in the spirit of the forthcoming Pentecost, starts from our Divine Liturgy, the Eucharistic synaxeis of the people of God, in which the Resurrection of our Lord, the ontological and existential foundation of our hope that is in us (I Pe 3:15), is Sunday after Sunday and on any other occasion, doxologically re-enacted, thus becoming in our tradition the springboard for mission to the end of the inhabited world (oekoumene).
3. The Church of Greece has responded from the first moment, more than a year ago, both to the invitation and to the challenge extended to her by the WCC to be the hosting Church for this conference on the general theme "Come, Holy Spirit, Heal and Reconcile." The decision of the Holy Synod to host such a major ecumenical event, the first ever in an Orthodox setting, despite our past bitter experience from aggressive missionary activities and hostile actions against our people (Crusades, uniatism, and more recently activist proselytism), was based on three reasons:
a) on our determination to join our forces with other Christians in, dialogue and common witness, especially nowadays, when, from one end of the world to the other, the human person is tortured at the social and political level, because of urbanisation and globalisation which annul any difference between personalities and make invalid the unique character of each individual person;
b) on the positive developments within the WCC, evidenced in the recommendations of the Special Commission; and
