Orthodox youth from around the world will meet this year in Wroclaw, Poland, between July 18th and 23rd.
The meeting was hosted by the Polish Orthodox Church and the Association of Orthodox Youth in Poland, with the blessing of His Beatitude Metropolitan Sava, Metropolitan of Warsaw and all of Poland.
The event was inspired by Christ’s words “to go and bear fruit” (John 15:16) and was organized by an international youth group coordinated by Archdeacon Josef Matusiak. The purpose of the festival is to bring together young people from the Orthodox Churches around the world to witness together the unity and comprehensiveness of the Orthodox Church, and to encourage each other in the experience of youth ministry.
“What will we Orthodox do to avoid the most terrible disease – indifference to each other?” Greek theologian Nikos Nisiotis asked this question in 1949, when Orthodox believers around the world were still experiencing the effects of World War II. This question remains relevant more than 70 years later, raising the additional question “… and how will we do it?”
The Wroclaw 2022 Festival will be happy to welcome Orthodox young people aged 16 to 30. (It is recommended that participants aged 16-17 be accompanied by an adult). According to the organizers, those who have focused their efforts on Orthodox missionary work will have priority. Through lectures and discussions, seminars and various other projects, the Wroclaw 2022 initiative will put into practice the biblical call “to go and bear fruit”.
At the events planned for Wroclaw 2022, the main focus will be on prayer. Each day will begin with morning prayers, preaching and reading of the Holy Scriptures, and will end with evening prayers, and the clergy will invariably be available for confession.
It is planned to celebrate the Divine Liturgy twice during the festival: in the Cathedral of the Nativity in Wroclaw and at the last place for a meeting on the final evening of the program.
Inspired and encouraged by the decades of pioneering work of Syndesmos, the World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth, and recognizing the current need to network, connect, and gather in fellowship the youth of the Orthodox Church worldwide a small group lead by Archdeacon Joseph Matusiak came together in the fall of 2020 to begin considering how this could be done. Following eight months of meetings and correspondence with with heads of local churches, as well as with bishops, priests, lay youth leaders, and others who were once involved – or continue to be – international youth work, a decision has been made to host a gathering of Orthodox youth from all parts of the world. In June of 2021 a group of youth workers from around the world came together to begin to develop Wroclaw 2022: A World Gathering of Orthodox Youth.
Orthodox young people wishing to take part in the Wroclaw 2022 meeting can register on the festival’s website: wroclaw2022.org
