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Monday, March 13, 2000 |
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| Report on the Visit The Church of Albania Press Release in Arabic Photo Gallery |
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Brief Biography of His Beatitude
Anastasios Yannoulatos is perhaps the most respected missiologist and one of the main leaders responsible for a reawakening of the missionary consciousness in the Orthodox Church today.
He was born November 4, 1929 in Piraeus, Greece. As a young man, he joined the religious brotherhood "Zoe", a spiritual renewal movement of the Church of Greece. In the late 1950s, he joined efforts with several other young theologians and called for Orthodox Churches worldwide to rediscover their great missionary tradition. In 1960, he founded the inter-Orthodox mission center "Porefthentes," which published a monthly Orthodox mission journal with the same name. This center later helped pioneer the framework for the Bureau of External Missions within Apostoliki Diakonia (the service branch of the Church of Greece) in 1968.
Following a bout of malaria he received in Uganda, Yannoulatos abandoned his desire to become an overseas missionary and instead pursued studies in missiology and world religions. In 1972, the University of Athens elected him professor of the History of Religions. In this position, he established a center for missionary studies, which led to an eventual chair of missiolgy in 1976. His written work includes nine scholarly books, five catechetical books, over sixty treatises (fifty in foreign languages), and more than eighty articles.
Within ecumenical circles, Yannoulatos became the youngest member of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the WCC in 1963. His active role in the WCC culminated in his becoming the first Orthodox missiologist to serve as moderator of CWME from 1984-91.
From 1980-91, Yannoulatos was called to serve as Archbishop of East Africa, opening and running the only Orthodox seminary in all of Africa. In 1991, he was elected Archbishop of Albania, and presently holds the task of rebuilding a Church that had ceased to exist 24 years earlier.
