Since there are tens of thousands of Chinese nationals residing in Serbia, either temporarily or permanently, many of whom have an interest in Orthodox Christianity, the Missionary Department of the Archbishopric of Belgrade and Karlovci has started its Chinese-language External Mission Programme on the feast day of Saint John of Shanghai, in the year of our Lord 2024.
We are starting the Orthodox missionary programme in Chinese rather symbolically, with a brochure and a three-page leaflet, suitable for missionary purposes within the Orthodox churches in Serbia. The leaflet (containing the images of selected icons and frescos, incorporated into the text) has the Jesus Prayer on the cover, and the Lord’s Prayer, the Prayers to the Heavenly King and the Theotokos, the Nicean Creed and the Guardian Angel’s Prayer on the inside. The brochure contains a short illustrated account of the life of Saint John of Shanghai. The leaflet and the brochure are both made in a bilingual format with Serbian and Chinese texts parallel to each other.
The prayers and the lives of saints in Chinese have been taken from Russian Orthodox Missionary online resources, whose addresses have been listed in the materials. At the same time, the partial editing of the Chinese text, the translation of the lives of the saints from Chinese into Serbian, as well as the complete design of the leaflet and the brochure were all done by the Missionary Department of AEM. All the Programme’s materials will be available for download in the electronic PDF format to the priests and missionaries of the Serbian Orthodox Church, via the following contact address: misionarsko.odeljenje@gmail.com. The Programme’s missionary materials are planned to be produced on a monthly basis.
The operational management of the Programme of External Mission in Chinese, has been entrusted to Dr. Sandra Knežević, a permanent expert associate of the Section for External Mission of the Missionary Department of AEM. Dr. Knežević is the focal person for this field, since she spent a decade in China, where she obtained her doctorate on “The Russian Orthodox Mission in Shanghai”, and where she later worked as a lecture in a native Chinese-speaking environment. Because of the missionary significance of this field, all the activities related to the Programme will be handled personally by the Director of the Missionary Department.
We are using this opportunity to invite all Orthodox Christians with adequate competence in the field of Sinology, who wish to support the activities of the Section for External Mission of the Missionary Department of AEM ( with the recommendation of their parish priest/spiritual father) to join us in this important missionary project. We also call upon all Orthodox missionaries and priests of the Archbishopric of Belgrade and Karlovci, who wish to acquire the necessary skills in the field of external mission in Chinese, to contact us for specialised training.
