The main goal of the Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative is "to reflect constructively on the history of relationships between Evangelicals and Orthodoxin order to work towards better understanding, and encourage reconciliation and healing where wounds exist." The focus of the 2014 meeting, held at St. Vlash Monastery outside of Durres, Albania 15-19 September, was on the mission of God, and the different but potentially complementary approaches to mission in Orthodox and evangelical churches.
IBT was invited to attend this meeting as an organization that puts into practice the side-by-side work of Orthodox Christians and evangelical Protestant Christians to accomplish the task of translating the Holy Scriptures into the languages of Russia and the CIS. Other guests invited to the meeting by Archbishop Anastasios, the head of the Albanian Orthodox Church, included mission leaders, ecumenists and theologians of the Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Coptic, Greek, Ethiopian and Russian Orthodox churches and of various evangelical churches.
IBT was represented at the meeting by translation consultant Alexey Somov, who gave a presentation on the successes and difficulties of having Christians of different confessions working together in IBT translation projects. Dr. Somov's talk was greeted with lively interest from the other participants, who asked many follow-up questions on how IBT produces its translations and runs its translation projects.
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