Issue 4 for 2025 (56) of the Quarterly Journal of St Philaret’s Institute has been Published

Issue 4-2025 (56) of the Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret's Institute is devoted to the theme of lay ministry. This topic was proposed for further development by the Inter-Council Presence of the Russian Orthodox Church, following a decision of the Holy Synod dated 30 May 2024.  The journal's electronic version is available on the SFI website.

The issue features:

• reflections on the royal priesthood of all Christians in the light of early Christian sources and in particular the consecration to priestly ministry within the sacrament of Baptism;
• an overview of lay participation in the institutions of the Supreme Church Administration of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1918–1920;
• a theological interpretation of the concept of charisma in the eucharistic ecclesiology of Fr Nicholas Afanasiev;
• and a theological analysis of the experience of lay ministry in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 20th–21st centuries.

The sources section contains the following publications:

• a ceremonial lecture delivered in 1866 at Kazan University by Alexey Pavlov (then a senior lecturer and later a full professor), entitled “On the Participation of the Laity in the Affairs of the Church from the Perspective of Orthodox Canon Law”;
• a conversation between Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) and the council of the Brotherhood of the Moscow Hierarch-Saints Peter, Alexius, Jonah and Philip;
• petitions from the laity of Pskov, written in early 1945, requesting the reopening of the city's Holy Trinity Cathedral.

The issue also includes:

• a summary piece entitled “The Problem of Lay Ministry: Assessments by Experts and Parishioners from St Petersburg Churches,” prepared by Evgenia Malkova and Olga Solodovnikova, on the basis of expert interviews and parishioner surveys;
• an appraisal by Abbot Silouan (Tumanov) of the book Lenten Triodion: Selected Hymns in Russian and Church Slavonic (Moscow: SFI, 2025);
• a review by Kirill Aleksin of Andrey Druzhinin’s monograph The Preparation of Pastors in the Russian Theological School: 1808–1869 — Discussion, Reflection and Practice (Moscow: PSTGU, 2025);
• other book reviews.