Apostle to the Hungry: Bishop Themi of Sierra Leone

 A rock star, atheist, Marxist, world-class theologian, African missionary, and a Greek Orthodox Bishop all in one lifetime? Hank Hanegraaff is joined by Bishop Themi—a personal hero of his and a beacon of hope and inspiration to millions of Christians around the globe. Bishop Themi earned degrees in theology, languages, and Biblical studies at some of the most prestigious universities in America and became a distinguished scholar—however in the 90s Themi questioned his life’s direction. Was he serving Christ best as a top-tier academic? A series of events led him to follow another path, serving the poor in his native Africa. Themi founded the Holy Orthodox Mission in Freetown, Sierra Leone where he has battled Ebola and foes, both earthly and spiritual, to feed, educate and offer the love of Christ to thousands of West African people.

opics discussed include: How Bishop Themi’s roots as a white man born in Africa formed his nomadic DNA and understanding of not feeling completely welcome (3:15); the impact that the British Invasion and the Beatles had on Bishop Themi becoming a Marxist (9:15); the guru and the cross—Bishop Themi’s first steps towards Christianity (19:00); mystical experiences that reveal the reality of Jesus Christ (25:00); how reading the Bible led to Bishop Themi being born again, selling everything and giving it to the poor to follow Christ (29:30); Bishop Themi was a serious academic until he was convicted that he must do missions due to the impact of Mother Teresa (34:00); how Bishop Themi’s belief on missions led him to Africa (40:05); the impact of HIV/AIDS on Bishop Themi’s first mission in Kenya  (43:15); why Bishop Themi thinks the experience in Sierra Leone with Ebola was worse than HIV/AIDS (45:25); what does it truly mean to live in poverty? (48:30); what is Paradise 4 Kids? (51:25); the methodology of indigenous missions (54:20); the impact of Bishop Themi on the life of Hank Hanegraaff (59:35); what we do with our lives and resources matters for all eternity—we will be judged (1:06:00);  sharing among the poor is not unusual—the poor tend to practice generosity beyond their means (1:10:25); the simple truth is that the more you give the more you will receive (1:12:20); Bishop Themi owns nothing—he has surrendered completely in confidence to God (1:14:20); how can we teach our children how fortunate they are?  (1:16:40); how can people support Bishop Themi’s mission? (1:18:40); Christ identified with the suffering and we must follow Christ by imitating Him (1:21:00).

 
 
For more information on the life of Bishop Themi, please see the following for your partnering gift, Themi – Apostle To The Hungry with Foreword by Hank Hanegraaff https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-themi-apostle-to-the-hungry-with-foreword-by-hank-hanegraaff/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome to another edition of the handcom Plug podcast, a
podcast that is committed to bringing the most interesting, informative
and inspirational people directly to your earbuds. And today will
be no exception. I have in studio with me someone
who has become a personal friend. His life story is

(00:45):
a story that is interesting, amazing, but I think above
all transformational. My guest is Bishop Themi and he is
known as an Apostle to the Hungary. I have in

(01:06):
front of me a book by Bishop Themi, Apostle to
the Hungary. It's his authorized biography. The back of this
book tells the story in some he's a rock star,
an atheist, a Marxist, a world class theologian, an African missionary,

(01:30):
and a Greek Orthodox bishop and all of that in
one life span. I mean, that's an amazing story in
and of itself. And his authorized autobiography has actually two forwards.
It has a forward by Father Alexander Carlutsis, and in

(01:51):
this forward I want to read one paragraph. Father alex
points out that when my guest was made a bishop
in the Orthodox Church, he said this, I will only
accept to be ordained if I am to be a
bishop for the poor, to the poor, and of the poor.

(02:17):
So what you're going to hear in this podcast is
a life story. But at the end of this life story,
you'll hear a mission, and that mission, that passion is
about the poorest, the least of these, my brethren. As
much as you have done this for the least of these,
my brethren, you have done it unto me. That's the

(02:40):
takeaway to the hand Gunplug podcast today. With that, I
want to introduce my guest formerly and thank you, Bishop
Thumbi for being on the hand gun Plug Podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
My total pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
I actually knew you before I was Orthodox. When I
was transitioning into Orthodox, you were instrumental in answering some
of my questions. You and I have become friends, and
I have been intrigued with your life story and want
to share it with our larger audience.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Oh, thank you appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
So your story reads more like a best selling novel
than a biography. To be really honest with you, you
start out as a rock star. I want you to
tell that story. Well, before we get into that story,
you were born in Alexander.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Right, That's where they start off.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, yeah, tell that story.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well, I was born in Africa of Greek parents, and that,
by the way, later on will help enormously because during
my African mission, there is at the moment, you know,
an awakening, an African awakening, and there is some sort
of resentment to the former colonial powers that were in
charge of Africa and the spheres of influence. And having

(03:54):
been born being a white man, but being born in Africa,
I have an advantage because I can claim that I
am an African in the sense that I was born
there and I would drink the water of the River
Nile for the first years of my life, so I
have drunk African water. So the issue is that that

(04:16):
is a passport to accept acceptability in today's Africa. In fact,
in Kenya where I started off as a missionary, my
my my apprenticeship into missionary work was Kenya, in Nairobi,
the capital city, and the word, the word for the
white man in Kenya is Muzungu. And it's not a

(04:38):
good term. It's it's a derogatory term. It's it's a
it's a pejorative term. And I would keep saying no, no,
mima apana, no, I'm not I'm not a Musungu, but
you're a white man. Yeah, I'm a white man, but
I was born in Africa. And that's sort of now
through a spanner in the wheels. Well, he's brow in Africa. Okay,

(05:01):
all right, so you're a more Africa muorpe. I was
no longer a Muzungu. I was a more Africa muorpe,
which means a white African. But I've got the African
part in there, you see. And I was accepted into
honorary member of the Luo tribe and so forth and
so on. Okay, So having been born in Africa has

(05:22):
been a tremendous asset advantage in my missionary work. But
beyond that, then we immigrated as a Greek family. We
immigrated to Australia during the times of the Arab nationalist movements,
the rise of I don't know if you've heard of
Nasser I became president, Colonel Nassa became president of Egypt.

(05:45):
There was a sort of a very very fundamentalist kind
of Egyptian identity issue, and we were suddenly foreigners in Egypt.
My father could see the writing on the wall, and
he decided that the future of my children is not
in Egypt anymore. The future of my children must be

(06:06):
somewhere else, and it was a toss up between Brazil
and Australia. My father applied, Eleftherios applied to Brazil through
the embassy and Australia. Australia, with its Anglo Saxon sort
of efficiency, responded almost immediately, Yes, you're accepted. We're waiting

(06:26):
for Brazil because Brazil we had one of our relatives
in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil was taking a long
time to answer. On the basis of the long wait
from the Brazilian embassy, my father decided Australia appears to
be more professional, so that's why we went to Australia,

(06:47):
not Brazil. I would have been speaking Portuguese to you
right now.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
That's kind of interesting because we were having a conversation
before we went on the podcast itself, and you're talking
about how the DNA of a child is formed, formed
very very early on in their life. Your DNA was
formed very very early on in your life. How was
that DNA formed.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Through because of the fact that we knew that we
were not completely welcome, right and as a child, you
hear your parents speaking so the idea of being in
one place forever has never been part of my life.

(07:33):
So for me to be moving around from place like
you know, the Australia then back to Africa, then studying
in the United States, I can kind of handle that.
I can handle it, but eventually I do want to
be more and more you know, working you know all
the year in Africa, because right now I have to
move out of Africa to be asking for money. So

(07:56):
I have to go to Australia for one or two months,
then I have to come to the United States another month.
Then I have to go to Greece. That's another month.
So a lot of my time that I should be
spending in mission work in serial Lyoned or in Kenya
when it was Kenya, is spent begging overseas. But because

(08:17):
of this, you know, previous situation being brought up that
you become mobile, you know, how to be mobile due
to political social changes going on around you. As a child,
I mean, I went through three periods of revolution in
Egypt that we the king was kicked out, then a

(08:38):
guy called Nageeb took over, and then a guy called
Nasa took over. That were constant, and then there was
a Seris crisis with the British invaded Egypt. So we
were brought up in this social volatile period and I
think that's also helped me to adjust to Africa when
things are not because we have volatility quite a bit

(09:02):
over there, not political volatility. We have the Boler crisis,
we have civil wars. So I think that early childhood
experience has helped me.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah, so you just mentioned British invasion, but there was
a British invasion of a different sort when the Beatles
invaded the world with their music. Correct, That is a
big part of your story.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yes, told that part of the story. Well, the nineteen
fifties and early sixties were dominated by the American music
industry with Frank Sinatra was just fading out when somebody
called Elvis Presley was coming in and Elvis became the
rebel image of the new youth movement. You know, people

(09:48):
like James Dean, Marlon Brando were all part of that
fifties revolution. But it still was not something that led
to movements around the world. It was just a concept
of rebellion, but it did not lead to universities having
demonstrations and students imitating right. What happened in the and

(10:13):
and the songs that they were singing was I love you,
you love me? Or please don't hurt my heart, I
will give you my life because I love you, April Showers,
Da da dah. It was all very nice, right, it
was all very nice. But suddenly, with the coming of

(10:33):
the British invasion, we have like philosophers writing music. We
have not in the beginning. The Beatles in the beginning
were not philosophers, but they become they become people with messages,
political messages, social messages. But in the beginning there were there.
It was just their look and their sound, which was

(10:55):
so different to the Elvis period, to the you know,
Frankie Avalon period, to the surf music beach boy period.
They were just so different and so revolutionary, and for
the first time it caught the attention that British music,
which up to that point was fairly much local and

(11:18):
did not have the impact of American popular music, suddenly
it becomes the brand. Suddenly, because of the Beatles, it
becomes the music standard for the whole world among the young.
And they, of course, as you know, they completely take
over the American musical industry. And the Beatle imitated groups

(11:42):
also become very popular the people, and of course Rolling
Stones and then led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix. Even though Jimi
Hendrix was American, he had to go to England to
become acceptable in America. So once he succeeded in England,
then he could be accepted in the United States. But
the reverse became true, you see. So as an eighteen

(12:07):
year old boy with a Beatle explosion in Australia, I
was very much influenced by that and we formed our
own rock group and we imitated the Beatles in name.
In that it seemed that the Beatles were an insect,
right they were copying Buddy Holly and the and the Crickets.
That's where they get it from, right, So Buddy Holly

(12:30):
and the Crickets, then we have the Beatles, then you
have the flies and the flies buzzing around. And believe
it or not, we achieved popularity because there were we
were the only one of the very few Australian rock
groups that looked like the beetle with the long hair.
You can show you can show the picture from the

(12:52):
book on the front page. We looked at the bottom one,
not the top on it.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
And I finally figured out which one you were going.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
On the right hand. So that look was not available
in Australia until we brought it in and we became
very very popular, extremely popular. And so that was in
the height of our popularity, was doing records, having hit records,
but also Rolling Stones, being an opening act for Rolling

(13:26):
Stones when they came to Melbourne. You see, so yes,
but that was just a brief period of my life.
But it seems to have caught the imagination more than
anything else. But that was just a brief period. Right
about a year or two. Right after that, I went
back to university and continued my studies at university and
that's where I became a Marxist. That's when I turned

(13:48):
to Kyle Marxis. I didn't have a religious upbringing. I
didn't have one, So becoming a Marxist was for US
students worldwide movement. It was a worldwide movement and it
was being fed by the music of the Beatles, by
the music of the Rolling Stones, by the music of

(14:08):
Bob Dylan. It was being fed times are changing, you know,
if you heard the Bob Dylan song, times that are changing.
And that led to the music and the political message.
And the catalyst was a Vietnam war. The catalyst was
the Vietnam War because we believe that to have been
an unfair war, a war against a people who were

(14:33):
a peasant, a community fighting what we were fighting. It
was said, oh, you've got to stop communism in Vietnam,
becoseted the domino theory. It will come all over the
world and then it will spread, you see. So we
went in too destroy Vietnam. That was and so many

(14:54):
American young men died there for what for? What did
they die to stop communism? Vietnam is communists, So what
did we do? Although capitalist communism it's a different story now.
So basically Marxism offered the possibility of looking at the

(15:15):
world through the eyes of the exploited, the victim class
who are being exploited by the capitalist class and the
power elite, which consists of the military, the business, in
the political field, the power elite who dominate the social narrative.

(15:36):
And we felt that what was needed was a revolution
where the work had takes over a classical Marxism and
becomes he becomes the ruler of the nation rather than
the power elite that exists at the moment. Hence Fidel Castro,
hence Chekhovara, hence ho Chi Minh hence Boutzeitung, hence all

(15:59):
these people who led these marxistms. Popa was a very
bad example, actually shocking, shocking, shocking, and a lot of
them were shocking, you know, shocking revolutions, you know. But anyway,
I dropped out of the Marxist movement when Christ found me.
I wasn't looking for Christ, but he found me, and

(16:23):
that turned my whole world upside down. In the meantime,
I was looking through Hinduism for answers. The Beatles had
turned to Eastern religion. Up to then it was political,
but then you know, we need a revolution and so forth.
But then when they turned to Eastern religions, suddenly we thought,

(16:46):
perhaps there are other dimensions of reality rather than the
economic one, you know, interpreting history from an economic perspective alone,
that's you know, historical materialism, that's fairly you know, one dimensional.
Perhaps there are other dimensions that we're not looking at.

(17:06):
And the at least they brought that to her attention,
the spiritual dimension, that there is a spiritual dimension, because
Marxism denies that, it denies that the supernatural, it denies
the spiritual. There is no spiritual, there is nothing beyond
the material.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
John Lennon really memorialized that in the song Imagine No Heaven.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Correct, one hundred percent correct, But that was later on.
He did try transcendental meditation. He did try. They did
try that, and I did try. I tried it too.
As a result of their going east with Mia Pharaoh
with and all of them together. One of their songs
dear Prudence. I don't know if you've heard of it

(17:47):
at all. It was because of mea Pharaoh's sister, who
would not come out of her room because she wanted
to meditate all the time. So John Lennon writes the
song dea prudes is once you come out and play.
I don't know if you ever heard of that song.
But so to that degree, we became aware that there
might be another dimension besides the physical dimension, right, And

(18:10):
so therefore I started exploring Hinduism, the hurry Christian movement,
not Christianity, because Christianity, according to Marxism, is part of
the bourgeois, as part of the capitalist class. But Hinduism
was something new. So we looked into that, and eventually
it turned out that was one Guru who had come

(18:34):
to Australia in my city called Melbourne, and he was
advancing his meditative system as it was postulated by the Avatar.
They claimed that they were following the Avatar, who is
God who visits the earth every two or three hundred years.

(18:57):
The previous Avatar to most Indians was a guy called
Krishna Murtu. I'm not if you're aware of him or not.
I am yeah, good, excellent. So this new one was
a fourteen year old boy, fourteen, and he was the
creator of this divine light mission, the divine light mission,

(19:21):
and we were following this his Guru who had come
to Australia. One of my one of my moments of
change of life happened in one of these ashrams or
one of these the assemblies of disciples who seek knowledge,
divine knowledge.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
There was a divine light mission, wasn't It.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
Was a vine light mission. And so what happened was
that the Guru I would attend these meditative classes or
assemblies whatever they're called, and the Guru would go around
different times and he would tap you on the on
the temple here and you would say, receive knowledge, received knowledge,
received knowledge, received knowledge, received knowledge when it comes to

(20:10):
me the uniform of a twenty year old at the time,
at the height of the Vietnam crisis, at the height
of the post John Kennedy assassination, years after John Kennedy's assassination,
and after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, where we finally

(20:31):
thought that America has has lost the plot, that these
great men were being slaughtered by why you know and
so and and that America was also in the Vietnam
We just sawt what on earth is happening to this country? What? What? What? What?
What's happening? So there was a lot of a lot

(20:52):
of sort of agitation, anti American agitation among the students.
But when he came to me, I was wearing my
traditional late sixties early seventies uniform. What's that T shirt
with an imprint of Chekovarra beret with a favor on top,

(21:16):
jeans naturally and hopefully with a hole around the knee, right,
a tear around the knee. That always was part of
the working class symbol. You know that you work on
your knees and therefore you put holes in your jeans
and probably just a purple coat or some sort and

(21:39):
across a big cross. Right, The big cross was there
because Black Sambath war crosses and led Zeppelin war crosses,
and there were our heroes. So, you know, a twenty
one year old kid, twenty year old kid, hey, let
Zeppelin wear crosses, Black Sabbath wear crosses, no problem. Or
I'll wear a cross too, you know, if they had

(22:02):
worn carrots around their neck, I'd wear a carrot too,
you know, or a watermelon whatever. Just it just happened
to be a cross. Okay. So when the gentleman, the
Guru came to me for me to receive divine knowledge,
he noticed that I was wearing a cross, and he

(22:22):
suggested in somewhat firm ways that I removed the cross.
That shocked me because that cross had no meaning for
me at the time, no meaning at all. But for
him it had a meaning. It had a meaning for him,
which he didn't have for me. So I wondered, what
what is this? What is this cross doing to him?

(22:45):
It would be like you, you know, I don't know,
having a watch and somebody saying remove your watch, and
you're think, what's the big deal with the watch. You
know what's happening with the watch that draws your attention
to the watch in a way that it wouldn't you
wouldn't have before. So therefore I started thinking, this thing
is happening, it's doing something. So that was one of

(23:07):
my first steps towards Christianity. His his his absolute negative.
Up to that point, he was smiling and divine knowledge
received not and then you've got to remove.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
What is this?

Speaker 2 (23:21):
How come the change of attitude? So I started thinking
about that, about what does this cross all about? Naturally
you turn to the Bible, you turned to a priest
or somebody, a book Saint Augustine's Confessions. I think I
would turn to that. And then as a result of

(23:42):
everything I had, I had remember the prophet Joel writing
in his book says old man shall have dreams and
young men shall have visions Chapter three of Joel. I'm
sure you know it better than I do. And and me,
as a twenty year old, had visions of Christ and

(24:06):
the Holy Trinity. Now that's something that was so unusual
for me, so alien, so so alien. It's just it
would just left feel completely you know what am I doing?
Have a visions of Christ who are up to this point,
I thought was alleged, you know, a myth that according

(24:28):
to Niche, it's only the weak who need the religion.
It's only the weak who are not, who have no
will and I cannot stand on their own, the uber
man who doesn't need anything outside of himself or herself.
And suddenly this turned my whole world upside down. Everything

(24:51):
was turned upside down. And so I found the Christ
of not the Christ that I was being taught, you know,
by the churches or by the you know, the evangelists,
but the mystical Christ, the mystical Christ. You see.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
Would you say in that process you had some Damascus
Road experience.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, absolutely, I mean that's the only thing that would
have changed me. I would never I would never have
become a Christian if it wasn't for those experiences, because
no logic in the world would have turned me away
from either Nitzche or Marx. That makes sense, Marks makes sense.
You know. From an economic perspective, there isn't there is

(25:33):
It's true. The poor are being exploited, there's no that's true.
There is a working class, there is an elite class,
there is a capitalist class. It's particularly in this country.
It's clear, and so why would I want to change
from that? Or again with Nietzche with the idea of
being yourself rather than having props to build your character,

(25:56):
you rely on yourself. That makes sense as well. But
all that had just tumble, It tumbled, everything tumbled upside down,
you know, pushing them away for this mystical presence of Christ,
which was so overwhelming and so much more powerful than
anything that Nichi had said or Box had said.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
You know, let me interrupt you for just a second
before you get into this whole notion of your mystical
experience or elaboration on that, I want to just for
a moment quote what Mark said.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Please.

Speaker 1 (26:30):
He said that religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.
It's the heart of a heartless world. It's the soul
of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
And then he said this the abolition of religion as
the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for

(26:52):
their real happiness. To call on them to give up
their illusions about their condition is to call on them
to get a condition that requires illusions. And then he
said that religion was therefore an embryo, the sigh of
that oppressed creature. It was the veil of tears. So
Marx was very clear that religion was the oppressor. As

(27:17):
a Marxist yourself or a neo Marxist, did you fully
understand that aspect.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Of MARXISTM No.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
No.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
On the contrary, we saw it as a liberator. And
Nitzsche's very well. Probably Nietzsche may have borrowed something from
Marx because for him, unless God is dead, then the
human cannot exist. So Nitsche's mission was the idea that

(27:46):
the world will never be liberated until the coming of
the uber man, the superber. Yeah, would never occur until
religion has put out, all religion is put out, and
then will be the liberation of humanity. Now, if you're
a twenty one year old, that's appealing, right, But I

(28:08):
get I'll repeat the minute that this mystical experience has occurred.
It made all this insignificant, totally insignificant, because this thing
that he was fighting, that Nietzsche was fighting against, or
Marx was fighting against, it seemed to me that never
experienced it. They had never experienced the power of Christ.

(28:30):
Marx had never experienced the mystical Christ. What would he
have done had he experienced the mystical Christ? Would he
still say what he said? What would Nietzsche do if
he had experienced the mystical Christ? What would be his reaction? Well,
I'm sure, I'm sure it would have been rather different.
So I was spared a Nitzschean future or a Marx's

(28:54):
future by these mystical experiences.

Speaker 1 (28:57):
So you saw divine light.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
You know, I don't like talking about it, To be
honest with you, I don't want to go too much
into this except to say that what I saw was
sufficient for me to believe that Christ is a reality,
and not a myth, but a reality. And that's all
I needed to know.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
But you also saw that Heaven and Hell were real.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, I did too. I did see the I did
see the darkness. I saw the darkness as well. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
So, as a result of your conversion to Christ, you
recognized that the epicenter of mystical theology is a continual
life of repentance.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
That came slowly. That came slowly. My first My first
move was to start reading the Word of God to
your testament, and having read it, I then decided that
I had to start again all over again. You're born again, right,
and that meant everything in every way, born again or
born from above, as the Orthodox prefer to use the

(30:04):
term from John. Sell everything you have, give it to
the poor, and come and follow me, and I will
show you the Kingdom of God. So the first thing
I did was to sell what I had, give it
to the poor, and then follow Christ. But I didn't
know how how am I going to follow Christ? Okay,
so get rid of the car, get ready to sell
this all that, take the money, give it to the church,

(30:26):
or give it to the poor. So that's what That's
one thing that you know I did. But then the
second thing was, now which church do you join? Where
do you go? Now? Because Christ speaks about and upon
this rock, I will build my church. You actually see
I move my church.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
Which pau calls the ground and pillar of truth.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
And he calls it the body of Christ, and you know,
the corpus CHRISTI. So the idea was now for me
to find out where do I belong church wise? So
I did a sort of I went from church to church.
My first out sort of outing to the Orthodox church

(31:10):
was not successful. I could hardly speak Greek, and the
priests that I met could hardly speak English.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
And this is Australia.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
In Australia, absolutely and not now. But you know, thirty
years ago, forty years ago, not now. Now. Everything has changed. Now,
everything has changed to the better, one hundred percent for
the better. But at that time the Greeks in Australia
were the immigrants, fresh from the boat, fresh and the
churches that they established were for them and for their

(31:40):
needs right as the working class, as the oppressed of Australia,
as the downtrodden, as the wogs as they are called
in Australia, or the day goes as they were called
in Australia, where the only time that mister Stephanopoulos could

(32:00):
get some dignity was by attending church on Sunday and
becoming the president of the church board or becoming the
secretary and being called by his surname, and as with dignity.
But then on Monday he got back and dig the
ditches again, you see, and be slandered at and be
yelled at by his Australian counterpart or boss. So the

(32:24):
church the time was for the immigrant. It had no
space for a nischean ex Niittzschean Marxists no appetite for that.
So I found it difficult in the beginning to communicate
with the priests who he may never have heard of Nietzsche,
or they may have heard of Marx but never heard

(32:45):
of Nitzche.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
So actually, because of your background, you started with Orthodoxy
in trying to find a church Alexandria.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
I mean, you can't get it. You know. I was
born in Alexandria, the Patriarchate of I was baptized by
the Patriarchate of Alexandria. So I had all that background,
but it didn't mean anything anything to me. Didn't mean
anything at the time. So eventually I went to other churches.
I went to the Presbyterians, and they seemed to be

(33:12):
because I was more Australianized. I could relate to them
very well. They would have me witness for the Lord.
They would have me to talk about my why I've
changed my lifestyle, how I did it, and so forth
and so and I went to other churches as well,
but something was pulling me back in the Orthodox Church.

(33:34):
One that I was baptized within the church. Secondly that
I began to read how this is like an ancient church,
you know, not a brand new church, but an ancient church.
So I decided to give it another try, but this
time another parish where I went and I spoke to

(33:55):
the priests, and he seemed more understanding and in fact,
because I kept talking about the Bible says this, and
we've got to he said, okay, I think we'll make
you a Sunday school teacher. So suddenly I became a
Sunday school teacher on the basis of my reading of scripture,
you see. And then he slowly, slowly developed where I

(34:16):
began to study theology systematically. The archbishop at a new
archbishop had come a younger one, and he decided to
send me to a Catholic seminary. I studied theology, then
went on to here the United States at Holy Cross,
doing work at Harvard, studying at Harvard Princeton, and then
my pH d Brown where my good friend Michael is

(34:39):
from Providence, and then going back to Australia. But again
going back to Australia, do what to become an academic,
a Christian academic with all this knowledge that God had
given me in the United States, with Hebrew, syriac Americ Coptic,
you know the scriptures and so forth. You know beautiful,

(35:01):
I mean, it was fantastic, and so I was able
to give all. I was appointed at the seminary in Australia,
at our local seminary in Sydney, where I taught. But
then what happened was, at one point I was teaching
Coptic at the university one of the universities. I was
teaching the Letters of Paul in another university, the University

(35:21):
of Sydney, and I was going to give up. It
was a conference and I was about to give a
paper on the interaction between a Nakhamdi text called the
trimorphic Protania as it applies to the Johanna on prologue. Now,
for most people that's Chinese or no offense. I love
the Chinese. By the way, it was like so esoteric

(35:45):
that even academics the of the scriptures may not even
be aware of what I'm talking about. But the Nakhamardi
texts were the gnostic texts that were discovered in Egypt
in nineteen forty five and which throw a different light
on early Christianity. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, Magnum,
the Gospel of Philip et cetera, et cetera. Well, I'm

(36:09):
not sure where that comes from, no, COMMDI the Gospel
of Judas. But anyway, So, so one of the texts,
the trimorphic Protannia, speaks about the father, the son, and
the father son and the mother. I can't remember exactly,
but here I am trying to work out what came first,

(36:30):
the Gospel of John or the trimorphic Britannia, If the
Gospel of if the if trimorphic Potanna comes first, and
hence John is using the trimorphic Britannia as his model,
right or vice versa. So so I thought that was

(36:50):
a really good paper, fantastic paper, right, I should have
had a lot of people coming to listen to it.
I had three people come to it, and I had
worked on it, like for three or four months on
this one pape, using coptic and all that, and then
it was like that was a voice speaking to me
without voice and basically saying to me, Look, you've given

(37:15):
three months of your life or four months of your life,
and the only people who benefit, if anything, even if
they had benefited anything, is about three people. Look at
what Mother Teresa is doing. So I was watching documentaries
about her. Look at what she's doing. She's helping thousands
of people in a real way, not in a sort

(37:38):
of a you know, academic tower way. Look at her.
And that was there was another Now begins my other
conversion experience, not from Christianity, but from academia to mission work.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
And by the way, part of that was with the
Father Kennedy, a Roman Catholic priest.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Very good, very good, excellent. Yes, that was also reinforcement
where we had where I was in Sydney, we had
a large Aboriginal community. They had at that time. They
were fairly poor. It was like an area of some problems,
alcoholism and so forth. And Father Kennedy, true priest, Roman Catholic,

(38:25):
his church was open to the Aboriginal people, whereas our
churches were. The local church was closed precisely because they
didn't want the Aboriginals to come in and steal the
candles or whatever they would do. Whereas Father Kennedy wide open,

(38:45):
wide open. They could come in. If they wanted to
take anything, they could take it, if they wanted to
smash anything that could smash it. He just let he
was allowing them to do whatever they wanted to do.
But he was a accepted among the Aboriginal community, and
he was a mentor to the effective mentor, and I

(39:07):
admired that. I admired that a lot. And I went
up to him at some point asking him, in what
way can I be of some assistance or whatever? And
he said to me, you go back to your academic tower.
You don't belong here. You're back to your record. He
spoke very frankly, and that hurt me. I thought, well,

(39:29):
why is he saying this to me, you know, But
basically he was saying, you go back to your academic tower.
This is this, you play your game. This is a
real man's job here. This is this is not for you.
You just go back and play your games. So all
these things happened, and that convinced me that the Lord
is showing me something here that I need take seriously.

(39:51):
And so the decision began to brew within me that
I need to do to work with the poor and
no longer to be this elite academic. You're doing obscure
papers that only three people could understand. And the other
precipitation of that decision to return to Africa was. I

(40:12):
was having difficulties with my archbishop at the time because
my concern was that the church had become Greek rather
than ecumenical, rather than one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
It was catering only to a Greek audience. It wasn't
catering to the Australian community. It was catering again to

(40:33):
this ethnic immigrant community, which by now was becoming more professional,
albeit and becoming more sophisticated. Yes, but it was still
an ethnic church. It wasn't the church that the fathers
had spoken about, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,

(40:53):
that is for everybody. You could be Greek, you could
be Mongolian, it doesn't matter. You are part of the Israel,
and therefore you belong to the body of Christ. You know,
if you're baptized and so forth. So I had a
problem with that with him. He was and God bless him.
He's passed away. I still pray for him. I prayed

(41:14):
for him last Sunday church. He wanted an Greek church,
a church that, yes, you can have Christ, but at
the same time, we must keep our Greek traditions, we
must keep our Greek language. Whereas I thought, no, no,
we need to become Australian. We need to be part

(41:37):
of the Australian community. We need to bring in the Aussie,
we need to bring in the Vietnamese, we need to
bring in the Aboriginal, we need to bring in all
the community. Why are we exclusive? You know? That caused
many problems, extreme tensions between me and him, until eventually
I decided that I can't keep fighting my archbishop. I can't,

(42:02):
I can't, And it wasn't good for the church to
do that, you know, because it was creating. You know,
oh maybe brother Themi is right, maybe we should not
be so isth Netnik or others were saying, no, the
church is you know, I was creating without maybe realizing it.
I belonged to Apollo, I belonged to Paul and blah
blah blah. So I decided, no, no, no, no, I

(42:25):
don't want to be part of anything like that. So
I decided to leave the Australian Archdiocese with his blessings.
And I did get his blessing. I think he was
more than happy to give me his blessing. And I
left and I went, and I had already written to
the Patriarch of Alexandria, who is in charge of missions
in Africa for the Greek Orthodox Church, and he fully

(42:47):
accepted me, fully accept This letter was very entchlesiastic. Yes,
by all means, come to Africa, you know, by all means.
And so my previous Archbishop Cleanos decided to let me
go officially canonically. I left with everything done properly, without
any you know, bad blood, so to speak, except for

(43:09):
our difference of opinion on the issue of mission and
how what the church should look like in the diaspora
outside of Greece. And I went to Africa, and that's
how it began.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
And you first went to Kenya, went to Kenya, and
this is sort of the epicenter of HIV AIDS.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Or big time. Kenya was really, really well, I think.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but you can check the
facts if you want. But I think one third of
Kenya had aides man. One third of Kenya had AIDES
And I was put in a church that a great
number of the parishioners had HIV AIDS. Anywhere you went

(43:50):
in Kenya, any parish would have had a substantial number
of HIV And that was at the time where we
didn't have a real you know, real cure or real
not cure. But you know, you know how today you
can manage HIV AIDS. It can be managed. You can
live a normal life and you may not die of AIDS,
you know. But then it was a death sentence. At

(44:15):
that time, it was a death sentence. And so I
didn't care because you know, I thought, well, you're a missionary.
Now you've come here. If it is to be to be,
if you're going to get AGS, you gotta get AIDS. Okay,
that's a badge of honor for you to die, you know,
on the mission field, you know, through a disease that

(44:36):
has nothing to do with you, you know. So and
the reason why I say to get AIDS is because
we in the Orthodox Church, we the priests, once we
give out Holy Communion, we give it with one spoon
and one cup, and then we have to consume the
whole cup. So once whatever saliva is in there, whatever

(45:00):
whatever HIV virus has gone into the spoon or the cup,
you have to drink it later on all of it.
So of course I did that. And because we believe,
we believe that it is the body and blood of
the Lord. So I was spared the ravages of HIV.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Which is something that you can elaborate on. Maybe right
now it would be a good time to elaborate on.
I wanted to get to how you got from Kenya
to Sierra Leone, but I do want to ask about
that same thing. When you were in Sierra Leone, you
were in the epicenter of the abola as.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
It's even worse than HIV. I mean, HIV is bad, Okay,
I'm not underplaying enough. I have full sympathy for HIV
patients and what they have to go through, and they
have my full sympathy. But Ebola that's a monster. That's
a monster. That's like makes HIV look like a choir boy.

(45:59):
You know, no way you can get out of a
bowler once it gets you. You're at the time that
we had a bowler. It was a death sentence. It
was a death sentence ninety percent of something like that.
It was just incredible, and many caught it. Many thousands
died of a bowler. Thousands and thousands died. But within

(46:21):
our congregation, within our Orthodox community of serially or none
of us got it. And I attribute that to prayers.
I attribute that so not one single person, one person
and many many, spoon many, that's right, that's.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Right, not one person, And there are people dying in
the streets.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
That's right. Corpses outside, corpses outside the church. I tell
the hospitals, corpses outside the hospitals. They would not be
put in the hospital. They would have to be buried
in mass graves. But anyway, to get back to.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
I mean, this is not something insignificant that you're talking
about here. I mean you're talking about people dying by
the thousands and yet not dying when they partake of
the real presence of Christ.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Well, we didn't get it. We didn't get it. None
of us got it. But even forgetting a bowler, if
I may for a minute, Hank, there are many other
diseases in Africa besides a boler A bola now thankfully
has gone, but we have tuberculosis, which is very contagious.
The one thing about a bowler that I think helped

(47:32):
us a lot, besides our prayers, is that it can
only get it by touch. It's not like COVID. It
it doesn't go into the air. You can't breathe the
a bola. It doesn't work that way. The only way
is by I touch you and you've been sweating, or
you some sort of some sort of liquid on your body,

(47:55):
and I've got a cut, which I do have here
on my finger, and that cut touches your Lickquit, boom,
it's all over. I started wearing gloves, and it's a
habit I still have of wearing gloves plastic, you know,
those disposable gloves. So I would wear it all day long,
so I wouldn't touch anything that was possibly ebola based.

(48:17):
But I didn't have to wear a mask because it's
not an airborne disease as covid is. So we managed
to avoid it. We managed seriously to avoid it through
our prayers. By the grace but the great grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ, we avoided it.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
So you leave Australia really essentially, I'm not talking geographically,
but you essentially leave the Western world, correct, and you
go to Africa. You basically sell everything that you have.
You're committed to ministering to the poor as someone who
is poor yourself, correct, and you now have a passion

(48:58):
for the poor. I want you to elaborate for our
audience on what that means. Because most of us in
the Western world do not understand what poverty is. Well.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Poverty is a child who has nothing to eat, a
four year old girl, five year old little boy. His
parents cannot help, they don't have any means of helping
that child, and that child is forced to go to

(49:33):
rubbish dumps in the city to try to find something
to eat, or digging through the mud in order maybe
finding metal or something to sell in order to eat.
But there's no guarantee he or she's going to find anything,
and therefore it could be one, two, three days that

(49:55):
you will go without food and the only solution is begging.
There's no other there's no there's no social welfare system
that you can rely on. There's not there's the country
cannot afford a system that a nation that's been destroyed
by civil war for eleven years. They're only now starting slowly,
with the grace of God, to recover, slowly recovering. But

(50:18):
it's a slow process to recover from such catastrophe. And
then we even had the Ebola coming for two years
where the nation was locked. We were locked, we couldn't
get in or get out, you know. So given all
these catastrophes that the nation had to had to bear. Poverty, unfortunately,

(50:39):
is the consequence. I mean abject poverty. I don't mean
a relative poverty like you have here. I'm talking about
object absolute poverty where you can die of hunger.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
There are thousands of people, maybe as many as twenty
five thousand people per day who die that die of hunger.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Hunger or related issues like hunger can lead to diseases,
and they can die of the disease that has been
caused by hunger, you know. But hunger can cause up
to twenty five thousand per day.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Yes, And we could feed those people with what we
throw away, what's in the garbage.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
More than three times, more than three times.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
Yeah. So you have this passion to feed the hungery,
to clothe the naked, and so you, through the grace
of God and through people that you came into contact with,
were able to establish a foundation called Paradise for Kids.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Paris for Kids is I'm not in Paradise for Kids.
I have basically nothing to do with Paradise for Kids.
Paradise for Kids is an organization that has been established
in order to be able to send money overseas legally.
There is a lot, a lot of problems in Australia
concerning money sent to religious organizations as a result of

(52:07):
the Islamic fundamentalist movement that many were sending money for
jihadic activities but calling it religious. So the government had
put in stern conditions as to how money can be
sent overseas bypassing religious organizations, and so Paradise for Kids

(52:28):
was established in order as a secular organization so to speak,
which will be sending money to Seria, leonn or Kenya
or whatever I was within the laws of Australia, within
the legal For example, while you can send money for
a school, irrespective whether it's a religious school or a

(52:50):
non religious school, you can send money for that. You
can send money. So what Paradise for Kids does is
raise money overseas and send it to us. We are
a separate organization. We are the Orthodox Church. We are
the boots on the ground Paradise for Kids, like the
Presbyterians that you're the Presbyteria that you meant and so forth.

(53:12):
They raise money. That's their function, to raise money overseas US, Australia,
whatever Paradise England, and that money is sent Paradise for
kids is not on the ground in serially owned there's nobody.
It's not on the ground there. It's an overseas organization
sending money to us. But there is a paradise for

(53:36):
kid entity there simply to facilitate the transfer of money.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
And that's how you support the church, which is sort
of the epicenter of everything that you're doing in Cierra Leone.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Yes, Now, for the Greek donus, that's an apply. There
is no law in Greece that prohibits sending on money
to regis organizations, and even in the United States there
are different But paradox forgets is useful for the Australian
situation because we need to know what the laws are
in terms of sending money overseas, so we try not

(54:10):
to break the law in Australia because that's where most
of our money comes from. With the creation of this organization.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Yes, so I want you to explain to me your
pattern for mission in Sierra Leone, because it is a
pattern that can be duplicated by God's grace. You establish
a church, you establish schools, you establish indigenous missions. And
there's a really interesting story related to that of a

(54:40):
Muslim person who stole a car. You can fill in
the details. I kind of a sketchy understanding of it.
But a Muslim man who stole a car, he crashed
the car. He's brought back to you by the police.
You were supposed to issue charges, but you don't. You
say no, we forgive you forgive him. He's now a

(55:03):
father in.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
The church, yes, as a priest. Elaborate on that, Alexander,
But you raised the previous question. The previous question was
the methodology of mission. How do we do mission in Africa.
I'll get to Father Alexander in a minute, But because
I think your question is very important, how we do

(55:25):
it in Seria Leone is schools. We begin with the school.
I don't begin with the church. I begin with the school. Now,
why is that one of our fathers of the Orthodox Church,
Cosmus the Aetolian. During the time of the Turkish occupation,
the Ottoman occupation of Greece, where the Greeks had more

(55:50):
or less lost their language, they were being in some
ways forced at night to go to school to learn
about Catechism, the secrets. Children would go late at night
under the moonlight to learn the language and also to
learn about the church. That Sunday school was basically done
very late at night. They were called the Klipta Scolia

(56:13):
the hidden schools. And so basically the idea that Saint
Cosmos had is, once you develop a school, then you
build a church. Because once you develop the school, you

(56:33):
can teach the children in the school about geography, biology, etc.
But you also teach them about God, right and from
there you will have your priest that will come and
then you build the church. But you can do the
work of the church within the school. You can still worship,

(56:54):
you can still and because remember they were under the
Ottomans there, so they had a lot of pressure on them.
So instead of building churches, that would build schools, which
look to be innocent right from the eyes of the Turks,
it seemed perfectly acceptable to build schools, but they would
the school would be used for religious purposes as well,

(57:16):
you see. So therefore and eventually they would then be
able to build their church with the permission of the
Ottoman authorities. So I use that as the model for
our mission. I build a school. Once I build a
school and everything is running in the school, I will
build a church next door. Right now, That's how it's

(57:38):
working in a place called Krube. Whereas this horrible slum
that I built.

Speaker 1 (57:44):
A school in there, it used to be a garbage dump.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
It's still a garbage dump. It's a garbage dump where
people live. So I built schools in rubbish dumps. Okay,
so I've built the school without the church. But now
I'm looking for money to build the church because now
they're ready. I have a chaplain in there. There's catechism
going on in the classrooms. We do worship, you know,

(58:10):
on Sundays we open up two classes to you know,
like with folding doors, who open it up, and we
have like a church, but it's in the school. So
our schools is our weapon. It's our avant garde. It's
the front line of our mission. From the school, we
built the church, we built the clinic, we built the

(58:30):
welfare centers, the charity centers, we built the and so forth,
the orphanages. You know, from the schools we begin, and
that is our formula.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
In serah leone, I want to read something that I.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Wrote about Hassan who became father Alexander. Yeah, you've nailed it.
That's exactly what you say. He was forgiven for stealing
the car, and he got so so impressed by that,
because you know, I mean, you know, we obviously we
respect Islam, but under Islamic law, a thief is treated

(59:08):
quite differently to the way Christianity would treat a thief.
And so he became so convinced that Christianity had the
essence of love in it that he converted. He became Orthodox.
And as a result of that, eventually I could see
he was very dedicated, extremely dedicated. You know, suddenly he's

(59:28):
talking about you know, Christ and about this the Bible.
So I've made him a priest. Is not one of
our priests.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
I want to read something from your book. I actually
wrote a forward to your book, themi Apostle to the Hungary,
and I'm reading it for a purpose. But in my forward,
I say, in my trek toward or.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
They, well, thank you for your forward. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (59:51):
Thank you, hug privilege. In my trek towards Orthodoxy. God
brought two noteworthy men into my life. The first was
father Alex Kerlutz's, who became a trusted friend and invaluable resource.
One day, upon leaving his office, he handed me a
little book titled on Wealth and poverty, And incidentally I
wrote the forward to that book now in the New

(01:00:14):
Patristic series. At any rate, that book contained a series
of sermons by Saint John Crisostom that imprinted an indelible
mark on my future. The second person he's sitting in
the studio across from me right now, is Bishop them
whose life personified the very essence of the book that
Father Alex had given me. And what is nothing short

(01:00:37):
of a literary pearl. Saint John, we're talking about Saint
John Crisostom, who was born in three point fifty takes
Christ's famed parable of the rich Man and Lazarus. We
just celebrated that this Sunday that parable and exposits its
immeasurable riches. He reminds us that as a little drop

(01:01:00):
is to the boundless sea, so much a thousand years
are to that future glory and enjoyment. Through its pages,
we become ever more cognizant that this present life is
but a drop in the ocean of eternity, that time,
and what we do now directly impacts the waters of

(01:01:22):
unending time. In profound and poignant fashion, Saint John removes
the masks and exposes the rich man as poor, and
poor Lazarus as the most affluent of all. For just
as an actor may personify either a wealthy monarch or
a destitute beggar, so wealth and poverty mask reality. When

(01:01:46):
the rich man's mask is removed when he dies, when
he departs the theater of the present life, he is
revealed as the poorest of all in that other world,
so poor, indeed, that he was not even master of
a single drop of water, but had to beg for this,
and did not even attain it by begging. In that

(01:02:08):
other world, the words of Christ take center stage. I
was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty,
and you gave me drink. And as you did this
for one of the least of these, my brethren, you
did it to me. Thus what we do now for
the least of these, those in need of physical food

(01:02:30):
and water, those who hunger for the bread of life
and thirst for the wellsprings of living water, reflects our
unmassed inner state, reveals whether we are truly of Christ. This,
in essence, is what we may glean from the authorized
biography of Bishop Themi, from the life's story of a

(01:02:54):
servant who personifies what it means to live in light
of eternity of a man who gave up fame, fortune,
academic privilege, prestige to assuage the hunger and thirst of
the least of these my brethren, and his story, and

(01:03:16):
that's why I'm doing this podcast. His story impels us
to do the same. We may not be destined to
move to one of the poorest nations on earth, yet
through the life story of Bishop Themi we gain a
template for living the duration of our lives with eyes
fixed firmly on our eternal destiny, for the time when we,

(01:03:41):
like Lazarus and the rich Man, stand before a great
white throne and books are opened, a time when all
masks are removed and we are judged according to what
we have done as recorded in the books. I thought
long and hard about the time as I lay in
a hospital bed during a life and death struggle with

(01:04:02):
stage four mental selymphoma. During those dark days and sleepless nights,
I contemplated the disparate destinies of Lazarus and the rich Man,
Abraham's bosom in the place of torment, in God's providence,
the time of my death as the time of yours
has been temporarily postponed. Paradoxically, during this postponement, I was

(01:04:26):
afforded the opportunity to write the forward to the updated
edition of Saint John Crysostom's Sermons on Wealth and Poverty,
and by the way, we have those available to the
ministry of the Christian Research Institute. But in it I
note that by absorbing the profundity of this patristic classic,
we might yet arrive at a true valuation of things.

(01:04:47):
And I say the same thing of themi Apostle to
the Hungary, For through the life and legacy of Bishop
Themi we become ever more mindful of the day on
which our Lord will say. Whatever you did for one
of the least of these brothers of mine, you did
it for me. Well. This past Sunday you preached a

(01:05:10):
homily on that very very message of Jesus Christ on
the rich men and Lazarus.

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
Came just as a gift to me that Sunday. You
know that I had such a classic text on my
my philosophy, so to speak.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Yeah, and a couple of things I want to get
into your philosophy on that in just a moment here.
But this book is available for anyone who stands shoulder
to shoulder with us in the battle for life and truth.
You can get your copy on the web at equipped
dot org. You can also write me at Post Office
Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code two
eight two seven to one. Again available to anyone that

(01:05:48):
stands shouldered to shoulder with us in the battle for
life and truth. I want to say one other thing
about the podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe, rate review.
It helps a lot. But I want you to elaborate
a little bit. But on this message, your message about
considering very seriously what we do with the resources that

(01:06:10):
God entrusts to us, because we will stand before him,
that's an absolute certainty, and we'll give an account of
what we did with our lives. And as not just
saying I pray to prayer and Jesus in my heart.
It's what we do with our lives that lays up
for us treasure that moth and rust cannot corrupt, that

(01:06:31):
thieves cannot break in and steal. So Jesus said that
where your treasure is there, your heart will be Also
talk about how important it is for us today to
invest in the lives of the poor.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
Well, we've been brought up on a myth since we
were little kids, that money is a source of happiness,
that money is a source of power, that money is
a source of joy. That somehow, now if we are
to pursue money, and that's the real politic, that's the

(01:07:06):
reality of life, no matter what anybody says. You know,
you hear that from your parents, or you may hear
that from your peers or your teachers or whatever. Money
is what you should be looking at. You should have
you should have money. Whereas the Gospels and the teachings
of Christ tell us that to be rich is a problem.

(01:07:27):
It's a salvation problem. That in fact, your disadvantaged in life.
If you are rich, your disadvantage because your chances of
salvation are slim. Now that doesn't sound fair, but that's
exactly what Christ says. It is very difficult for the
rich to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier

(01:07:48):
for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than for the rich man to enter the Kingdom
of God. So how can a rich man be saved?
So here is where the whole sure of poverty comes in.
It is the window of salvation for the rich. It's
as if the poor exists for the salvation of the

(01:08:12):
rich unless you help the poor. The parable of the
rich man and Lazarus. What was the crime that led
the poor the rich man to enter into hades, whereas
the poor went into paradise, into the wisdom of Abraham

(01:08:35):
the different. His main crime was not adultery, His main
crime was not money laundering. His main crime was not
he had murdered anybody. For all we know, the rich
man may have been a very moral person. He may
have been monogamous, he may have been he may have
respected his wife, he may have been a very honest man.

(01:08:59):
But where he felt on his face was every time
he'd go out of his palace, he would see the
poor and do nothing. That was his crime. He saw
the poor and did nothing. He saw that the plight
of the pain of the poor, and did nothing. What
was the crime of the rich man. Indifference to poverty.

(01:09:21):
So indifference to poverty will lead you to hades if
you are rich, that's your problem. As a rich person,
you have a problem, and the problem is you're heading
to hades because you're indifferent to the poor. So what
Christ offers us offers the rich is a way out
of that condemnation, and the way out of that condemnation

(01:09:44):
is help the poor. Once you begin to help the poor,
then your chances of entering the Kingdom of Heaven become
much better. It's no longer a camera trying to go
through the eye of a needle. It's now possible. Is
now possible. So basically, let us not admire the rich.

(01:10:05):
Let us not, you know, be jealous of the rich.
In fact, feel sorry for the rich. You are to
feel sorry for them. You are to pity them because
their chances of entering heaven almost zero. You see. So
my idea is I feel sorry for the rich, and
I want to help them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
So contextualize this for me. A rich man can help
a poor man, but a poor man cannot help another
poor man.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
No, on the contrary, I will tell you how it happens.
The rich man can help the poor, and the poor
man can help the rich big time because he's helping
him to enter the Kingdom of God. Right, But the
poor to the poor. It can also can also work
that way that the poor can be very generous to
each other. I can give you many examples of that,

(01:10:56):
you know, like, well, let me give it to you
in an Africa and saying, if you help a man,
you're helping his family. If you help a woman, you're
helping the village. In other words, there will be an

(01:11:19):
outward going of help by the fact that you've helped
one person. So sharing among the poor is not unusual
in an African country.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):
By the way, why is it more significant you make
that transition from helping a man and helping a woman.

Speaker 2 (01:11:36):
What is the significance of the significance is that the
African woman, let me put it, he put it, The
African woman is the backbone of Africa. The African woman
is what preserves the family in Africa. The African woman
is she who keeps the family and feeds the family

(01:12:01):
by and large. Now that that's a generalization, okay, And
I keep saying, let those who give out the Nobel
Peace Price give it one year to the African woman.
She above all brings peace and brings and brings stability.
She brings stability to Africa.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
I want to stick for a moment on what we're
talking about with the rich. The founder of Paradise for
Kids is a man who God has blessed mightily from
a financial standpoint, and.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
Well, he claims that he was basically going through a
hard time financially before the creation of Paradise for Kids,
but since the creation of Paradise for Kids, he claims
that he has been blessed with an abundance of wealth. Well,
and that's another really important he's helping.

Speaker 1 (01:12:57):
But that's another very important point because giving is not
a sero sum game. Meaning you don't have just a
pie this big, and you take a slice out of
it and you give, and then you only have this
what he.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
Says, that's what he says. I'm only repeating what he said.
But the point remains that the more you give, the
more you will receive. That's just a simple truth of them.
I even get the kids in Syria leone to understand
that the poor kids, the destitute kids. What I do
I say to them when they're in church? I say, okay, John,

(01:13:29):
how many pencils do you have? I only have one,
sir or father. I want you to give it to
the person next to you, but I won't have a
pen I said, don't worry. Give it to them and
see how many pens you'll have next week and come
and tell me. So I do experiments with them to
learn how to give and not to be afraid, because

(01:13:51):
God will reward them forgiving. In giving, you will receive.
And I get back messages about that. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's true. But at the beginning is very difficult because
if you only have one pen, you don't want to
give it away, particularly if you that's all your pen
you have. But once you learn to give that pen away,
and I'll try to do it to the little kids,

(01:14:13):
then they learn that it's going to come back to you,
three or four pens will come back to you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:18):
So you gave up virtually everything, but have you really
given up anything? Meaning your life is a rich, fall
and productive and very edifying life. You're changing the lives
of many people. So you have been blessed. You've been
given a reward not only in the life to come,

(01:14:39):
but a reward now.

Speaker 2 (01:14:40):
I seek first the Kingdom of heaven. I'm not trying
to act wholly or anything like that, because I'm not.
I am a filthy rag, but I can tell you
right now I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven first.
That's number one. Right. As a result, of that. God
gives me the things that I need, so I don't

(01:15:02):
know I have to worry about food. My salary would
be is My salary is eleven thousand euros a year.
That's about twelve thousand dollars a year. That's my salary,
and even then I can't get it out of Greece.
It has to stay in Greece. So basically I live
with the grace of God. Okay, I own nothing because

(01:15:24):
everything I own is in other people's names. It's not
in my name. I have a small unit in Australia,
but that's under my sister's name. So basically I don't
own anything. But I see that as a blessing and
power rather than weakness because I see what God does
for me. Blessed be his name. But I'll never go hungry.

(01:15:45):
I'll always have a bed, I'll always have a full life,
an adventurous life as well, an exciting life. Always unexpected
things happen, meeting so many people, even becoming a bishop,
I mean, that is unbelievable. You know, all these thing's happening,

(01:16:06):
and yet they do happen. And that's only because you
surrender to God completely. Your surrender to him, but in confidence,
not in fear, in confidence that whatever he says is true.
And therefore these other things you are seeking, like this
bottle of water, which I never bought, but I'm drinking

(01:16:28):
from it, shall be given on to you, which reminds
me of a joke. What kind of food there are, Socrates?
Do you enjoy eating the most? He said? The one
that other people buy for me?

Speaker 1 (01:16:39):
Yesterday you had a little girl. I introduced you in
a meeting yesterday and there was a little girl there
you brought up, and you asked her some poignant questions.
You asked her, do you have how many shop bead
and shoes? And so forth? Tell that story.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
Well, I do that quite a bit. I do that
quite a bit in order to reinforce to the children
how fortunate they are to live in a country like
this one, or Australia or Europe, how fortunate they are,
and how they should not take it for granted. So

(01:17:15):
what I do is I get them to realize that
the number of shoes they have is far in excess
of what is basically necessary in Africa. How the fact
that a bed is a big deal. They never How
would a child know that a bed is a big deal,
right or a pillow. A pillow is a big deal.
A mattress is a huge deal. When we bring mattresses

(01:17:38):
from overseas in containers, I have to have security guard
as we take out the mattresses from the container. I
have to make sure there's not a riot take place.
A riot A mattress is unbelievable. It's an unbelievable luxury.
So let them understand as children. And there's something else

(01:18:00):
that I'm concerned about. How much you spoil your children?
You Americans, you Australians, you Europeans. How much you spoiled Johnny,
how much you spoiled Suzanne? Whatever? Suzanne once she gets
no every now and then, say no, Little Johnny runs
the show. Tell Johnny no, Tell him no, because one

(01:18:24):
day he's going to grow up. He's going to get
a lot of nos outside and he won't know how
to deal with it. So we're tending to spoil a
whole generation of young children and making them also obese.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
How can people support your mission?

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
How can they? I have the man here, his name
is Michael. Michael is a man from Rhode Island. No,
he's living in Massachusetts now and I've known him from
a child and is a devout Christian Orthodox. He's gonna
is going to tell you how.

Speaker 3 (01:19:02):
A gentleman who should be speaking. Unfortunately he's in Australia
at the moment. I think as I walked in, you
were you were talking about Hank Louis Toumbus. And just
like his grace, Bishop Themi, Louis Tumbas, through somewhat of
a miracle, had a big conversion in his life and

(01:19:23):
he came to Christ. And he was somewhat of a
ruthless businessman. Forgive me if you hear this, Louis, but
he had a change in his life. He did a
total one eighty and he became somewhat of a righteous businessman.
He dedicated his life to helping the poor, specifically through
Bishop Themi and back in about two thousand and seven

(01:19:45):
he created a charity, an organization in Australia known as
Paradise for Kids, and he made it his life's work
to help the poor. Through Bishop Themi. Paradise for Kids
has become a global entity now it's established all over
the world. It's a five oh one c three here

(01:20:07):
in the United States and uh it is comprised completely
of volunteers all around the world that help and every
dollar that Paradise for Kids raises goes to sponsor the
Orthodox mission in Sierra Leone, which is underneath the Patriarchate
of Alexandria. And a lot of people in Australia didn't

(01:20:29):
didn't buy that Louis had this change of heart and
this conversion. And on a personal note, he says, the
reason why he did it is that when when judgment
Day comes and he's standing before the throne of Christ,
he can he can point and say I'm with that guy,
and hopefully that that will be his table.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
I know him. So what I mean A bad mood?
What happened there?

Speaker 1 (01:20:55):
I have done? That'll be difficult, that's a well, let's
sort of end this podcast by I want to quote
a little passage from the Book of Revelation. People that
know me know that I love the Book of Revelation.
It's only four hundred and four verses, and the vast
majority that come directly from the Old Testament.

Speaker 2 (01:21:15):
So the only Testament you don't read in the electionary
in the church. Yeah, but it's because it became canonical
way after the lectionary was compiled, but.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
It is the Revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave
him to show his servants what must soon take place.
And in Revelation chapter twenty one, the apostle John sees
a new heaven and a new earth, because the first
heaven and earth that passed away, and there's no longer
any sea. He sees the Holy City, the new Jerusalem,

(01:21:47):
coming down out of heaven, prepared as a bride, beautifully
adorned for her husband. And he hears a loud voice
from the throne saying, now the dwelling of God is
with men, and he will live with them. They will
be as people, and he'll be as God. He'll wipe
every tear from their eyes. There'll be no more death, mourning, crying,

(01:22:10):
or pain, for the older things will have passed away. Behold,
all things will have become new. These words are trustworthy
and true. And what I think is so important about
that passage is right now, Christ has not come in
the Second Advent, and there's death, mourning, crying, or pain.

(01:22:36):
And your message is we are the instruments of Christ
to alleviate that hunger and that thirst, and that we
need to take that seriously it's not something we can postpone.
It's not something for another day, but it's something we
need to be involved in right now. And actually by

(01:22:58):
meeting the physical needs of people, we so often have
an opportunity to meet their spiritual needs as well. That
story you told about the Muslim who you forgave, who
has now become a father, that's a poignant story of
how someone was met at the point of their need

(01:23:22):
and as a result of that was utterly transformed from
a spiritual perspective as well. Closes the ship.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
Themi Well, you've raised a couple of issues, all right.
One of them is the need to take care of
people who are suffering. That's a non negotiable issue. Why
because of all world religions and philosophies, the only one

(01:23:52):
in which the founding figure identifies with the suffering, identifies
in total solidarity. I was hungry. He didn't say there
are hungry people in the world. He didn't say there
are thirsty people, there are sick people. I was sick.
I was hungry. The ago, the rore, the eye is there,

(01:24:16):
and so he becomes the the poor man, he becomes
the beggar. There is a very interesting story told in
the hagiography The Life of Saints, whereby Saint Martin Martinos
in Greek is walking along. He's a poor man, and

(01:24:39):
he has an old jacket, an old coat, and he
sees this beggar, and the bigger the beggar summons him
and says Martin, I'm very cold, Martin, I'm very cold
and hungry. And Martin says, I don't have any money,
but I can give you my old my coat. So

(01:25:00):
he takes off his coat, even though it was cold,
and gives this beggar, this pathetic beggar, He gives him
his coat, his old, you know, torn coat. And the
author of this tradition writes, at that very moment in heaven,
when Christ was in his seat of glory, and the

(01:25:20):
angels around him were chanting and praising him, not daring
to look upon his glory, one angel who dared to
look upon him and saw the Master sitting on the
throne and asked timidly, Master, why are you wearing this
old coat? And the answer came because my friend Martin

(01:25:40):
gave it to me. So this is the I was hungry,
I was sick. I was This is unique to usk Christians.
So there's nothing more compelling and nothing more rewarding than
serving the crucified Christ, the barefoot Christ, the hungry. That's how.
That's how I survived there because I don't think I'm

(01:26:02):
feeding I'm feeding Christ. So when I look at that
kid who is crying, When I look at that woman
who without a husband, whose husband has left her and
she've got four kids and she's desperate, I think, oh wait,
this is Christ. And he's testing me, you know. And
that's how I'm able to do what I do. But
if I just look at it from a secular point

(01:26:24):
of view, or I'm doing charity, you know, just another
number of charity. But no, this is Christ. When I
look at that guy without legs, you know, he's crawling
on the ground to come to me. They crawl on
the ground, and I think, what would I do in
his What would I do if I was like him?
You know? And I admire his courage, and he would

(01:26:44):
look up without legs and say, I need I need
your help. I need your help, you know, I need
your help. I look at the eyes, I say, this
is Christ. This is Christ. This is the Black Christ,
you know. So that is how I keep going with
this that's how I keep going.

Speaker 1 (01:26:59):
Well, that's replaced to end. Because Bishop Themi is, as
the title of this book says, themi Apostle to the Hungary.
It is available for those who stand shoulder to shoulder
with us in the battle for life and truth. All
you have to do is write me at Post Office
Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code two
eight two seven one, or just go to the web

(01:27:22):
at equipped dot org. Thanks for tuning in to this
edition of the handcum Plug Podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:27:28):
May I thank you also Hank for inviting me here
and to all your listeners to continue to support you.
You're a brave man. You've made some very brave decisions.
You've also gone through so much in terms of your health,
and you survived, and obviously God is keeping you in
a good state at the moment for the reasons of
His glory. So thank you. In the words of the

(01:27:50):
creole in serial Leon, thank you, thank you, Boku.

Speaker 1 (01:27:54):
Well, thank you. You're a dear friend and I'm so
privileged to know you. And thanks everybody for tuning in
to this edition of the hand gum Plug Podcast. We'll
see you next time with more of the podcasts. Along
for now,