A joyful event for the Old-believers of Pakistan took place on Sunday, February 9th. During the liturgy in the Intercession Cathedral at Rogozhskoe in Moscow, Russia, metropolitan Korniliy elevated deacon Paul Nazir to the rank of a priest. Father Paul’s ordination to the rank of a deacon took place on February 3rd in the Intercession Cathedral.
The head of the Edifying Department of the Moscow Metropolitanate, father Mikhail Rodin, was also at the service. Father Mikhail has been to Pakistan more than once and is well acquainted with father Paul. Together they worked on the creation of an Old-believer calendar in Urdu – the native language of Pakistan.
Father Nikola Bobkov was also in attendance to congratulate father Paul with his ordination. Father Nikola oversees another foreign direction of the Russian Orthodox Old-believer Church – the community in Uganda – and he presented father Paul with embroidered icons for the church banners for the church in Sargodha, Pakistan.
Father Paul (Rehmat Nazir) was born in Wazirabad in 1970. Until recently, he worked as a teacher in a private school in Wazirabad. Prior to joining the Church, he belonged to the parish of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, where he was the representative of the community and the teacher of the Sunday school in Wazirabad.
Father Paul actively participates in the publishing activities of the Orthodox Church of Pakistan, which is canonically subordinated to the Russian Orthodox Old-believer Church, and under the leadership of father Cyril Shahzad, he participated in the translation of the first Orthodox calendar into Urdu, the first Old-believer prayer book in Urdu (issued in 2019), and is currently working on the translation of the Church’s patristic writings into Urdu.
