Tag Archives: Autobiographical Facts

Fifty Years: Biography of Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips since 1 September 1974

After leaving Colchester Royal Grammar School in 1974, where I studied Russian, Latin, French and German, I went to study Russian Literature in Oxford. In 1977 I graduated and qualified as a teacher. Having taught in Thessaloniki for a year, in 1979 I left Greece to study at the Russian Orthodox St Sergius seminary in Paris, meeting the last Paris White Russians who had been adults before 1917. In 1980 I married and then became an Orthodox priest, also working in Paris as a lecturer in European political and cultural history. We had six children (currently with twelve grandchildren – all our children live in Suffolk, Essex or London). Apart from living in Paris, I also spent time in Lisbon from 1992 on, setting up the first Orthodox church there. I started publishing my first books on Church history and theological and pastoral themes in Paris, then in 1997 we returned to England to live in Suffolk.

Here I continued writing, publishing more books, setting up a website, teaching and taking part in broadcasts on Channel 4 and Radio 4. I gave talks at Church conferences in the USA and Australia and also spoke at conferences in Russia and Eastern Europe, notably at official events for the Russian Church reunion in Moscow and in the Kremlin in 2007. In Eastern England I have fundraised and bought church buildings, buying and setting up new Orthodox churches in Felixstowe in 1997, two churches in my native Colchester (at the old Garrison Church) in 2008, Norwich in 2016 and Cambridge in 2020. These are all international parishes, which have resisted any political manipulations, interference or extremes from Greek or Russian alike, keeping to the royal way. This is why our churches are with the Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Church, centred in Paris.

 

An Autobiographical Note

Archpriest Andrew Phillips was born in 1956 into a family that has lived for centuries on the Essex-Suffolk border in the East of England. He began teaching himself Russian when he was twelve. Following early experience confirmed by reading, he was finally allowed to join the Russian Orthodox Church in 1975. After obtaining an M.A. in Russian in Oxford and working in Greece, he went on to study Russian Orthodox theology in Paris. In 1988 he wrote a first book about the Church in early England and this was followed by five other books on Orthodox themes. After many years spent serving the Russian Orthodox Church in France, Portugal and then England, as senior priest of the Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland of the Church Outside Russia he has since 2008 been rector of the multinational St John of Shanghai Orthodox Church in Colchester, which he founded. Located in his native town, this is the centre of the East of England Orthodox Church trust, which is under the Church Outside Russia and includes a church in Norwich and a community in Bury St Edmunds.

Married with six adult children, serving in one of the largest Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe and working to establish missions from it throughout the East of England, where he travels extensively to isolated families and visits Orthodox in prisons, he also teaches, translates, broadcasts and writes for the website www.orthodoxengland.org.uk, where he especially promotes the veneration of the saints of Western Europe. His work strives to reflect in English the integral Russian Orthodox view of the world. He follows the restoration of Church life in Russia very closely and is a frequent visitor to the Russian Lands. Some of what he writes has been translated and published on websites and in booklet form in Russia and several other countries. He is a member of the Patriarchal Commission for the Diaspora, the representative for Western Europe of the Missionary Department of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a member of its Diocesan Ecclesiastical Court and of the Theological Committee of the Orthodox Bishops in the British Isles and Ireland.