The experience of educational work and interaction with elderly people in social service centers, with children in the Orthodox-oriented children's recreation program "Star of Bethlehem", as well as with church-going adults in catechetical courses, reveals the enormous difficulties that these categories of believers experience in prayerful communication with God. Due to age, employment, or poor ecclesiastical development of children's consciousness, they do not understand the prayer books in Church Slavonic that are in common church use. At the same time, such believers sometimes have no opportunity to attend Church Slavonic language courses or study it at home on their own. In addition, rarely do any of the new Christians, due to lack of prayer and church experience, have the opportunity to read the morning and evening rules in full.
As a result of the above, an urgent need arose to compile and publish the text of the main church prayers contained in the Orthodox prayer book in Russian. The creation of such a prayer book received approval from a large number of responsible church workers and authoritative clergy, as well as Orthodox youth leaders at the conference “Youth in the Church. Problems and ways to solve them" (2005).
A short prayer book for new Christians in Russian has been prepared by me for publication since 2004. Over the years, based on consultations with specialists, the prayer book has been revised many times, in 2007 it passed philological and theological censorship, and last year it received approval from the Synodal Department of Religious Education and Catechesis. Currently, the Hierarchy is considering the possibility of publishing this prayer book. Until the appropriate decision, it cannot be officially published in printed form.
Alexander Bozhenov,
employee of the Patriarchal Center for Spiritual Development
children and youth at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow.