With a changing of the guard, new developments are inevitable, and that has certainly been the case since His Eminence Archbishop Makarios stepped foot on Australian shores.

In addition to the appointment of three new Bishops last month, in October a new Archdiocesan district was announced for Victoria in Northcote, splitting the state in two rather than the administration being centralised in South Melbourne, using the Yarra River as a natural divide.

Fr Evmenios Vasilopoulos from The Transfiguration of Our Lord in Thomastown has been appointed as the Archdiocesan Vicar of the new district.

While it is a loss for his congregation who have come to know Fr Evmenios over the years, embracing him as a member of their families who beyond spiritual guidance would go so far as to assist their children with their homework, it is an honour for the priest to have been recognised for his good work.

With Melbourne home to the largest concentration of Greeks in Australia, Fr Evmenios says the new district will see the administration of the church slightly altered to be “more focused and controlled”.

“It’s done out of a practical sense, there’s no divisiveness in it. It’s more about being able to administer His Eminence’s vision and all of the programs he wants to implement in a better way. We’re still one big family,” he assured Neos Kosmos.

That vision is largely centred around building youth engagement, with a youth conference scheduled to take place on 14 March, 2020.

“That’s going forward and will be quite interesting. We haven’t had one for a while, so it will be good to get the ball rolling, get youth engagement. From that we’ll be looking at having annual retreats and events to keep the youth active within the church,” Fr Evmenios said.

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While such activities are standard church offerings, they had been on hold for some time as a result of the late Archbishop Stylianos’ ill-health.

The new district will also allow for greater emphasis on welfare work, which includes the creation of a drug rehabilitation centre. Announced in October with the support of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Fr Evmenios is among a handful of people selected by the Archbishop to help realise the mammoth project.

While the exact format has yet to be finalised, the church is clear on the centre being focused on drug rehabilitation as opposed to detoxification.

“It’ll be a multifaceted approach to drug rehabilitation. So there will be ongoing counselling and support, there will be a welfare aspect also involved for those people who have been detoxified, going through the counselling and now trying to approach coming out into the real world again. They’re the ideas that are floating around, now it’s just a matter of putting everything together and presenting to His Eminence and going from there,” Fr Evmenios said, with hopes for it to be up and running in one to two years depending on what is encountered in the trajectory going forward.

The rehabilitation centre will be open not only to those of Greek Orthodox faith, but to the wider Australian community, which Fr Evmenios says will be the case “in anything we do and try to achieve from now” going forward.

“The most common theme from His Eminence from the moment that he stepped in Australia was that of showing love, showing unconditional love to all people, and I think that is the foundation of what His Eminence is trying to achieve,” he says.

“I remember one of his sermons in the first couple of weeks that he was here, he said it’s time that we open up the doors and we let people from the outside in and I think all this that we’re trying to establish and implement will do exactly that.”

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With life increasingly fast paced, this greater emphasis on active missionary work is something that he says can make a big a difference in the lives of not only those in direct need, but the volunteers themselves.

“I think that society at the moment gives us high expectations, there’s no opportunity to belong somewhere. The church is the only place that can give someone that sense of belonging and through its programs a sense of purpose.”