MOC-OA and IVZ have today established a Friendship Group – a formal framework that will offer a quality space in which both sides can produce a much greater understanding and mutual acquaintance and encourage common concern for the public good.

We want to provide space for future priests to have contacts with each other, which will lead to qualitative improvements and changes in many segments of social life. It is a really significant framework that we will develop in four modules in the next period, and what we have done so far at different levels is now getting a more formal structure of its own, said the director of the Commission for Relations with Religious Communities, Darian Sotirovski.

He clarified that the group will function at the level of thematic views, will consider various issues, and in doing so will use foreign comparative experiences, primarily positive, but also negative, in relation to achieved shifts and risks that were not foreseen in time.

We have a healthy relationship between the MOC and IVZ at the moment, it has been worked on for quite a long time and we need to use it at the right moment to take it one step further. Practically, this would mean that after each annual friendship group, we will have many participants in a period of a decade who have passed the friendship groups and accordingly have contacts from the religious officials on the other side in their phone book. It will often prove to be very useful and necessary in times of crisis, like these today when circles are closing and society is being segregated by social affiliation, by religion, by language, by nationality, etc., especially by politics. We must build a vanguard that, even in times of crisis, contacts each other and builds what the state recognizes as one society, and people recognize as the only healthy society, a society in which segregation does not exist or does not exist in every pore. To build a quality of social living, Sotirovski clarifies the purpose of the Friendship Group.

The group will have a symmetrical number of members from both sides and will hold meetings in four modules that will be previously thematically aligned with the representatives of the two religious communities.

For now, it is not planned to include external experts outside the theological sphere in the work of the group.

I think that both sides are fed up with the activism they produce and the non-governmental sector is healthier for everyone. This is not about a project. This is not a project. Here we don't need to tell someone that we have achieved something. We are just creating a space in which something should develop positively. And in that sense, I think that this kind of framework that has been set up today is appropriate and will give its results, the head of the Commission for relations with religious communities and religious groups is decisive.

At the event that officially started the work of the "Friendship Group", the heads of the Archbishop of Ohrid and Macedonia, Mr. d. Stefan, reisul-ulema h. hfz. Shaqir Effendi Fetai, as well as the deans of the Orthodox Theological Faculty, prof. Dr. Gjoko Gjorgjevski and the Faculty of Islamic Sciences, prof. Dr. Shaban Suleimani.