Appeals have been pouring into the West in recent months from Soviet evangelicals seeking relief from oppression by authorities in their country. Some of the appeals have been addressed directly to United Nations general secretary Kurt Waldheim, the World Council of Churches, the Baptist World Alliance, and Christian leaders in the West. Some are copies of appeals sent to Soviet authorities. In many cases accompanying documents cite names, places, dates, and details of grievances.
A notable current case involves Soviet church leader Georgi Vins, 46, of Kiev in the Ukraine. Trained as an electrical engineer, he is secretary of the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (CCECB), the dissident Baptist movement that the government says is illegal.
Vins, a founder of the CCECB, was arrested in 1966 after a Baptist demonstration outside Communist party headquarters in Moscow and sentenced to three years at hard labor in a prison camp. He emerged in 1969 broken in health. A new case was opened against him in 1970, but he went into hiding and carried on the direction of the CCECB secretly. Late last March the authorities found him and jailed him in Kiev pending trial.
One of those appealing on his behalf through open letters is Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, who himself is in hot water with the government for his outspoken advocacy of human rights. In an interview published in Dagen, a Stockholm daily, Sakharov says Vins is charged with vagrancy (not holding a job and hiding from the police), using religion for crime against the rights of citizens (living on the means of others), and violating church-state separation laws. He says Vins wants a Christian lawyer from the West (relatives have written the WCC requesting one) rather than an atheist who would not understand or be sympathetic toward the religious issues involved.
Vins’s mother Lidia spent three years in a Soviet prison camp (1970–1973) allegedly for protesting government harassment of her son and other CCECB leaders. She is among the thousands of Soviet citizens who have signed appeals this year to Soviet leaders asking that constitutional guarantees of religious freedom be implemented and the persecution stopped. She and others have also asked Waldheim to appoint a United Nations investigative commission to look into Soviet violation of human rights. (Her husband Pyotr Vins was arrested for religious activities and died in a prison camp some years ago—of torture, allege relatives.)
The CCECB is the product of a conflict within the main Protestant body in the U.S.S.R., the officially recognized All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), composed of Baptists, Pentecostals, Mennonites, and others. In 1960, under government direction, the AUCECB revised its structure, assuming a measure of central control over local church affairs—in opposition to traditional Baptist views of local autonomy. The AUCECB said it would recognize only those congregations that had been legally registered by the state, in effect giving the government a determining role in church life. (Two-thirds of the churches had been unable to obtain this registration, according to a historical sketch in the May–June issue of Religion in Communist Dominated Areas, published by Blahoslav S. Hruby at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City.)
The AUCECB went on to appoint visiting “supervisors” who discouraged local-church evangelistic endeavors and tried to prevent young adults from joining. Youths under 18 were banned from membership outright.
Because of these and other AUCECB policies, a number of Baptist ministers, led by A. F. Prokofiev, G. K. Kriuchkov, and Georgi Vins, formed a so-called Initiative Group to press for reform and new leadership in the AUCECB. (This led to their being known variously as Initsiativniki or Initiative and Reform Baptists.)
An AUCECB congress in 1963 took up the issues, but the reformers were not there (most were in jail). The AUCECB officers were reelected. Some of the objectionable regulations, however, were rescinded. Nevertheless, the reformers established their own separate national fellowship in 1965, the CCECB—an outlaw organization, in the eyes of Soviet officials. In 1966 the AUCECB revised its constitution, apologized for the 1960 regulations, and asked the reformers to return. There was no effective response; Vins and the other leaders were in prison.
Meanwhile, a Council of Prisoners’ Relatives (CPR) had been organized at a Reform Baptist conference in Moscow in 1964. Its threefold purpose was to keep church members informed about persecution and imprisonments throughout the U.S.S.R., to petition the Soviet government on behalf of those imprisoned for religious activities, and to maintain files on prisoners and the children of Christians taken into state custody to prevent a Christian upbringing. The CPR also endeavored to provide material relief to families deprived of their breadwinners.
Over the years since then a steady flow of CPR-produced documents have reached the West. Many have been published in Hruby’s journal and in publications of Anglican scholar-researcher Michael Bourdeaux’s Center for the Study of Religion and Communism in the London suburb of Keston. Writing about the CPR in Bourdeaux’s journal Religion in Communist Lands, researcher Katharine Murray notes the absence of bitterness on the part of the CPR chroniclers. Underscoring their integrity, she states that no document from them has turned out “to be falsified, no single piece of information untrue.”
At the second secret conference of the CPR in 1970 an appeal was drafted asking the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) and others to help. It stated:
… If you keep silent now, deliverance and freedom to preach the Gospel will still come—but let this not happen without our taking part in it, for what should we say to Jesus? How have we carried out his command of love?
One of the most recent CPR documents is a sixty-one page report telling of raids of worship services (police seriously wounded a teen-age youth in an outdoor meeting on May 2), of an Odessa pastor found hanged to death in an exile camp, of forced injections and drugs (one Christian leader was blinded), of searches, heavy fines, and confiscation (of even children). Believers often cannot immediately pay stiff fines; authorities then confiscate furniture and other goods and sell the items to passersby, according to the document. Children of CCECB leaders are sometimes seized and shipped off to state institutions for atheistic indoctrination, the report indicates.
In April nearly 200 CCECB members addressed an appeal to Soviet leader A. N. Kosygin asking for the release of Vins and other religious prisoners, official recognition of the CCECB, and freedom to minister.
A new note has cropped up recently in CCECB documents (the CPR is a CCECB affiliate). For years the writers simply called on the Soviet Union to live up to its own constitution and grant freedom to the believers to practice their faith. Now, however, some speak of wanting to emigrate to any country “where our convictions will not be at variance with the laws of the land.”
For years the CCECB has operated at least two secret presses to publish its documents plus thousands of New Testaments, Scripture portions, hymnals, and other religious literature. The presses have long been the object of an intensive Soviet search. In late October the CCECB suffered a staggering blow when reportedly 200 Soviet police stormed a basement in Ligatne, Latvia, containing one of the presses. Six CCECB members were arrested and a large quantity of New Testaments and paper confiscated. Few within the CCECB knew of its location, and there is speculation that Vins or another CCECB leader may have been drugged or tortured into talking. (At a convention of psychiatrists in Oslo, 181 psychiatrists signed a statement calling for an end to “psychiatric persecution” in the U.S.S.R., and the Union of Swiss Physicians condemned the Soviet practice of sending dissidents to mental institutions.)
The CCECB publishing ventures no doubt encouraged other samizdat (unauthorized publishing efforts). Six Lithuanian Catholics were recently arrested for producing religious literature and circulating the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church. Sakharov appealed in their behalf to the WCC and to the recent Catholic synod in Rome. Five Lithuanian priests signed a statement saying “the authorities would not have had to resort to arresting these people if enough prayer books and catechisms and a minimum quantity of essential religious literature were produced in Lithuania, and if there were no discrimination against believers.”
So far, the appeals from Soviet believers to Christians in the West have not sparked the solidarity of response that characterizes the Jewish community’s reaction to the plight of Soviet Jewry. BWA officials are concerned, but they don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize the fragile bit of freedom and legitimacy enjoyed by the AUCEB. (The bulk of the nation’s Protestants, including thousands of former CCECB members, are in the AUCECB, among whose churches revival tides are flowing.)
The WCC, in the opinion of many, has been scandalously silent on the issue, partly out of fear of alienating Soviet representatives in the WCC. (WCC leader Emilio Castro in an interview in Lausanne last summer said he agonized over the WCC’s silence. Protests directed to a totalitarian government are virtually useless, he implied, and they may cause more harm than good.)
As for the United Nations, it has again postponed coming to grips with a declaration on religious intolerance.
In the meantime, Vins and other churchmen languish in Soviet jails. A statement signed by Vins’s four children asserts that Vins’s wife was fired from work for her religious beliefs in 1962 and it was years before someone would hire her. Daughter Natasha was fired last January from a hospital job allegedly because “religion and medicine are incompatible.” Son Petya (Peter) has completed his education but has not been hired anywhere, the statement points out. It closes with a vow addressed to Soviet authorities:
“If our father is not released and if measures are taken in prison which threaten his life, then know you that our entire family is filled with resolve to die alongside him. This we make known to you and believers around the world.”
OBSERVING THE DAY
Christmas in Zaire has fallen victim to President Mobuto Sese Seko’s “authenticity” campaign. Stricken as a public holiday because it is not authentically African, the day celebrated in the West as Christmas will be just another work and school day in the African nation. Of Zaire’s 23 million inhabitants, eight million are Catholics, two million are Protestants, and several million are Kimbanguists (members of an independent African church), and many of these are expected to observe the day privately and at night or early-morning services.
Dr. I. B. Bokeleale, head of the Church of Christ in Zaire, the Protestant church council, supports Mobuto. The date was taken from a pagan celebration anyway, he says, adding that the CCZ will meet in February “to pick our own day.”
It all calls to mind earlier controversies over the day. Christmas was outlawed for a time in England, observance of it was a prison offense in Massachusetts, and for nearly two centuries it was largely ignored in the New England states.
DAY OF ACCOUNTING
Student pastor David Finestead of the 150-member United Methodist Church in Lake Lotawana, Missouri, dramatized Christ’s “Parable of the Talents” in an unusual way. Finestead, 30, a former farm-machinery salesman, put $1,000 of his savings in the offering plate one Sunday several months ago and instructed his church members to take secretly whatever amount they wished, then return the Sunday before Thanksgiving for “a day of accounting.”
The members returned last month with more than $3,200. A widow who had taken $1 made jelly from apples in her backyard and sold it for twenty-five cents a jar. By plowing her profits back into ingredients, she was able to put $80 in the offering plate on the appointed day. A printer took $120 to finance wedding invitations and returned with $600. A teen-age girl took $10, bought auto wax, and came back with $30 from waxing cars. Two families took $130 between them and sponsored a community chili supper, more than doubling their investment.
After repaying Finestead his $1,000 the congregation will use the money to buy a used bus and some Christian-education materials.
Finestead, a graduate of Greenville College in Illinois and a student at St. Paul (United Methodist) Seminary in Kansas City, assumed the pastorate in June. One of the biggest blessings of the talents project, he says, is the unity it has brought to his congregation. “In a way, I bet $1,000 on my people. But I wasn’t worried,” he says.
The pastor’s faith in his people, comments an observer, has resulted in greater faith of the people in the Bible and God.
Under Investigation
Baptist pastor Iosif (Joseph) Ton of Ploesti, Romania, was still under police investigation early this month but not in jail, according to Baptist World Alliance executive C. Ronald Goulding of London, who recently visited him. Ton had written and circulated papers calling for full religious freedom in Romania (see November 22 issue, page 52). A colonel who led a seven-man search-and-seize operation at Ton’s house reportedly died of a heart attack four days later while listening to tapes of Ton’s sermons. Authorities say the cleric violated a law forbidding the unauthorized publication and distribution of printed materials.
A Nod For Charismatics
At last month’s semi-annual meeting of the Nation’s Catholic bishops, a committee of bishops issued an eight-page statement of guidelines on the so-called Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Overall, it expressed approval of the movement and extended encouragement to its members to continue with the renewal’s “positive and desirable directions.” It called on bishops to join priests in tying the movement closer “to the whole Church.”
The statement did warn of dangers: “elitism,” “biblical fundamentalism,” and reducing doctrinal content to “a felt religious experience.” In discussing the report, some bishops expressed reservations about the movement, mostly relating to matters of authority.
Archbishop Joseph L. Bernardin of Cincinnati, newly elected president of the bishops, said his own attitude and that of most of the bishops is “quite positive.”
In other action, the bishops called for twice-weekly fasting to help ease world hunger.
Way Out In Kansas
Founder-president Victor Paul Wierwille of The Way, an organization in New Knoxville, Ohio, is saying openly and directly what he’s been teaching quietly for years: “Jesus Christ is not God.”
That is the title of the lead article in the latest issue of The Way magazine and also of a book to be published in the spring by Wierwille. Jesus is important, but the Father “alone is God,” he asserts.
This and other teachings considered way out by orthodox Christians will be expounded at The Way College of Emporia, Kansas. The forty-one-acre campus was acquired by Wierwille in September in an unusual transaction with the United Presbyterian-related College of Emporia, forced to close in 1973 because of a financial crunch. Wierwille refers to the transaction as a switch in affiliation rather than as a purchase, apparently aiming to retain the accreditation granted to the Presbyterian school, which was founded in 1892. He paid off a mortgage of $504,000 plus debts of $190,000, including unpaid 1973 salaries of the defunct school’s former teachers.
The Way college is expected to open early in 1975, with a student body of between 400 and 600 by fall. A corps of Way workers has been helping with renovation, estimated by Wierwille to cost $1.5 million.
Wierwille is a former Evangelical and Reformed minister who holds a master’s degree from Princeton Seminary (he also studied at Mission House College, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Moody Bible Institute) and an honorary doctorate from Pike’s Peak Bible Seminary, a reputed degree mill. He blends unitarianism, dispensationalism (the Church began with Paul’s epistles), Calvinism, and charismatic teachings on tongues and healing, a mixture based on instruction he says the Lord revealed to him directly in 1942. His movement numbered only a few adults in Ohio until several years ago when he and his associates began foraging among young people in the Jesus movement.
Doing The Declaration
In an overcrowded and stuffy room at Chicago’s Wabash YMCA, the 115 participants of the second by-invitation-only Thanksgiving Workshop on Evangelical Social Concern split up into six task forces to consider ways of implementing last year’s declaration on social action (see December 21, 1973, issue, page 38). The groups drew up proposals dealing with consciousness-raising (evangelism was a top priority item in that group), women’s issues, economic life-styles, research and education, politics, and black concerns.
An economic-life-styles proposal calling on Christians to try to live on $2,000 a year per person evoked debate. The idea was suggested by Editor John F. Alexander of The Other Side, who headed the life-styles task force. Fellow task-force member Roger L. Dewey, editor of the Boston-based Inside magazine, argued against it, citing legalistic implications. Workshop planning-committee members Carl F. H. Henry, former editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and Conservative Baptist leader Rufus Jones said it reflected an inadequate biblical rationale.
The same objection was voiced by others concerning part of a twelve-point proposal from the women’s caucus, which among other things called for equal rights for women in the church in such matters as ordination, membership on policy-making boards, and staff employment. The proposal also called for monitoring Christian bookstores for “sexist publications” and for examining Bible translations and Christian-education materials for use of “sexist language.”
The group also appointed a committee to plan the first national evangelical feminist conference, to be held in about six months. (At last year’s meeting little visibility was given to the evangelical feminist position. For example, no women were on the original planning committee; two were added to help draft this year’s program. Only a handful of women were invited to last year’s workshop; nearly a third of this year’s participants were women.)
All the proposals were approved except one suggesting a national congress on biblical social action (too expensive). An affirmative vote for a proposal, however, did not necessarily indicate wholehearted endorsement. Chairman Ronald Sider, dean of Messiah College’s Philadelphia campus, stressed that yes votes merely meant that the coalition accepted items as “a valid means” for implementing the declaration, not that each person could or would follow through on each item. This led some to conclude that easy approval was given in order to maintain visible unity.
Several major problems surfaced during the weekend. Because of the six separate task forces, the overall thrust seemed fragmented to many participants. Said history professor Richard Pierard of Indiana State University: “Last year’s meeting was focused; we wrote the declaration. This year everyone was doing his or her own thing.”
Jim Wallis, editor of the Post-American, and Rufus Jones cited others: not enough attention to the biblical and theological bases for the proposals, nor enough time for discussion (a fifteen-minute time limit was set for debate on each proposal). Wallis, who headed the evangelism section, urged that at next year’s meeting—dates and place have not been decided yet—more time be given to theological considerations.
CHERYL FORBES
MARY HEMINGWAY
Mary Williams Hemingway belonged to the pith-helmet era of foreign missionary work. Born of missionary parents in China and educated at Oberlin College in Ohio, she spent forty years of her life as a Congregational missionary in China. While there, she helped in the hospital her missionary husband built, she taught Chinese women and children to read, and she told them about Jesus. She fought against the ages-old custom of foot-binding, delivering many girls from the ordeal. She stayed on throughout the Japanese invasion and occupation. Scores of refugees found shelter and food in her home. Then came the Communists, and she had to leave.
No pith-helmet missionary, Mary Hemingway died last month in Washington, D. C., at the age of 99.
Few noted her passing.
Terror For Life
Another African nation has imposed a reign of terror on its citizens and, as in the case of Chad currently and Burundi earlier, suffering is especially intense among Christian believers. One-fourth of the 308,000 citizens of the tiny West African Republic of Equatorial Africa are in exile, tens of thousands have been murdered, most of the parliament members elected in 1968 have disappeared, and the prisons are overflowing, according to an investigative report in One World, a World Council of Churches journal. It accuses President (for life) Francisco Macias Nguema, 50, of exercising a “ruthless dictatorship.”
The country is 98 per cent nominally Christian, mainly Roman Catholic, with strong Methodist and Presbyterian churches (the latter has about 10,000 communicants). Since 1968 most of the foreign missionaries have been expelled, and “the local clergy have been put under increasing pressure, including imprisonment and torture,” says the report.
Additional information came from the Swiss League for Human Rights, which says Christians are being harassed in an atmosphere of “militant atheism.” Church buildings have been confiscated, church leaders prevented from traveling, and special permits required for church meetings, asserts the league.
One World says a recent presidential decree requires priests and ministers to read a message extolling President Macias at every worship service, and every church building in the land to display his portrait.
Reforming The Reformed
These are troubled times for the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (GKN). The Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (NGK) issued an ultimatum to the GKN: Put your doctrinal household in order and rescind your decision “to support terrorism on our borders” or consider the ties between us broken. Earlier, the Reformed Churches in New Zealand voted to suspend its “sister church” relationship with the GKN, meaning that members transferring from GKN churches and visiting ministers must pass doctrinal muster before being allowed official entry. And in no case will women office-bearers from the GKN be received in any official capacity.
Meanwhile, the quadrennial synod of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (Colored) in South Africa, a “daughter church” of the NGK, decided that mission workers (most are white clergy on loan from the NGK) must assume full membership in the churches where they are serving, thereby coming under the authority of the mission church. In other resolutions the mission synod rejected the government’s ban on mixed marriages and called for mixed worship. After heated arguments a decision on whether to join the South African Council of Churches was postponed until the next synod.
Elsewhere on the Reformed scene, the synod of the separatist-minded Christian Reformed Churches in the Netherlands debated whether it should withdraw from Dr. Carl Mclntire’s International Council of Christian Churches. Unless there is considerable reform in the ICCC by the time of the next synod in three years, the synod says, it will withdraw. The synod alleged that McIntire exercises an almost papal authority, saying and doing things without consulting member churches. Among the demands: Allow member churches to dissociate themselves from certain declarations without censure; avoid giving the impression that Communism is the only enemy; don’t use worldly styles in battling for the faith; prevent personal declarations from being represented as the opinion of the whole organization; take an exclusivist position only where required by Scripture; and see that the content of all resolutions is biblically founded and theologically responsible.
Nigeria: Above Tradition
A Nigerian Congress on Evangelization (NCE) is planned for next August as a follow-up to the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne last summer. The sixty Nigerian ICOWE participants, one of the largest Third World contingents at Lausanne, are spearheading the effort. It will be held at the University of Ife, one of the country’s five universities. General Secretary J. A. Ayorinde of the Nigerian Baptist Convention is NCE honorary chairman, and evangelical leader Samuel O. Odunaike is executive chairman.
At its annual meeting last month the Nigerian Evangelical Fellowship (NEF) endorsed the NCE plans. The NEF also appointed its first full-time general secretary, West Indian Kenrick Sharpe, a Sudan Interior Mission worker.
After a lively discussion on the revival of African tradition and culture, the delegates passed a motion noting that Christianity had had “a vital part in the continent of Africa since the first century, A.D.” Their statement exhorted Christians to “examine and judge all culture and tradition, national and foreign, in the light of God’s universal and eternal laws, as recorded in His holy Scriptures.… That which is contrary to God’s laws must be rejected.”
W. HAROLD FULLER
