Soviet Churches Survive in Historic Heartland

President Johnson made important overtures to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites October 7, but the international thaw is complicated by such factors as Communist treatment of religion. After touring the Ukraine, heartland of Soviet Protestantism, News Editor David E. Kucharsky wired this report October 13:

From a park-like slope in Kiev, a floral portrait of Lenin glares at the Ukrainian Council of Ministers, housed in a nine-story building across the street. “That,” said a Communist guide to touring Americans this month, “is so they will not forget him.”

Frost will soon smite the begonias marking Lenin’s profile. But no one is likely to forget him, least of all the 125,000 Protestants in the Ukraine. On the eve of the fiftieth-anniversary year of the Soviet Revolution, they just manage to hold their own in the discouraging milieu of a political system hostile to religion.

Right now, spirits are buoyant following a rare four-day congress in Moscow this month of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (see following story). The meeting provided pastors from throughout the Soviet Union a chance for mutual encouragement and discussion of problems. The All-Union Council is said to embrace only 500,000 of the two million Protestants in the Soviet Union, but it is the only non-Orthodox religious organization with official stature.

Among the fifteen Soviet republics, the All-Union Council is strongest in the Ukraine. But even here its social impact is small. The once-dominant Orthodoxy has been reduced to a remnant. Two generations of Communism have left a largely religionless society.

This decline of religious activity is well known in the West. Not so widely reported is the relatively high tone of personal and social behavior in this secularized culture. Moral conduct is respected—and expected.

In Kiev, the Ukraine’s sprawling capital city with a population of more than one million, women and children walk safely at night through the many parks. Tourists are not subjected to propositions of prostitutes. Newsstands and bookstalls are free of pornography. Drunks are at least out of sight.

All this is in embarrassing contrast to the heyday of Orthodoxy, which was scarred by scandal and exploitation of the masses and little apparent manifestation of fruit of the spirit.

“At its first entrance in Russia,” wrote church historian Philip Schaff, “Christianity penetrated deeper into the life of the people than it did in any other country, without, however, bringing about a corresponding thorough moral transformation.”

Kiev, where the Dnieper River emerges from the forest and moves across rich Ukrainian grain fields, is the cradle of ancient Russian civilization. The Russian monk Nestor, a medieval historian, tells of mass baptisms in the Dnieper as priests read prayers from the palisades. The name of Kiev’s main street still means “to Christianize by baptism.”

Credit for the introduction of Christianity to the area called Kievan Rus in the tenth century goes to Prince Vladimir, whose statue, cross in hand, still graces a Dnieper overlook at Kiev. The rich religious heritage of Kiev is also recalled in picturesque Saint Sophia Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in the world, and the sprawling Kiev Perchersk Monastery, whose catacombs rival Rome’s. Saint Sophia is now a museum for ecclesiastical artifacts; since 1961, the monastery has also been for exhibition purposes only.

At the other end of the architectural scale are the Ukraine’s 1,037 Protestant churches, many of them converted dwellings. Most towns have one, though Kiev and Kharkov have three each. Kiev’s biggest draws about 300 persons—including those who stand at the back or peer through the windows from outside, as they often do because of the press of the crowd. When the congregation is not meeting, the church from the outside looks like just another house, painted in the popular terra cotta color with brown trim woodwork. Inside, the neatly kept sanctuary has a blue and white motif, with curtains at each window. There is no piano, but the church has an old-fashioned, American-made foot-pump organ with fifteen stops. Most of the congregation are old women wearing babushkas. Only a few teen-agers go to worship these days.

Among Protestants throughout the Soviet Union, there is such a demand for Bibles that tourists are besieged with requests. Christian visitors to the Soviet have taken to bringing in several Bibles per suitcase. Some have tried to smuggle in large quantities only to have them confiscated at the border.

Apparently sensing the demand for biblical literature, the Soviet government publishes occasional books about the Bible that come close to reproducing the text, along with discrediting commentary based on higher and form criticism (see Sept. 2 issue, page 56). The latest of these, called The Ancient Judaistic and Christian Myths, is due shortly.

Like Protestant churches everywhere, those in the Soviet Union are experiencing internal problems. Some laymen, apparently dismayed by the failure of pastors to assert themselves, took things in their own hands and ended up in jail. Grass-roots elements feel leaders of the Protestant clergy are not using all the latitude available under the Soviet constitution to push the government for more favorable treatment.

In a long Novosti Press Agency report last month, Vladimir A. Kuroyedov, chairman of the government’s Council on Religion, said dissidents who constitute one-twentieth of the Soviet Baptists have called Soviet religion laws Satanic and demanded repeal to allow unrestricted public preaching. The dissidents spread leaflets, tried to organize street protest marches in several cities, held public prayer meetings, and gave religious education to children (prohibited under current laws).

True to the Slav temperament, they got carried away with their brinkmanship. When they ignored warnings, Kuroyedov notes curtly, “a number of the leaders were prosecuted.”

Soviet Baptists Rap ‘Modernism’

This month’s thirty-ninth national convention of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in Moscow drew 705 delegates elected in sixty-three regional conferences across the Soviet Union. Information on the meeting was provided CHRISTIANITY TODAY by the U.S.S.R.’s Novosti Press Agency.

The council reaffirmed its basic beliefs, codified in 1913 by Ivan Kargel. The re-elected secretary-general of the council, Alexander Karev, said Soviet Baptists reject “modernistic” attempts by some Baptists in the West to replace faith in the deity of Jesus Christ by worshipping him merely as a divine man. Karev also noted that U.S.S.R. Baptists do not practice national or racial separation as U.S. Baptists do.

The council adopted a new charter which encompasses as full members the “Evangelical Christians,” “Fiftieth Day Evangelical Christians-Baptists,” and Mennonites, under union plans previously negotiated. Besides members of these groups, speakers included “Apostolic Christians” and members of the “Initiative Groups” or “Sponsors” which split from the council in 1961. The Soviet Baptists looked to the world ecumenical movement for “the rapprochement, not the merger, of churches.”

On closing day, October 8, the council called on all the world’s Christians to pray to the “Prince of Peace” for an end to the Viet Nam war, and added:

“We address the U. S. government as well as the governments of all other countries whose troops are in Viet Nam. In the name of Christian love, cease fire in Viet Nam, withdraw troops from that country, and give the people of Viet Nam the opportunity of deciding their internal affairs by themselves.”

No Hush For Harold Wilson

A generation has grown up in England that knows nothing of A. A. Milne and his sense of the sacred. “Hush, hush, whisper who dares—Christopher Robin is saying his prayers” is apparently no longer an English attitude, as England’s Prime Minister discovered during a church service in Brighton this month. The service in Dorset Gardens Methodist Church had begun sedately enough, and most of the 1,000 persons attending were unaware that among them sat some thirty representatives of the Viet Nam Action Group and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Present also were Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Foreign Secretary George Brown, and other senior ministers, in town for the Labour Party Conference.

It was Wilson the infiltrators were gunning for, but an unhappily chosen Old Testament lesson goaded one of them into premature action. As Mr. Brown concluded his reading from Micah, about nation not lifting up sword against nation, a young man shouted, “Hypocrite!” He was ejected. His colleagues, one account has it, sneered. The congregation sang “Father, Let Thy Kingdom Come,” and Mr. Wilson went forward to read from the New Testament—another unfortunate passage, under the circumstances, this time from Matthew 7, including the words: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”

He did not get far. Interruptions came from all sections of the congregation. “Wilson for ex-Prime Minister!” shouted one girl. A man called: “How dare you use the House of God for your political ambitions, you hypocrite!” Scattered parts of the church took up the chant of “Hypocrite! Hypocrite!”

After several unsuccessful attempts at continuing the reading, Mr. Wilson went back to his seat in a front pew. White-helmeted policemen who had been on duty outside the church entered and removed the demonstrators, who resisted noisily. Host minister Leslie Newman later said, “In the forty years of my ministry, I have never witnessed anything like it, and I cannot imagine that it will reflect any credit on those who took part in it.”

It was reported later that four women and five men would face charges of obstructing the police and unruly behaviour in church.

T. D. LENTON

Looking Back At Geneva

The chairman of the World Council of Churches’ summer Conference on Church and Society (Aug. 19 issue, page 42), is in America for a year of follow-up meetings, between teaching chores at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

At the first such meeting, in the nation’s capital this month, the Rev. M. M. Thomas, who directs South India’s Christian Institute for the Study of Church and Society, said the Church’s major responsibility at present is not evangelism, but framing questions about human personality and existence in an age of social and technological revolution.

“M. M.,” as the slight, witty, middle-aged scholar is called within the ingroup, drew sizable crowds and talked with the quiet ease and eloquence usually reserved for men with a passionate belief that they have made history.

During the mostly-secular discussions, Thomas stated the theological basis for social action as “the common humanity of all men in creation and redemption. If you deny this, you are lost.”

O. WILSON OKITE

Texas Tilt: Nuns In School

Two Benedictine nuns are in the middle of a legal battle in Boerne, Texas (population 2,200), because they wear religious habits as they teach in the public school.

In a crowded courtroom October 7, District Judge Charles Sherril, Jr., took under advisement a petition complaining about the practice. He will set a hearing date after lawyers file briefs, and a long hassle is expected.

The furor erupted when the Rev. George McWilliams of Boerne’s First Baptist Church protested the “silent, yet striking and unmistakable teaching of sectarian religion in the wearing of the religious symbolic garb.” Aided by a Church of Christ minister and two retired Army officers, McWilliams and his two lawyers seek permission to ask the nuns in court if the garb is peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church, if they are wholly religious persons, and if they have taken oaths of obedience to poverty.

San Antonio lawyer Pat Maloney, representing the nuns, says, “We feel the constitutional right of freedom of religion is involved.” He thinks complaints are aimed not at the garb but at the Roman Catholic Church. Through Maloney, the nuns filed a statement arguing that state law forbids schools to ask prospective teachers about their religion.

The town school board had hired the nuns despite opposition, citing a shortage of qualified teachers.

McWilliams said many friendships had cooled in Boerne, although both Catholics and Protestants have “tried to hold down prejudice.”

MARQUITA BOX

Pointers From Hunters Point

Moved by the worst racial riots in San Francisco history, Bay Area churches are pondering as never before their role in the face of increasingly severe urban problems.

The violence was triggered by a sixteen-year-old Sunday school dropout’s death at the hands of a policeman September 27. The boy, Matthew Johnson, was one of several youths who bolted from a stolen car when a patrolman approached the run-down Hunters Point public-housing district. The officer spotted the fleeing teen-ager, ordered him to stop, fired three warning shots over his head, then felled him with another.

Bitterness over the shooting was the first reaction among Negroes, even ministers. They demanded that a civilian review board be established; some angrily insisted that the officer be charged with murder.

Visibly distressed, the patrolman (also named Johnson), father of four, told reporters, “I didn’t want to kill that boy. If only he had stopped when I told him …”

As rage gave way to reason, the local chapter of the National Association of Evangelicals scheduled a meeting this month with Negro pastors. The purpose: “to explore how evangelicals can work together to assist churches on location toward a more effective ministry among the unemployed and uneducated.”

Bi-racial groups of pastors ventured into the strife-torn areas day and night “to offer counsel and plead for peace.”

Baptist Victor Medearis, a leading pastor in the Hunters Point area, offered his perspective: “This was not really a race riot. The rioters were mostly unemployed young adults and frustrated teen-agers. Tensions run high always, and rumbles occur often, usually with invading gangs from the Fillmore (another Negro district). Our church people deplore what has happened, and they are as afraid as anyone else when violence breaks out. We need to do something as churches to get these kids off the streets.”

The monthly meeting of the Economic Opportunity Council, the city’s anti-poverty organization, fell on the second night of rioting. During a heated exchange, EOC’s public-relations officer, Raphael Taliaferro, scored Roman Catholic and Council of Churches representatives on three counts: failure to help lobby for more federal funds for the unemployed, failure to interpret effectively the EOC program to parishioners and thus involve their support, and failure to approve plans for activist projects. This neglect, he declared, was responsible for the outburst.

Major interfaith officials later met and vowed to carry the call for wider church social involvement to their congregations.

In an interview, Taliaferro laid much of the blame for “the social mess” upon Negro churches, especially Baptists (“they represent half of this city’s 80,000 Negroes”). He is himself a member and the music director of the city’s largest Negro church, the 5,000-member Third Baptist Church.

He spoke of the lack of an educated ministry, of storefront fly-by-night operators, of irrelevant and excessively emotional sermons that fail to appeal to intellect or will, of the small number of teen-agers and young adults active in churches, and of failure to use facilities efficiently. (Third Baptist, in the heart of the Fillmore district, has one of the best gymnasium buildings in the city; it stands unused much of the time).

The civic leader outlined a three-point educational program aimed at changing “basic Negro values.” He hoped churches would act soon to:

1. Sponsor remedial and adult education classes (“for example, churches can teach neighborhood residents how to read, write, and speak correct English”);

2. promote cultural development;

3. (“most important”) provide family-life education and counseling services (“the prevailing concept of ‘family’ among Negroes must be drastically changed; the church is in the key position to do this”).

“We are generations late,” commented one Negro clergyman. “We need to move into these areas of need, and now.”

Another minister, white, seemed to summarize the newly aroused concern of many Bay Area Christians when he said, “We all, really, had a hand in that boy’s death and in the violent venting of hostility that followed.”

The product of a broken home, Matthew Johnson lived in Hunters Point sometimes with relatives, sometimes with his father and stepmother. With the latter, members of the Evergreen Baptist Church, he attended Sunday School and services “regularly” until two years ago, according to the Rev. R. Johnson, pastor. At that time he went to Louisiana to live with his mother for one year. On his return he only “rarely” visited church; occasionally he attended mass with Roman Catholic friends. His pastor and Sunday school teacher can recall only that he was “a quiet boy.”

In a gardening job under the city’s anti-poverty program during summer months, he was rated by his supervisor as a “very good and dependable worker” who was “neat in appearance” and “obeyed all orders.”

But when, because of family moves, he was transferred to another high school at the beginning of the fall term, he refused to cooperate. He became a neighborhood drifter with other truants and unemployed older youths. His last day of life was in their company.

It took 1,000 police and 2,000 National Guard troops to quell the violence and destruction of property that erupted in the wake of his death. Ironically, the rioting brought a curfew that forced cancellation of revival services at Evergreen Baptist.

In a shocking footnote this month, Rev. Johnson said in his funeral sermon for the youth that if he were a policeman, he wouldn’t arrest children, but “parents who have not lived up to their responsibilities.” Matthew Johnson’s mother walked out.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

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