Walter Sawatsky
Christian mission in Orthodox lands is a 2000- year-old story, generally unknown in the West and still unexplored sufficiently for the purpose of Christian mission in post-Communist states. Because of Orthodox repression under Islamic and Soviet overlords, and a stifling tsarist bear hug in between, public perception has not yet perceived Orthodoxy as a missionary church.
The Babylonian Captivity
Even if the Russian Orthodox Mission Society, founded in 1865, achieved impressive results in the spread of Christianity across major tribal peoples of Siberia and in East Asia, Russian Orthodox leadership came to refer to the period from 1721 to 1917 as the era of the “Babylonian Captivity.” As a modernizing despot, Peter I (1696-1725) applied bureaucratic models of governance derived from Scandinavia and Germany and, for the sake of the empire, modernized church structures similarly. As a result, by 1814 Russia had established self-financed church schools, including seminaries, in key cities and theological academies in St. Petersburg, then in Moscow, Kyiv, and finally Kazan (the latter with a mission and linguistic studies curriculum). By the 1890s nearly 90 percent of Orthodox priests had completed seminary, the academies were fully conversant with the ideas and literature of the best of the theological faculties in Western Europe, and the journals from those academies are still worth reading today. The “Babylonian Captivity” label emerged because central financial control and appointments of hierarchs had become tsarist absolutist prerogatives.
Out of the Pietist era of early 19th century Russia a Bible Society emerged (1813) with a modern Russian New Testament circulating by 1821, but the whole Bible only from 1876. The emergence of the Russian evangelical movement may be traced to a democratization process, as more and more peasants and urban workers learned to read the Bible. How much evangelical faith was and remained an indigenous renewal movement within Orthodoxy, and how much it was influenced by similar Bible-based movements in German principalities, Scandinavia, the Baltics, and Britain, remains under debate to the present.
The Soviet War on Religion
The 20th century saw the most intense period of testing for all faith traditions, in a manner that also resulted in their forming a common core of traumatic experiences. To understand the rapid shifts following the fall of communism in 1991, it helps to recall the significantly different church-state experiences of Orthodox and evangelicals during the Soviet era. Perhaps the most profound difference was that following the October Revolution, the first action of Soviet authorities was to declare the separation of the churches from the state. The new regime also refused the legal right of juridical personhood to all religious bodies, including the newly established Russian Patriarchate, calling into question the future of all organized religious life. Orthodox experienced the first decade of Soviet power as an outright war on the church, specifically the destruction of Orthodox institutions, until in 1927 acting patriarch Sergei declared full loyalty to Soviet power without reservation. Not only did his action precipitate a break-away movement that went underground (the True Orthodox Church), but between 1927 and the purges of 1937 Orthodoxy was so severely persecuted that only four bishops were still free, a large majority of bishops and priests had been executed, and others languished in the Gulag.
Evangelical Protestants, only granted tolerance in 1906, expanded rapidly from that date. In contrast to Orthodox under siege, the years 1918 to 1929 came to be known as the golden age for evangelicals. Nevertheless, in addition to being pressured to declare loyalty to Soviet power, Baptists, Evangelical Christians, Pentecostals, as well as Mennonites, had to abandon official support for pacifism or biblical nonresistance between 1923 and 1926. Still, evangelicals’ highly flexible organizations meant that imprisoning key leaders was less effective in suppressing them than was the case with Orthodox. Then came the 1929 Law on Cults which in short order resulted in the shutting down of virtually all public worship.
What has become better known since 1991 through access to archives is the fact that Orthodox resistance to Soviet pressures was indeed intense and creative. Knowing that leading hierarchs were being imprisoned, and assuming a sobor (church council) would not be permitted to elect another patriarch, Patriarch Tikhon had left a testament naming more than nine possible successors in order of elimination. Sergei, who became acting patriarch in 1925, suffered three imprisonments before issuing his declaration of loyalty. When the theological academies and seminaries were forbidden, their leaders tried to sustain short-course programs and tutoring for priests, so there would never be a time when priests stopped functioning in secret. Materials about the suppression of monasteries in the 1920s that this author was able to examine in 1994 were filled with pathos. When a women’s monastery was closed, trucks came to drive the nuns a long distance away, leaving them to fend for themselves. They still managed to return and were arrested again. In the same archival files were hundreds of lay letters of protest. In the post-Soviet era it was from such materials that lists of Christian martyrs numbering in the millions were collected.
We now also know of creative forms of witness by enterprising priests and members of the intelligentsia. As with evangelical witness and clandestine mission, efforts to sustain faith included assistance from abroad. The writings of Father Alexander Men, for example, were published through the efforts of an EasternRite Catholic monastic community in Belgium, and Orthodox priests and bishops allowed to travel abroad during the ecumenical era after 1961 brought back copies of Men’s writings and other religious literature in their luggage.
Expectations of a New Golden Age
It was only in the late fall of 1987 that it became certain that Soviet authorities would agree to a celebration of the millennium of the baptism of Rus in 988. With a rethinking of the role of Christianity and religion in general in Russian history, perestroika finally came to include matters of faith. Most striking was the television program at Easter time 1988 showing original footage of the destruction of churches, the imprisonment of clergy and believers, and an interview with a de facto nun peeling potatoes as she talked about her life of faith, the camera highlighting her gentle hands, and no atheist conclusions ending the program. Then came the actual celebration of the baptism on the banks of the Dnepr River in Kyiv, Gorbachev announcing the re-opening of a monastery, an international celebration at the Danilov Monastery (the new patriarchal residence in Moscow), and the recognition of Patriarch Tikhon as a saint with his icon placed in the Donskoi Monastery.
As the U.S.S.R. collapsed, the Orthodox Church found itself in urgent need of priests and funds to repair re-opened churches. Then in the mid-1990s the economy in Russia, Ukraine, and numerous other successor states suffered an economic catastrophe, massive unemployment, and galloping inflation that destroyed seniors’ pensions. Local Baptist churches began relying on donations from fellow believers abroad, while many priests and bishops, receiving proportionately less aid from fellow believers overseas, drew financial support from newly rich—but often corrupt—businesses.
Unfortunately, some of the clergy, and even major leaders such as Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg, took nationalistic political stands that included antiSemitic racism. Other Orthodox leaders sought to draw on the visions of renovationist renewal from before the Revolution, or from much-admired writings of Orthodox theologians in the diaspora, such as Nikolai Berdiaev and Alexander Schmemann. In 2000 the special Sobor of Orthodox Bishops (known as the Jubilee Sobor) gave evidence of both deeply conservative and liberal Orthodox perspectives. On the one hand, the Sobor declared Tsar Nicholas II and his family saints for the way they had conducted themselves when executed in 1918. On the other hand, the Sobor approved a comprehensive statement of social concerns prepared under the leadership of Metropolitan Kirill (then head of the International Department, now Patriarch). Already in 1994 the Bishops’ Sobor had approved a commitment to mission and evangelism, calling upon Orthodox seminaries and theological academies to include such training for all priests. It was also a period when several Orthodox mission study centers were opened (Apostol’ski gorod in St. Petersburg led by Vladimir Fedorov and another center in Moscow led by Sergei Shirokov,
But then the atmosphere began to change. Several key elements account for the shift. Although a new law on religion stressing widespread religious liberty had passed the Soviet Duma before the U.S.S.R. dissolved (with similar legislation in the sovereign states of the post-Soviet era), by 1997 Russian revisions to that law were already limiting freedoms, especially for foreign missionaries. The first sociological studies after 1991 showed that evangelical Christians were highly respected, less so the leaders of Orthodoxy; but early in the new century public attitudes shifted with Orthodoxy accorded greater respect (even if religious practice was relatively low). In contrast, evangelical leaders and believers were increasingly linked with undesirable Western ways.
“Canonical Territory”
In 1994 Metropolitan Kirill championed an ancient notion of “canonical territory” as part of his call to mission that served to warn against proselytization by Catholic and Protestant missionaries in what Russian Orthodoxy considered its Orthodox world. That stance revealed the persistent impact of centuries of Orthodox isolation, in contrast to the globalization of the rest of Christianity since 1500. A profound isolation of Christian confessions into their own territorial limits had set in since 1054, so that taking converts from other Christian traditions was justified on the grounds that the “others” lacked full marks of the Holy Spirit.
As the modern missionary movement proceeded, this sorry situation led an international missions gathering in Edinburgh in 1910 to confront the fragmentation of Christianity with the intent of new initiatives to overcome division. By 1948 this effort had resulted in the ecumenical movement organizing a World Council of Churches. By 1974 a parallel Lausanne Movement had emerged seeking closer cooperation among evangelicals globally. The mid-1960s also witnessed Vatican II, a gathering of Catholic bishops that resulted in new declarations on evangelization, a more tolerant view of “separated brethren,” and steps toward the development of formal conversations with other Christian traditions. Kirill’s anxieties over proselytism revealed not only Russian Orthodoxy’s century of absence from these unity efforts, but also widespread distrust of ecumenism because of the politically compromised way in which Russian Orthodox and Evangelical Christians-Baptists joined the World Council of Churches in 1961.
Because of Soviet Christian isolation from the shifts in thinking globally during the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox notion of canonical territory no longer made sense, given the way Christian mission had proceeded. Roman Catholics, once only one of five patriarchates, had expanded through organized mission since the 1550s into Asia, Africa, and the Americas, coming to account for just over half of all Christians. The next largest bloc of Christians, “Independents,” consists of free church and indigenous Christian movements with no links to historic Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant traditions. Because of the many centuries of dominance by Islam in historically Orthodox territories, Orthodox growth remained stunted. Further undermining the concept of canonical lands have been forced population movements of Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants in Europe and their mostly voluntary migration and intermingling in the Americas and Australia.
Striking Growth and Striking Limitations
Thus, the Russian Orthodox context since 1991 reveals both striking growth patterns and striking limitations and incapacities. When Metropolitan Hilarion addressed the World Council of Churches Assembly in Busan, Korea, in November 2013, he noted his church’s 25,000 parishes, a massive increase over 25 years, amounting to three new parishes per day. He also enumerated 50 theological schools, 800 monasteries, and a rising tide of new vocations (Russian Orthodox Church News, 1 November 2013; www.mospat.ru). From another perspective, Nadiezda Kizenko, a highly respected scholar of Orthodoxy, wrote in Foreign Affairs that a “deep discontent [exists] among the Orthodox laity about the church hierarchy’s alliance with the state,” meaning its close ties with President Putin of ill repute (“Russia’s Orthodox Awakening,” Nachrichtendienst Öestliche Kirchen 38 [No.13, 26 September 2013], 1-2). Kizenko went on to cite Sergei Chapnin, editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose new book, The Church in Post-Soviet Russia, stressed that “church structures should expressly support lay participation,” a way of saying that a democratization of church structures and practice was a necessary task for the future.
Also in 2013, Willy Fautre, a long-time observer of religious freedom violations, noted ongoing internal conflicts among Baptists, Pentecostals, and Methodists in the former Soviet Union (cited in Martin Banks, “Eastern Europe: Freedom of Religion or Belief Still under Serious Threat,” Nachrichtendienst Öestliche Kirchen 38 [No. 13, 26 September 2013], 1-2). That is, the two decades of post-Soviet growth of evangelicals had not resulted in greater unity, but a continuing, incapacitating ethos of distrust and competition. Russian sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin has criticized previous decades of Western scholarship for relying too heavily on samizdat and human rights themes which have revealed too little of the inner spiritual life of believers and of clergy. In particular, Mitrokhin highlights the daunting task before the Orthodox Church of catechizing the population of its claimed canonical territory—in part the legacy of generations of state atheism (Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’: sovremennoe sostoianie; aktual’nye problemy [Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006]). It called to mind the post-1991 challenge “of reaching an immense religiously inactive population” that historian of Russian Orthodoxy Nathaniel Davis laid bare in his respected account, A Long Walk to Church (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Patriarch
Aleksei II stated in 1991 that “the new generation has forgotten everything….People live with emptied souls.” Metropolitan Vladimir (Kyiv) spoke of the task of “re-Christianization…bringing the Church to the population…which estranged itself from the Church.” In the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate Vladimir Semenko appealed to the laity to become missionaries “in the ocean of paganism that surrounds us.”
Church Demographics
Orthodox “territory,” in fact, is currently quite uneven, understandably so, if we call to mind Russian and Soviet population movements: from west to east, from village to city, and from freedom to Gulag. For one, Soviet industrialization projects resulted in new cities void of churches to address spiritual and social needs. Mitrokhin’s findings from data between 2002 and 2006 revealed that Russian Orthodox Church domination was strong in central Russia, central Ukraine, Belarus (except Grodno), and Moldova. Even so, in 14 of 89 regions the number of Protestant congregations was greater than the number of Orthodox parishes. Further, in Central Asia Protestants were more widespread than Orthodox, and in the Far East, 409 Protestant congregations outnumbered 317 Orthodox parishes. Siberia was home to 834 Orthodox parishes and 557 Protestant congregations, which indicated that this vast territory was much like the confessional diversity of the American Midwest and West Coast, due to similarly expansive frontiers over the past two centuries. Even further, if in central Russia 4,030 Orthodox parishes outnumbered 1,056 Protestant congregations, still, one in five churches were Protestant. In southern Russia 1,154 Orthodox parishes outnumbered 676 Protestant ones, but again, one in three churches was Protestant (Mitrokhin, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’, 409-11). Finally, in a two-volume encyclopedia published in 2003, Orthodox scholar Sergei Filatov documented that a wide region of eastern Russian was best described as an atheist or secular zone. Filatov’s findings also drew attention to the persistence or revival of pre-Christian religions, as well as major regions of Muslim presence, not only in Tatarstan, within the Russian Federation (Sovremennaia religioznaia zhizn’ Rossii. Opyt’ sistematicheskogo opisaniia [Moscow: Logos, 2003]).
What Orthodoxy Can Teach and Learn from Global Christianity
Numerous consultations have been held over the past two decades on mission and education, coming to the conclusion that education is mission. In November 2010 the World Council of Churches reported on an “international inter-Orthodox consultation on theological education, the ecumenical movement, and the life of Orthodox Churches.” The gathering’s communique stated, “Love should be rekindled and strengthened among the churches so that they should no more consider one another as strangers and foreigners, but as relatives, and as a part of the household of Christ (Ephesians 3: 6).” What followed were statements by Orthodox leaders giving thanks for having been helped by other churches and exhortations that, in spite of continuing differences on ecumenical issues, Christian churches “should deliver a clear common witness to the world and to secularized society.” The consultation ended with specific commitments to improve Orthodox theological education to better understand other churches, to move from “polemical apologetics” to “fair-minded, non-polemical” methods, and to adopt “a self-critical approach…in a spirit of humility” as “essential for authentic Orthodox dialogue and engagement” (WCC International Inter-Orthodox Consultation, Sibiu, Romania, 9-12 November 2010, WCC E-Newsletter).
Early in the 1990s, I participated in gatherings of mission society representatives eager to learn from the models, methods, and experience of specialists from the West. It was a sobering moment because I rightly came to question what we from the West had done to justify running mission seminars, especially as we knew only too well how widespread was the crisis of belief in the West. In stark contrast to the West, Slavic Christian witness, whether under Islamic or Soviet atheist repression, very often had been forced to express itself in martyrdom. This reflection called to mind the title of an Orthodox publication sponsored by the World Council of Churches following a consultation on “mission today.” The title was Martyria/Mission: The Witness of the Orthodox Churches Today (Geneva: Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, World Council of Churches, 1980), edited by Romanian Ion Bria.
The missiological emphasis today is to resist denominational pride, to think modestly, and to seek to appreciate how one can notice the marks of the work of the Holy Spirit in other churches and ministries. In addition, mission from and to a Slavic context demands knowledge of mission in other contexts if it is to be part of what God is doing everywhere. After 25 years of renewed mission in a post-Soviet context, what is particularly lacking is engagement with global missions and missiologists with a global perspective. Slavic Christianity thus has much to teach, but also much to learn from Christian witness in the rest of the world.
Editor’s Note: Edited excerpts published with permission from the author’s chapter in Peter Penner and Vladimir Ubeivolc, eds., Novye gorizonty missii: razmyshleniia o missio Dei v post-sovetskom prostranstve (Kyiv: Colloquium, forthcoming)
Walter Sawatsky is retired professor of missiology, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana