Mark R. Elliott, Editor
As soon as I had opportunity to peruse Malkhaz Songulashvili’s comprehensive account of the history and current status of Georgia’s Evangelical Christian Baptists (337 pages of text, 90 pages of appendices, and 62 pages of bibliography of Georgian, Russian, English, French, and German sources), I immediately recognized a volume that had import well beyond the confines of a small, post-Soviet republic in the Caucasus. For the first time in 24 years as editor of the East-West Church and Ministry Report, I chose to recruit multiple critiques of a truly path-breaking study. As a consequence, in addition to reprinting an excerpt from the book, this issue includes reviews by four theologians and church historians: James J. Stamoolis (author of Orthodox Mission Theology Today), Danut Manastireanu (longtime World Vision administrator for Eastern Europe and the Middle East), Paul Crego (Library of Congress), and David Bundy (New York Theological Seminary). The wide range of significant issues addressed by Songulashvili and his reviewers include Georgian Baptist borrowings from Orthodox liturgy and iconography; the interface of evangelical and Orthodox theology; a comparison of Georgian Baptists and Romania’s Lord’s Army; the heresy of phyletism (the fusing of Christian allegiance and national patriotism); the ordination of women; and the defense of freedom of conscience for all, including for those who hold beliefs even a majority consider objectionable.
Unfortunately, for the present issue, even with considerable effort, I was unable to secure Russian evangelical and Orthodox responses to the ongoing Georgian Baptist Church experiment. However, for the next issue I have managed to recruit Russians to critique Songulashvili’s volume. In the meantime, I will close with a quote from British Baptist pastor and missiologist Darrell Jackson: “More conservative Baptists have been critical of… [Georgian Baptist] reforms, although an official European Baptist inquiry in 2003 found in favor of their remaining within the family of European Baptists” (“Experimentation in Worship: A Georgian Baptist Case Study,” East-West Church and Ministry Report 13 (Summer 2005), 15.