Mark R. Elliott
Disheartening Trends
Outside of college classroom responsibilities, most of my professional life has centered around learning all I can and disseminating all I can about church life and Christian ministry in Soviet and post-Soviet states. In 2002, ten years after the breakup of the Soviet Union and ten years after the founding of the East-West Church and Ministry Report, I published an editorial on East European missions subtitled “Taking Stock of the First Post-Soviet Decade” (10 [Winter 2002], 20, 19; www.eastwestreport.org). Despite acknowledging the reappearance of government restrictions and cautionary notes addressing mission miscues, the editorial was nevertheless replete with astonishment and wonder at still-abundant new freedoms and new opportunities.
Not so today. Most East European and Baltic states have made a respectable effort at honoring freedom of conscience for religious minorities as well as religious majorities. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for much of the Balkans and most of the former Soviet Union. The mantra of state protection of “traditional” faiths now compromises the free exercise of faith just as Marxist ideology did previously. The irony is that in the long run, secular support for a majority, “traditional” confession undermines rather than strengthens the favored faith. As “Taking Stock” in 2002 put it: Serious students of church history will stress that state recognition for the church has always been, at best, a mixed blessing. When any church—be it ancient Roman, Russian Orthodox, French Catholic, or German Lutheran—has been privileged rather than persecuted, it has run the risk of conversions of convenience and nominal allegiance. State favoritism predictably weakens established churches by tempting adherents with material and political advantages that undermine spiritual vitality (20).
Today, the increasing discrimination and harassment faced by non-majority religious expressions in Russia, Belarus, and the Caucasus republics and the outright persecution of minority faiths in Central Asia bear resemblance in too many particulars to the Soviet era. Also troubling is my sense of waning international urgency over infringements of religious freedom in post-Soviet space.
Ceasing Publication
With these unwelcome trends in mind, I was disheartened to learn of the November 2012 demise of Religion in Eastern Europe (REE) in its present format after 32 years of publication (www.georgefox.edu/ academics/undergrad/departments/soc-swk/ree).While in one respect REE and the East-West Church and Ministry Report have been competitors, I have always considered the two publications complementary. The fact is the story of faith in Eurasia is too big for half a dozen publications. Furthermore, I respect the scholarship of, and have benefitted from friendship with, REE’s longtime editors, Paul Mojzes and Walter Sawatsky. In recent years Sawatsky has served as a contributing editor for the EWC&M Report, while I have served on REE’s advisory editorial board. I also have published a number of my own articles in REE that were too long for the EWC&M Report’s 16-page format, and both Mojzes and Sawatsky have published articles and reviews in the EWC&M Report.
REE’s fate has given me pause to reflect upon and “take stock” of the enterprise of reporting on Christianity in Eurasia. First, it is stunning to note how many relevant serials and news services have ceased publication in just over two decades. In addition to REE, they include Religion in CommunistDominated Areas (1962-90), Keston Institute’s Frontier (1986-2006), Keston News Service (1974- 2002), Ecumenical News International (1994-2010), Pulse/World Pulse (1965-2011), News Network International (1987?-1996), Russia Intercessory Prayer Network (1997-2003), Christianity in Russia (Yakov Krotov’s religious news translation service, 1993?- 1997?), and a news forwarding service prepared by Ray Prigodich (1997-2000). Compass Direct News (www.worldwatchmonitor.org), to be renamed World Watch Monitor in 2013, has substantially reduced its coverage of religion in Eurasia, as has Religion, State and Society (formerly Keston’s flagship publication, previously entitled Religion in Communist Lands).
Other Troubling Signs
Other indicators of declining Western church and academic focus on Eurasia have included significant drops in Western university enrollments in Russian and East European languages, the failure of U.S. Christian colleges to sustain exchange programs with Russian universities, the 1999 closure of the Institute for East-West Christian Studies (a program of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center), and the 2011 closure of the undergraduate program of Moscow’s faith-based Russian-American Institute (russian-american-institute.org). Also disappointing from an East European perspective is the news that the International Baptist Theological Seminary (www.ibts. edu) will be moving in summer 2014 from Prague to Amsterdam.
Growing nationalist hostility to the West and government visa restrictions clearly have reduced missionary numbers in many post-Soviet states. At the same time, it is impossible to document the level of retrenchment because mission agencies working in Eurasia are more skittish today about sharing personnel information than they were in 1988 when I was preparing the East European Missions Directory (1989). On the bright side, compared to ten years ago, though numbers are down, the savvy and effectiveness of missionaries serving in post-Soviet states is arguably much higher on average: more fluency in native languages, more experience, less flamboyance, and more cultural sensitivity. On the downside, it is worrisome that the increasing restrictions they face, along with the region’s minority faith believers, do not seem to command the attention or provoke the ire worldwide that they would have done a decade ago. Islam, China, AIDS—any number of today’s hot buttons seems to have relegated post-Soviet religious discrimination and persecution to back-page status.
Signs of Hope
However, all is not lost. Numerous sources for credible information on Christianity in Eurasia remain available, and the Internet is greatly expanding access and dissemination options. Various news outlets, academic entities, and mission consortia continue to document, decipher, and disseminate reliable information about Christianity in post-Soviet Eurasia. The East-West Church and Ministry Report, now in its 21st year of publication, was added to EBSCO’s Academic Search database in early 2013. Since 2005 Oxford-based Keston Institute has posted its Russkoe reviu online (www.keston.org.uk/russianreview61.php), with many informative articles by such respected specialists as Sergei Filatov and Roman Lunkin. Especially noteworthy is Keston’s sevenvolume encyclopedia documenting the diversity of religious life in Russia, Sovremennaia religioznaia zhizn’ Rossii. Opyt sistematicheskogo opisaniia (2003-08), which has involved its research team of Xenia Dennen, Sergei Filatov, and Roman Lunkin in prodigious field studies across 11 time zones. In addition, Keston’s substantive, twice-yearly Newsletter deserves wider readership.
Forum 18
While Keston News Service ceased publication in 2002, its staff was picked up by Norwegian-based Forum 18 (www.forum18.org), which provides excellent and courageous coverage of post-Soviet infringements of religious liberties, especially in Central Asia. Forum 18 staffer Geraldine Fagan has just published Believing in Russia—Religious Policy after Communism (Routledge, 2013), arguably the most important Western work on Russian church-state relations and the Russian Orthodox Church since the careful scholarship of Dmitry Pospielovsky (1984), Jane Ellis (1986 and 1996), and Nathaniel Davis (2003). Fortunately, Keston Institute’s exceptional archive of Soviet-era religious samizdat (selfpublished protest literature) is now housed in a safe, long-term home at Baylor University, Waco, Texas (www.baylor.edu/kestoncenter/).
Other News Services
In addition to Forum 18, at least seven no-fee news services focus part or all of their coverage on postSoviet religion:
- English-language BosNewsLife, Budapest (www.bosnewslife.com), headed by Dutch and Ukrainian journalists Stefan and Agnes Bos;
- Mennonite William Yoder’s Moscow-based press releases under the auspices of the Russian Evangelical Alliance, in English and German (reamoskva.org);
- Obzor [Media Review], www.rea-moskva.org, William and Galina Yoder’s Russian-language compilation of East European and world religion reportage;
- Paul Steeves’ Religion in Russia website of Russian-to-English newspaper translations (www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/relnews/);
- Hosken-News, an English-language compilation of articles on religion in Eurasia prepared by former Protestant missionary and Orthodox convert Robert Hosken (www.agape-biblia.org/ hosken-news/index.htm-Russia);
- Swiss-based Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West, in its 40th year of publication (www.g2w.eu); and
- Nachrichtendienst Östliche Kirchen (www. kirchen-in-osteuropa.de), providing materials in German, English, and Russian. For more detail on these German and other sources, see Walter Sawatsky, “Resources for Religion in Eastern Europe,” Religion in Eastern Europe 32 (November 2012), 47.
Other Online Resources
This list hardly exhausts online resources, 108 more of which the East-West Church and Ministry Report has itemized and annotated in various issues over the years: Volume 6, No. 2; Volume 7, Nos. 2 and 4; Volume 8, Nos. 2 and 3; Volume 9, No. 3; Volume 11, No. 4; and Volume 13, No. 4. In addition, the EWC&M Report has periodically published bibliographies and website listings on specialized subjects including short-term missions (Volume 2, No. 2), Islam in Eurasia (V2, N3), post-Soviet women’s studies (V6, N1), cults (V6, N3), medical ministry (V6, N4), Father Alexander Men (V7, N3), Christian publishing (V8, N2), ministry to children at risk (V9, N2), Roma (V10, N3), and missionary ethics (V20, N1).
Acta Missiologiae
A welcome, relatively new entry in the field is Acta Missiologiae (2009-), published annually by the Central and Eastern European Institute for Mission Studies (CIMS), kre.academia.edu, and edited by Scott Klingsmith, Denver Seminary. Focused on articles and reviews dealing with missiological issues, the serial also includes a helpful “Chronicle” of past and upcoming conferences and consultations, theses, obituaries, and new developments in teaching missiology. The compiler of this section is associate editor Anne-Marie Kool, director of CIMS of Károli Gáspár University, Budapest. A Dutch Reformed church worker of long standing in Hungary, Dr. Kool is an accomplished scholar and a preeminent church and missions networker.
The Euro-Asian Accrediting Association and ASEC
‘Besides CIMS, an important institutional source is the Euro-Asian Accrediting Association (E-AAA), www.e-aaa.org, which, along with encouraging high standards in Protestant theological education, hosts conferences and publishes a Russian-English diglot journal, Bogoslovskie razmyshleniia/Theological Reflections. E-AAA also produces affordable CD-ROMs containing valuable collections of Russian Bible translations, biblical studies, Bible commentaries, and Slavic church history texts. With support from Overseas Council International and the Maclellan Foundation, E-AAA’s Bible Pulpit Series provided the first Russian-language texts for use in new Protestant seminaries. Ongoing E-AAA editorial projects include a home-grown, Russian-language Bible commentary and research on the Pentecostal movement in Ukraine. Dr. Bradley Nassif’s pathbreaking Society for the Study of Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism no longer functions. Compensating in some respects are the biennial conferences of the U.S.-based Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity (ASEC), which provide an ongoing forum for students of East European church history and church life.
A Steady Stream of Dissertations
An altogether new source in the post-Cold War era for the study of Christianity in Eurasia is the steady stream of dissertations now being written by missionaries and indigenous believers. The EastWest Church and Ministry Report regularly excerpts portions of these works in its pages, while Acta Missiologiae’s “Chronicle” carries reviews of them. Two outstanding examples are Insur Shamgunov, “Listening to the Voice of the Graduate: An Analysis of Professional Practice and Training for Ministry in Central Asia,” Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 2009; and Alexander Kashirin, “Protestant Minorities in the Soviet Ukraine, 1945-1991,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 2010. Romanian evangelicals in particular have been adept in doctoral studies. Danut Manastireanu gives the authors and titles of 49 dissertations completed by Romanians in the EWC&M Report 15 (Winter 2007), 7-12.
Surveying the Coverage
Beyond dissertations, magazine publication trainer Sharon Mumper has written on East European Christian magazine development, including a listing of 41 serials published in 13 post-Soviet states (EWC&M Report 5 [Summer 1997] and 12 [Winter and Fall 2004]). Librarian Katharina Penner has published an excellent and comprehensive update on the same subject in The Asbury Journal 67 (Fall 2012). Orthodox priest, historian, and journalist Yakov Krotov has done the same for religion coverage in Russia’s secular press, including descriptions of 20 newspapers and 44 journalists (EWC&M Report 10 [Spring and Summer 2002]), while Anna BriskinaMüller critiques Russian Orthodox journalism favorable to and critical of the Moscow Patriarchate, covering both print and online sources (EWC&M Report 20 [Fall 2012]). International Religious Freedom Reports Two additional institutional efforts to protect religious freedom deserve commendation: The U.S. Department of State and a Moscow-based NGO, the Slavic Center for Law and Justice. In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act, which established the post of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and required the publication of an annual report on the state of religious liberty worldwide. As a result, the International Religious Freedom Report has been produced yearly since 1999, with the full text of Reports from 2001 to 2011 available online at www.humanrights.gov. The Reports serve a valuable function in publicizing infringements of freedom of conscience around the globe, including post-Soviet states. Regrettably, the Reports’ perception of fairmindedness is compromised to some degree by their failure to include any accounting of religious liberty issues in the United States.
The Slavic Center for Law and Justice
In Moscow in 1993 Baptist attorney Anatoly Pchelintsev, JD, and Pentecostal attorney Vladimir Ryakhovsky founded the Christian Legal Center, later renamed the Slavic Center for Law and Justice (www.sclj.ru), to provide legal assistance in cases of violations of freedom of conscience. Today its two branches, the Slavic Legal Center and the Institute of Religion and Law, focus on litigation and research and education respectively. The Slavic Legal Center has successfully defended dozens of religious clients before Russian regional courts, Russia’s Constitutional Court, the Russian Supreme Court, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The Institute of Religion and Law, headed by Roman Lunkin, Ph.D. and research fellow of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences, promotes religious tolerance and broad respect for religious rights through public speaking, conferences, research, and publications. Its journal, Religiia i pravo [Religion and the Law] (1997-), provides comprehensive coverage of Russian churchstate and religious liberty issues. The Institute has also published over 20 Russian-language volumes in support of religious liberty, including a fourth edition of a handbook of Russian religious regulations and court practice, Religioznye ob”edineniia, svoboda, sovesti i veroispovedaniia (2012); Zashchita prav religioznykh organizatsii [Protecting the Rights of Religious Organizations] (2010); Praktika Evropeiskogo suda po pravam cheloveka po delam o svobode sovesti [Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights on Freedom of Religion and Belief] (2009); and an account of the pivotal legal defense of the Salvation Army in Russia, Armiia spaseniia v Rossii (2008). It should be underscored that the work of the Slavic Center for Law and Justice is both unique and invaluable.
Encouragement from the Next Generation
Closing on a personal note, I cannot but reflect with pride on former students and former student workers of the East-West Church and Ministry Report who shared twin passions for the gospel and for documenting threats to believers’ rights in post-Soviet states. Countering any discouragement derived from the demise of certain institutions or publications are representatives of the next generation whom I have had the privilege to mentor to some degree. Viktor Hamm was a student in my Russian church history class the first opportunity I had to teach it as a regularly scheduled course. This Russian-German émigré has gone on to become one of Russia’s most effective evangelists. Later, I assisted student worker Gregory Nichols with his M.A. thesis on Russian evangelical leader Vasilii Pashkov. Now teaching at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, he has recently published an outstanding biography of Russian theologian Ivan Kargel under the title The Development of Russian Evangelical Spirituality (Pickwick Publications, 2011). (See EWC&M Report 20 [Fall 2012], 13-16.) I also was able to assist Matthew Miller with his M.A. thesis on the YMCA in Russia, which he later expanded for his dissertation and recently published as The American YMCA and Russian Culture (Lexington Books, 2012). (See EWC&M Report 15 [Summer 2007], 2-4, and [Fall 2007], 9-11.) After many years of ministry in Moscow Dr. Miller is now assistant professor of history at Northwestern College, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Another former student and EWC&M Report student assistant, Sharyl Corrado, also completed an M.A. thesis on Vasilii Pashkov which has been published in Russian (Filosofiia sluzheniia polkovnika V. A. Pashkova [Bibliia dlia vsekh, 2005]). Over several years we collaborated on a number of articles for the EWC&M Report and one for Religion, State and Society. Through her doctoral research Dr. Corrado has become quite an authority on Sakhalin Island and now is assistant professor of history at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California. Finally, former student and EWC&M Report student assistant Oleg Turlac now regularly preaches and teaches in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This promising young Russian Moldovan also edits an online magazine, Khristianskii megapolis (www.christianmegapolis. com), assists victims of human trafficking with the help of his wife Natasha, and recently published Nashe poniatnoe i neponiatnoe khristianstvo [Our Understandable and Complicated Christianity] (TFM, 2012), a popular treatment of the essentials of Christian faith in a post-Soviet context.
Summing up, in taking stock of post-Soviet religion reporting overall, I find more justification for encouragement than alarm. Fortunately, today many capable people, publications, and programs are dedicated to telling the truth about Christian faith and threats to its free exercise in post-Soviet states.
Mark R. Elliott is editor of the East-West Church and Ministry Report.