This is a really interesting issue of the East-West Church and Ministry Report [24 (Summer 2016)]. Thank you for your ongoing efforts to disseminate information. I find the Report to be an incredible resource!
I have been working off-and-on in Georgia for the past several years, but more importantly, two of our team members (Ukrainians) have worked to develop music ministries among evangelical churches in Georgia, including Baptists (non-Songulashvili), Pentecostals, and others. We also worked closely with the Franklin Graham Festival of Hope, which took place in Tbilisi in June 2014. The churches with whom we have worked all considered Malkhaz Songulashvili and his union to be an apostate church.
Further, the Georgian Orthodox Church, with whom Malkhaz has communion, actively persecutes and works against evangelical churches. In Tbilisi, this has included collaboration with behind-the-scenes forces which set fire to the building where the Festival of Hope was to take place. In addition, as one of the music directors for the Festival of Hope, I learned that several of our Georgian Orthodox musicians were threatened with excommunication (for their families as well), if any of them participated in the orchestra for the event. Though we had the official blessing and permission of the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church to hold the event, and though Malkhaz’s group was also aware of the harassment, we encountered constant resistance from Georgian Orthodox believers and from some of Malkhaz’s followers. In addition, signs were posted around the event labeling Franklin and his team as members of a cult and as apostates. Malkhaz did nothing to alter this view.
From my point of view Stamoolis’s review [of the Songulashvili volume in the summer 2016 issue] is accurate, and I think he has raised the questions that still exist today in Georgia about Songulashvili. Namely, few of the Christians with whom I work see any call to repentance or a new way of living in the Evangelical Christian-Baptist churches led by Songulashvili. My initial response to Malkhaz was that he was looking to be culturally relevant, but I do not see this in practice. What I do see is a Georgian Orthodox Church movement in all but name, where there is worship (not veneration) of icons and a strong move away from a personal faith, where the believer has direct access to God without the mediation of a priest.
Steven Benham, President, Music in World Cultures, Lawrence, Pennsylvania