Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

and Human Enmity. This was an opportunity to share stories of disrespect, missionary proselytism and outright discrimination, and to assure the others that the Gospel they taught in no way encouraged enmity, especially among Christians. There were a few short gatherings over the next decade, usually when a repre- sentative from Geneva came to call, but no new council of churches for negotiating relations and problems seemed possible. After rather violent clashes over property between Orthodox and Uniates in Ukraine, and the refusal of the Russian Patriarch to meet with Pope John Paul II following the Catholic creation of episcopal regions in the former Soviet Union, one observer spoke of an “ecumenical meltdown’.* Not only are relations between Catholics and Orthodox quite precarious still, but evangelical *! Economic stringencies also help to explain the ending of regular church delegations trav- elling to fellow East European Baptist unions, and the AUCECB no longer was able to assist with travel funds for those unions. * Joseph Loya, “Interchurch Relations in Post-Perestroika Eastern Europe: A Short History of an Ecumenical Meltdown’, Religion in Eastern Europe, vol. 14, no. 1 (February 1994), pp. 1-17. 207 church relations with the Orthodox scarcely exist in a formal sense, and the role of Slavic evangelicals in the wider evangelical world is rather minimal. A recent book on the evangelical movement in mission in the twentieth century contains no article on the Slavic evangelicals, nor do the authors of background articles so much as mention their existence.* This may well be due in part to the minimal presence of Slavic evangelicals at the usual international gatherings of evangelicals. Since Slavic evangelicals produced one of the longer lists of martyrs for the faith, their modest or nearly absent witness in such circles is doubly tragic. Conclusion: the Historians’ Task Rather than emphasising historical facts, this paper has instead drawn atten- tion to some apparent patterns in the history of evangelicalism in the Soviet Union and its successor states. This sketch of the ways in which evangelical unions (primarily ECB unions) repositioned themselves between 1980 and the present seeks to tell an important story. Tracking the origins and function of church leadership enables the historian to determine where to find the resources for grasping a fuller story. We are beginning to see new scholarship that cites archival data, a rather different approach than what Michael Bourdeaux and I did in the Soviet period, relying on samizdat, official publications and private conversations to construct a picture of church life from 1945 to 1980. But archival sources in union offices are limited. Much was not saved, and present resources are inadequately stored and inventoried. Sorting out what is preserved in state archives has begun, the survey of state archives in each oblast of Ukraine headed by