Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

. 4 (Winter 1990), p. 319; quoted in Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 60. '4 Davis, A Long Walk to Church, pp. 64-65. 'S Interestingly, Bychkov discussed charitable activity not so much as a recovered part of Christian identity, but rather as a way to promote unity among evangelicals inside and out- side of the AUCECB, long a matter of contention. According to Bychkov, “Social service - care of the sick, homes for the elderly, shelters - can become a good platform for coopera- tion.” “Soobshchenie o plenume VSEKhB’, Bratskii vestnik, no. 3 (1988), p. 70. 214 Church in Moscow regularly sent volunteers to assist staff in the geriatric wards of Moscow's Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital No. 1.'° On 22-23 January 1989, the Baptist church in Syktyvkar (Komi ASSR) held concerts of classical and contemporary Christian music to benefit victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake.”” Also in 1989, Baptists in Zaporizhzhia provided materials and labour to repair and redecorate the dom maliutki (home for children up to the age of three) in their city. At a celebration held in August commemorating the two-hundred-year anniversary of Mennonite settle- ment in that area, an offering of 7,260 roubles was collected to benefit the home.'* In the process of seeking opportunities for service, positive new relation- ships were formed with secular structures. At an evening worship service on 24 September 1988 dedicated to the theme of mercy, V.N. Kozyrev, head doctor of the Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital in Moscow, stated, “If someone had told me a few years ago that this kind of symbiosis between a church and a hospital was possible, I wouldn't have believed it.... Out of the cobwebs of oblivion, words full of human warmth have surfaced: love, mercy, kindness - and we have begun to measure our lives accordingly.” Many of the first encounters between evangelicals and secular social service organisations were enthusiastic. However, pastor Mikhail Zhidkov, co-ordinator of the Moscow Baptist volunteers, told me in 1989, “They put us in the geriatric ward because they figured we couldn't do much damage there’, a remark that suggests it was not always easy for evangelicals to gain the trust of the leaders of the institutions they wished to serve. Nor did the evangelicals particularly trust the leaders of these institutions. Also in 1989, Iakov Dukhonchenko, Senior Presbyter of the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists of Ukraine, warned me not to get involved directly with secular organisations. “If you're going to send humanitarian aid, do it through us’, he said. By 1991, of course, Christian ministries of all descriptions proliferated across what was soon to be the former Soviet Union. Western mission : agencies raced into the newly independent countries, and local organisa- | tions split and multiplied to accommodate