Church Without Walls: Post-Soviet Baptists after the Ukrainian Revolution, 2013-14, Joshua T. Searle, 2016

nd the church and the Kingdom of God, community and society, mission and education, and religion and culture. Too often, post-Soviet Baptists have abdicated their social responsibility. Some churches have reduced the task of mission to exhorting people to join their church. Ukrainian Pastor, Sergey Golovin, remarks that, instead of fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission to “go and make disciples of all nations,” post-Soviet Baptists have tended to say, “go and lure them into church buildings.” As a result, mission serves only the church institution. Society remains without a transformative influence as churches relinquish their vocation to be salt and light. The light shines only upon the faithful and the salt is distributed only to members of the church. But this is not what Christ meant when he said: You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:13-16). The radical French theologian, Jacques Ellul, maintained that, . we must not wait for people to come to church, or to meetings organised by Christians. To evangelise means to go into groups and meetings of people who are not Christians. To evangelise is to declare a gospel which enters the concrete interests, the anxieties and hopes of these people. It is not a good news which is abstract and spiritual.** Baptists need to reject exclusivity and narrow pietism that over-emphasises individual salvation. Instead, there needs to be a vision of holistic mission, in which both the individual and society, the spiritual and the social, the moral and the political become complementary parts of the overall Christian vision of biblically-informed action on behalf of the overriding biblical imperative of social justice. As in the West, the well-intentioned emphasis of evangelicals on personal salvation and gaining individual converts has been misguided, especially when these emphases have been carried away with narrowly—defined personal issues at the expense of social responsibility. Moreover, any kind of “mission”, which is aimed solely at eliciting individual repentance through dire warnings about hell and eternal damnation, raises serious concerns about the motivations of the “convert.” One young theologian has helpfully noted that, if someone is convinced that there is a place where they will be tormented after death, and that the only way to avoid this terror is by affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord, then they will no doubt make that affirmation, regardless of whether th