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

ey are genuinely moved by Christ or not. This type of discourse endeavours to compel individuals to bow their knee regardless of their motives or the nature of their desire. Like a lover of nuts who is offered thousands of shells with no centre, so we offer God thousands of “converts” with no hearts.> These words call to mind the disturbing words of Jesus, who said: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are” * Ellul, False Presence of the Kingdom (New York: Seabury, 1972), 103. * Pete Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (SPCK: London, 2006), 36. (Matthew 23:15). According to the late American Baptist theologian, James McClendon Jr., this focus on making converts constitutes a demonic perversion of the true task of mission. “The perversion associated with evangelism”, notes McClendon, “is potentially the more demonic . . . just to the degree that in a crass way it succeeds. Members are added; the institution grows; but in this phony evangelism, the gospel is choked out by that growth.” This is what happens when the highest goal of mission becomes the making of converts, which results in “an infinite regress of mere recruitment” that takes the place of any “real (or realistic) understanding of the point of evangelism.”*° In conclusion, it can be observed that the Baptist movement in post-Soviet Eurasia is experiencing a time of transition. The contours of the future are still hazy; we look as through a glass darkly. Nevertheless, we can identify four stages of transition that the post-Soviet church is currently passing through. First, post-Soviet Christianity is experiencing a transition from a confessional understanding of the “mission of the Church” to a “missiology of the Kingdom.” Walter Sawatsky called this a turning away from “church—centered missiology” to “God-centered missiology” when “mission is no longer limited to the established Church, rather it signifies shalom in the Kingdom.”*’ There is a gradual recognition that mission is not to be equated with evangelistic activities or outreach programs, but is much more about the whole of life. Mission is not about inviting people to religious buildings to attend religious events organised by the church. Mission is much more a matter of engaging with the world and learning to listen to God’s heartbeat and discerning his purposes for particular communities in order encourage “more reflective and intelligent participation in those 9958 purposes.” The gospel calls us to be a missional people. As one Anglican document put it: it is not so much that the Church has a mission, but that the God of mission has a church.” Mission has a theocentric, rather than an ecclesiocentric, object and point of departure. If mission, according the missio Dei paradigm developed by Barth® and Bosch*! an