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

become the midwife of the future, because with the future comes the Kingdom of God. o Hegel remarked that, “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation.” Hegel, Enzyklopedie der philosophischen Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959), 436; translation by Slavoj Zizek in his book, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 186. The church should anticipate and embody renewal, awakening and rebirth and should prepare and educate its people to live out their prophetic calling as agents of the Kingdom of God. We must focus on preparatory work for the future, rather than on responding to and struggling with what we have already outlived and agonised over. It is obvious to everyone that the current order has lost legitimacy — the emperor has no clothes. The dismal legacy of the seventy-year Soviet catastrophe and the spirit of servitude, falsehood and disrespect that it nurtured have left their mark on post-Soviet society today. Given the widespread cynicism towards political institutions, the post-Soviet church is called not only to engage in politics, but should itself become a polis, which embodies an alternative vision for political engagement and mediation between society and the state. This alternative vision is well encapsulated by the term, “church without walls”. A reflection on the witness of Christians during and after the Revolution of Dignity yields a thought-provoking answer to the basic question: “What is the church?” The Greek word, éxkAnoia, translated in English Bibles as “church”, contains two primary significations. The first part, “ek”, indicates “out from” or “out to”, and the second part, “kaleo”, signifies “to call.” In a strictly linguistic sense, therefore, the church is that which is “called out from or to” something. As well as this notion of being “called out”, the term, éxkAnoia, in the Bible connotes two meanings: firstly, the “church” is the local community of believers gathered for the sake of worship and witness in a particular place; secondly, it is the mystical community that constitutes the fulfilment of God’s eternal plan of creation, redemption and glorification. It is significant that in the whole Bible there is no single reference to the church as an organisation, institution or building. The church — in the sense of a community that is “called out” — is thus both an empirical and an eschatological reality. The fullest expression of the meaning and nature of the church is to be found in the last book of the Bible, Revelation. The New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 represents a transfigured world and the fusion of the entire human community into a spiritual fellowship without barriers or distinctions of any kind. The church is a radically inclusive eschatological community. Nowhere in the Gospels do we read of Jesus’s e