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

stablishing a religious institution. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Far from founding a religious institution based on order and hierarchy, he built a community in which the values of compassion and justice were lived out in the context of a new order of existence made possible by the Kingdom of God. In fact, Jesus even explicitly discouraged the kind of * Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 46-7. hierarchical order and power relations that governed the “kings of the Gentiles” — the secular powers that regulate the systems of the world (Luke 22:24—26). The problem in many post-Soviet churches (as in the West) is that missionaries and church planters have tried to build the Kingdom of God through programmes and evangelisation outreach strategies, which have had little relationship value. God — as Father, Son and Holy Spirit — has ordained community as his chosen means to build his Kingdom on earth. The early churches were not “churches” in the modern sense at all; the earliest Christians had no designated buildings of worship, but would congregate in each others’ houses, offer hospitality, share each others’ stories and read and reflect together on the meaning of Scripture. Church without walls is a community that welcomes people into fellowship without first insisting that they conform to accepted patterns of “Christian behaviour” or that they subscribe to certain creeds that uphold “sound doctrine.” In the same way that the disciples journeyed with Jesus and gradually came to a realisation of their faith, so should the church without walls welcome people into fellowship and allow them to journey with us as they (and we) become more integrated into the Way of Jesus. Jesus’s “method” of evangelism is expressed perfectly in the simple invitation, as recorded in John’s gospel, to “come and see” (John 1:45—51). If this is the case, critical questions need to be asked about why so many evangelicals make it a pre-condition of Christian fellowship that one must be “born again”. The missional task of the church is to witness to the compassion of Christ for the benefit of the watching world. Church without walls is “a place in which the reign of God begins to be made manifest here and now.” Churches that thrive in post-Soviet Eurasia will be those communities of believers covenanted together in the love of Christ and exhibiting a radical witness guided by faithfulness to Christ, obedience to Scripture and an openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Above all, church without walls is a missional movement that builds communities of grace. Such communities are built not by programmes and strategies, but by compassion, which is both a Christian virtue and a missional imperative.” Compassion is the defining character of the Kingdom of God, which is concerned with relationships. Lesslie Newbigin rightly remarks that, “