Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

would no longer be services, 14 Those few thousand individuals who regularly received copies of Brat- skii Vestnik (and this certainly included the senior presbyters) were less shocked. Already in 1948 Jacob Zhidkov no number of baptisms had decline proving and teaching neophytes sO guarantee that excommunications would b year he again complained about the rush to baptism and urged that the candidate should be a Christian for at | east one year. In 1949 he discouraged allowing un- converted people into the choir because this lowered the spiritual standard. In 1955 the AUCECB again expressed concern about rushing to baptize new believers. Early in 1959 Sergei P. Fadiukhin in a major article, “On the Church,” declared that the most important issue where the church could work for good was to oppose the new weapons of massive destruction. Then he went on to declare that at the beginning of the third century in the his- tory of Christianity when persecution had ceased, many unreliable types joined the rush to church membership. A church council had therefore de- cided that baptismal candidates must undergo a probati one to three years, 5 At the 1963 congress V ice-President N., getic attempt to rewrite recent history 1960 had been introduced as a draft an present at ns were on period of from A. Levindanto made an apolo- by asserting that the new statute of d that the AUCECB had repeatedly 3 4g : : i 178 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il requested constituency responses and suggestions. But the letter of instruc- tion had made it clear that the new statute must be enforced rigidly. Al- ready in 1948 when the first statute was issued unilaterally by the All-Union Council, President Zhidkov admitted that “we cannot force anyone to ac- cept and observe the statutes of the union” and went on to eschew all coercion. But in the same breath he added that “those believers who do not wish to subordinate themselves to the statute, naturally cannot have a place- among the members of the congregations of the Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists whose statutes they reject.” That non-coercive coercion was at least as strong in 1960. Some local church members never learned of the statute because their presbyter or even senior presbyter gave it a pocket veto. In another con- gregation the entire issue was discussed at a members’ meeting where they decided as a local church to resist. Often this was successful. Other con- gregations decided to keep their children home from church for a few months and to devote their preaching to the Book of Job until the storm passed and they could gradually resume their usual activities. But in other localities the presbyter or deacon stood in the doorway and prevented children from entering. In Novosibirsk, for example, active evangelists were excommunicated from the church. In many other localities