Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

ganized separately within the Russian church structure that the first references to Mennonites in the Soviet Union began. Allert’s statement in 1963 was not only a surprise to the other delegates, who began asking who these Mennonites were, but it was also a surprise to most of the Mennonites he claimed to represent. During the next three years a few regional dis- cussions were held, and at the subsequent congress in 1966, with seventeen Mennonites present, a formal application with conditions was submitted, The new additional denomination was also acknowledged in the new statute. 38 : In the new expanded All-Union council that was elected, Jacob Fast, leader of the German congregation in Novosibirsk, was elected a council member, and Victor Kriger was elected a candidate member. Kriger, who had grown up in Kirgizia, had done his military service in Moscow, married a Russian, and remained in the capital. In 1964 he became a full-time worker for the union and began traveling about to establish ties with the Mennonites.” Kriger became a full council member in 1969 but did not stand for reelection in 1974 and also discontinued much of his traveling. Initially the AUCECB claimed that 16,000 Mennonites had joined; by 1968 Kriger claimed there were 18,500; and, more recently, 30,000 have been claimed for the AUCECB. This growing strength was also reflected structurally, so that in 1974 Fast was elected to the ten-member presidium. Both he and the other Mennonite representatives were also highly popular with the delegates in general. Fast.and his associate, Kviring, completed the Bible correspondence course, while Victor Kriger was able to study two years at the Baptist seminary in Hamburg. In 1977 Traugott Kviring be- came the first German appointed as a senior presbyter—responsible for Central Asia.49 Similar to the Pentecostal pattern in 1945, the formal voting procedure for joining was less significant than attempting to get the local Mennonite 282 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II Brethren to support the union post facto. Mennonite Brethren joined be- cause they no longer had an awareness of theological difference with the Baptists, and both sides acknowledged “‘a living relationship with Christ and the teachings of Christ on the rebirth as the most important of biblical teachings,’4! The old distinctives of pacifism and refusal to swear the oath had long ago been lost, and local congregations now agreed not to practice footwashing at communion, the same stipulation made for the Pentecostals earlier. What the Mennonites gained were cultural concessions—the possi- bility to hold services in the German language!” An official statement published after a meeting between Mennonite representatives and the presidium in March 1976 declared that the Mennonite entry into the ECB union gave them greater opportunities for preaching the gospel, for proper church order and spiritual