Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

education of believers.“ Willi Matthies, who had attended the 1966 congress, produced a small bombshell when he announced at a meeting in May 1967, where seventeen Mennonite leaders met with the AUCECB presidium, that the Council for Religious Affairs had granted permission for their 800-member church in Karaganda to register autonomously as a Mennonite Brethren congrega- tion. Matthies assured the Baptists that their congregation would like to maintain fraternal ties with them but also that they did not wish to lose their Mennonite identity. It was a decade before another autonomous Men- nonite Brethren congregation achieved registration, but the fact that au- tonomy was now a theoretical possibility did mean that the AUCECB had to continue to woo the Mennonites. They did so through periodic meetings, where their relationship was regularly affirmed as positive, and through ap- peals sent out urging the remaining Mennonites to join.“ For a long time establishing contact with the Mennonites in the Omsk and Orenburg regions was a problem because the state officials refused to register these congregations. When it became possible to register and to visit them in the mid-seventies, many local congregations responded with caution. They could find nothing in the Bible about registration, they said, and they had heard that the AUCECB belonged to the World Council of Churches, which others had told them was the Babylonian whore. But some progress has been made. AUCECB President Andrei Klimenko recently claimed there were fifty-three German-speaking congregations in the union, and another recent announcement referred to ten congregations registered in Kazakhstan.‘¢ Nearly as many Mennonites belonged to the Church Mennonites, but union remained a problem for these. According to Soviet sources, in 1957 The Movement Toward Autonomy 283 there was a meeting 'in Solikamsk (Ural region), where leaders tried to form a Mennonite church union.‘ But the state authorities nipped it in the bud. The AUCECB also made an unsuccessful effort to incorporate them. The problem with the Mennonites was that although all those who had become active again after the war were clearly born-again Christians who spoke the same evangelical language as the Baptists, they practiced believer's baptism with a difference. The difference was that, instead of totally immersing a person, they simply poured water on his head as the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century had done. The AUCECB’ discussed the Church Mennonite problem at an enlarged plenum which met in September 1964 and decided to circulate a letter to the churches.‘® In this letter they urged local churches to permit Church Mennonites to preach (but not to lead), to sing in the choir, and to take communion with AUCECB members. It seems more than coinci- dental, that the revised statute of 1963 omitted the statement that their union practiced baptism by immersion. But this attemp