Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

iew XXVII, 2, 1975. “The one who is active, who provides rights, is always God.... Nowhere in the Bible do we find references to ‘rights’ of a personal kind, rights which the individual can demand of society’ (p. 124). See also related articles by Burgess Carr, David Jenkins, Julie Barriero, Eawund Rogers, and Victoria M. Chandran in the same issue. 60. Available in Russian or English from Khronika Press, New York. 61. KNS, July 15, 1976. 62. Marta Harasowska and Orest Olhovych, eds., The International Sakharov Hearing (Baltimore-Toronto: Smoloskyp Publishers, 1977). 63. For a summary see G2W 11/78, passim: materials from the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Washington, D.C.) including fact sheets and Profiles: The Helsinki Monitors (December 10, 1979). 64. KNS, May 2, 1979. Peter Vins, in America since June 1979, has not com- mitted himself to membership in the Baptist church. 65. John S. Reshetar, Jr., “The Search for Law in Soviet Legality,” Problems of Communism (July-August 1979), pp. 61-64. 66. Mennonite agencies have circulated a helpful pamphlet giving guidelines on how to “Give from the Heart with the Head.” When is the best moment for the church? Right now. The church is powerful when she’s on the cross, when she’s persecuted. When she has a ‘‘guardian,” she gets weak. It's not by accident that I’ve become daring. The time has come for doing. The fields are white for harvest. We need workers. —Dmitrii Dudko 15 Beyond Survival: New Frontiers After 1974 Alexei Bychkov reported in May 1978 that approximately 100,000 persons had been baptized into their union since 1963. That meant an average of 7,150 baptisms per year for a growth rate of 2.4 percent.! Total registered membership for the AUCECB is probably around 350,000, the official claim of 565,000 appears to be overstated.? Since there were also losses through death, these statistics do point to the fact that a new genera- tion of Russian evangelicals has come to birth. As Soviet sociologist Lialina also acknowledged, the crisis of aging, of death by attrition, had been sur- mounted. If Soviet policy toward religion changed after 1974, the major Soviet evangelical union had also changed. CCECB leaders soon after began re- printing their first Samizdat documents in order to remind their young people of the reasons for the split. They did so because they felt that funda- mentally the situation had not changed, that the AUCECB was still con- tinuing its pact with the world. But objectively speaking, much had changed. Few of the leaders after 1974 were personally tainted by the ac- tion of issuing the letter of instruction in 1960. After the 1974 Congress of the AUCECB, there emerged a clear sense of progress. There was a new op- timism, and AUCECB leaders told foreign visitors they had never had it so good. Ernest Payne observed with considerable insight that virtually throughout its entire history, t