Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

truggled in vain to liberate itself from Holy Rus. Sir John Lawrence, who knows the Soviet Union intimately, affirmed ‘ unequivocally that “the number of believing Christians is now far higher than the number of believing Marxists, and many secret Christians are found in the ranks of the Communist Party.”? Weekly church attendance is estimated to be at least four to five times higher than in Great Britain—that is, at least 20 percent of the Soviet population remains actively Christian. That Old Russia lived in a perpetual aura of holy incense has been ac- knowledged by numerous writers. “To be Russian is to be Orthodox” is an oft-repeated way of acknowledging the power of Christian faith on Russian culture and society. But religious dissent is also a part of the long tradition of Holy Rus. The evangelical movement described in this book had its direct beginnings in the nineteenth century through foreign Pietist in- fluences but the ground had been “prepared for them by the deep spiri- tuality of the Russian Orthodox God-seekers.’’ Were the evangelical move- ment a mere foreign importation, it would have been eliminated as easily as the churches of the foreign colonists were. Today the evangelicals are “the most rapidly growing section of Russian Christianity, 4 although they will probably continue to remain a minority church. This growth is due to at least two factors. Soviet evangelicals continue to be part of an international evangelical movement which has shown itself remarkably adaptable to fitting the local context while maintaining uni- formity on. essential issues of faith and witness, Even in the Soviet Union the evangelicals are a multinational movement, a quality that Orthodoxy lacks. In this multinational aspect, the evangelicals are similar to the Com- munist Party. Perhaps even more significant, in the eyes of one seasoned scholar, is the fact that the type of people who are attracted to Soviet evan- gelical churches are the sort of people “who would be attracted to the Com- munist Party itself.’ This factor goes far in explaining why “the hostility of the regime towards the Baptists is out of all proportion to a movement Introduction 15 whose adherents, according to official figures, number one-quarter of one percent of the total population.’”¢ This book is both a history and a descriptive analysis. After summariz- ing the early history in the first chapter, I have tried to communicate the deeply emotional character of the renewal movements through a composite of individual stories. Because church growth patterns were established then, it seemed fitting to describe present methods of evangelism in the second chapter. In 1944 a unique evangelical church union was formed, thanks to state assistance. Since unity, or rather the struggle for it, runs like a golden thread through the entire story, I have analyzed the little known 1944 unity congress in some detail. Another little know