Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

e 1945 was very deliberate in order to stress a point. By the late thirties, the churches had virtually ceased to exist as institutions. When the evangelical union was born in 1944, it sought to stress its continuity with the past, but it was very much a new creation. The new evangelical church reflected a concern for the basic essentials of the gospel. If an individual was born again, if he accepted the authority of the Bible, then he was accepted as a fellow believer. The more detailed practical theology that developed as the years passed emerged in a Soviet context. Although evangelicals were variously labeled Baptists, Pentecostal, or Mennonite, it is deceptive to immediately assume they are like their counterparts in the West. It is a major assumption of this study that these believers must first be understood in their commonality as Soviet evangelicals and only secondarily according to their denominational labels. Denominational labels (apart from the Baptists) soon came to have the function of a loyalty declaration with little specific denominational content. I have also consciously used the adjective “Soviet” because, with minor ex- ceptions, they consider their home and their future to be in the Soviet Union, which is more inclusive than to be Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, or one of the many other national subgroupings. My use of the word “evangelical” also needs an explanation. I sought an inclusive term that would embrace more than “Baptists” or “Pentecos- tals’ and that lacks the pejorative character which is still attached to the word “sect.”” The sociological designation “sect” can also refer to numerous religious organizations not included in this study. There was also a very con- scious attempt not to restrict the treatment to a history of the All-Union Introduction 17 Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists even though their story looms large in the following pages. Rather, I sought to acknowledge that some evangelicals had joined one of the two competing Evangelical Christian- Baptist unions, while others remained institutionally autonomous though still affirming a common confession of faith. Some attained registration, others have still not attained it, or lost it, or reject registration in principle. These various attitudes are found without distinction among Baptists, Pentecostals, or Mennonites. The Soviet Evangelicals have their counterparts in the American evan- gelical experience. As in America, the term “evangelicals” refers more to a movement than to a denomination. Both had their more immediate birth after World War II. Both were heavily influenced by such antecedents as fundamentalism and dispensationalism and even earlier by the revivalism of Methodism and other free churches. The revivalism of Charles Finney, who so strongly influenced the subsequent history of American revivalism, represented a coalition of two theological traditions: “American Puritanism, which