New research published today points to the ongoing cost to Europe’s ordinary citizens of the social and political upheavals across the continent. The Eurostat report also goes on to report the fact that in 2010, the number of under 18 year olds facing these risks was as high as 27% across the European Union.
These are the crises that are being played out in congregations and churches across Europe. Europe’s Christian population is not immune from the broader social changes affecting Europe generally.
How are churches responding? Some will be engaged with community development programmes. Some will be highlighting the moral and spiritual crisis that underlies the current economic and social crisis. Some will see this as an opportunity to present a gospel of hope in the face of new challenges. Some will be offering care and compassion in the name of Christ. How we respond to ‘the least of these’, including children and adolescents under 18, remains a key indicator of authentic Christian discipleship.
Countries with the highest percentages of its citizens at risk were Bulgaria (42%), Romania (41%), Latvia (38%), Lithuania (33%) and Hungary (30%).
Eurostat reports that ‘across the EU 8% of the population were severely materially deprived, meaning that they had living conditions constrained by a lack of resources such as not being able to afford to pay their bills, keep their home adequately warm, or take a one week holiday away from home. The share of those severely materially deprived varied
significantly among Member States, ranging from 1% in Luxembourg and Sweden to 35% in Bulgaria and 31% in Romania.’

At the recent meeting of the World Evangelical Alliance’s Mission Commission I presented a 25 minutes overview of several of the main features of Europe that we have been researching and which impact the mission of the Churches. One of those concerns work on the generational impact of the 20-29 year olds on trends relating to secularisation.

Six questions from the European Values Study (1980 and repeated in 1989, 1999 and 2008, the latter including 47 countries) form the basis for our ‘Nova Index of European Secularity’:

1. Do you believe in God?
2. How important is religion in your life?
3. Are you religious, non-religious or atheist?
4. How often do you attend religious services?
5. How much confidence do you have in the church?
6. 6. How often do you pray?

From these measures we believe that the 2008 data points to a ‘developing post-Christendom identity’, characteristic of people who have previously been, or who remain, ‘Christian’ but who presently have no institutional affiliation (or a very diluted form of it). The data represents a shift from ‘Christendom’ religiosity to ‘post-Christendom’ spirituality, rather than from ‘Christendom’ non-religiosity towards ‘post-Christendom’ spirituality. The newly ‘spiritual’ are not on a journey towards faith but instead are on a journey away from church affiliation. Whether this data represents a deepening of secularity or a mutation of religiosity deserves closer and more rigorous attention and debate.

The EVS data indicates a markedly irreligious generation of 50-69 year olds, best characterised as ‘ideologically hostile’ to religiosity. This generation is now beginning to retire from influential roles in the media, politics, education, and the arts. The havoc that these ‘lost generations’ have wreaked – in constructing a narrative of hard secularism – may finally be waning.

Our initial analysis supports the findings of other social scientists who suggest that the current generation of 20-29 year olds is reportedly less hostile to religion and religiosity but that this may be little more than a generation best characterised as ‘benignly indifferent’ to religiosity. This more ‘open generation’ may prove to be more amenable to creating the space necessary for a discussion of religion and religiosity within the media, politics, education, and the arts.

Where post-ideological commitments like this are held relatively lightly there may yet be scope for a considered exploration of the public value of religious belief and practice.

This edited excerpt from Branko’s blog is fascinating. Branko was visiting the town of Stara Tura, in the White Carpathian Mountains on the Czech-Slovak border. When he drove into the town’s main square he noticed a TV crew filming the uncovering of a memorial statue.  When it was uncovered, the memorial he recognised that the statue commemorated a Slovak Professor, Jozef Rohaček, and his work.

Branko writes;

“Professor Rohaček (1877-1962) was born in Stara Tura, but lived and worked in Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and what is now Serbia, in Vojvodina. As a Lutheran missionary, later pastor and teacher, he spent five years in Kisač and surroundings, teaching Slovaks to write and read in their mother tongue, from 1906-1911. Additionally, while in Kisač, he published the first ever Slovak translation of the Gospel of Mark in 1910. The whole Bible was published in 1934, and was translated from the original languages. The church, however, did not endorse his work… but when the Bible was printed eventually, the first 5,000 copies were sold in less than four months. Such was a hunger for the Word of the Lord in the Slovak language.

Here is what Stefan Šebo wrote about Jozef Rohaček in his 2010 book Jozef Rohaček, zivot a dielo:

“He was working on socio-theological concepts as a solution to the social situation of the Slovak nation… he had worked on a translation all of his life while working as a teacher, pastor, assistant, friend and brother. Along with his family he founded the orphanages, homes for the elderly, hospitals, schools, chapels and churches… He challenged the theology of the time because he recognsed that theology was soaked with evolutionary ideas and was progressing in a questionable direction… Jozef Rohaček himself was a representative of the social dimension of the biblical testimony…”

Branko’s Blog

http://writtingsofbranko.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/reformation-day-in-slovakia-blog/

The website of the European Baptist Federation http://www.ebf.org carried the following story  on Tuesday 15 November. Authored by Klaus Rösler

In Turkey, more and more Muslims are becoming Christians because they have dreamed about Jesus Christ. Recently, the pastor of the evangelical Agape Church in Samsun, on the Black Sea, Orhan Picaklar, reported such a case.
A young woman became a Christian after Jesus Christ appeared to her in a dream. But that’s not all: after she had been attending worship services, she brought her mother and her younger sister along with her in the mid-October. This is quite extraordinary, since in general, the families of converts are extremely critical of them. In a prayer letter, Picaklar wrote that after the worship service, the mother even promised to tell her husband that his daughter was now a Christian “at the right time”, so that he would not have a negative reaction.
Again and again, there are unexpected meetings with interested people. For example, at the market, Picaklar offers free Bibles and invites those interested to come and see his church. Recently, a woman came by. She told him that she had taken eight Bibles from the market and had given them to women in her neighborhood. She was delighted to have a Christian church in her neighborhood, although she herself was not a Christian. She urged Picaklar to make sure that the church remained in its current place, although there are no plans to move.
The church was planted in 2003. A short while ago, there was a baptism ceremony where four people were baptized. About 50 attend worship services each Sunday. The Agape Church is the only  evangelical church in the Samsun Region, which has a population of 1.2 million. It is in close contact with the European Baptist Federation (EBF). Picaklar is a former Muslim who became a Christian through reading the Gospel of John.

On the 5th July 2011 the Georgian Parliament passed into law new legislation that ensures the religious freedoms of ‘religious groups recognized as religious organizations in member States of the Council of Europe or having close historic ties with Georgia.’

Initial drafts limited the freedoms to just five groups, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Evangelical Baptist church of Georgia, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jewish and Muslim communities of Georgia, in addition to the special status still accorded the Orthodox Church of Georgia. The Baptist Archbishop in Georgia, Malkhaz Songulashvili, reports that following the release of the first draft, Bishop Rusudan Gotziridze (Baptist), lobbied the parliament and requested that the legislation should be extended to all religious groups in Georgia. The draft was subsequently amended to meet this request. A press release from the Embassy of Georgia in London specifically refers to Evangelicals being granted the same freedoms.

According to the Embassy’s press release, lawmaker, Nugzar Tsiklauri, said ‘Georgia is a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country and every citizen of this country, regardless of what religion he belongs to, must have equal rights.’

Previously it has only been possible for the majority of religious organisations to register as a non-profit association. The new legislation now allows for registration as a religious association although the lawmakers have been careful to allow religious organisations to decide whether they want to continue as a non-profit association or register as a religious association. The legislation is designed to ensure maximum flexibility for such organisations.

A copy of the press release can be downloaded here.

Regina Claas

During the next five years, German Baptist Churches hope to be inspired by the example of the Baptist Union of Malawi. A partnership agreement was signed during the recent  Annual conference in Kassel. The German General-Secretary Regina Claas (from Elstal, Berlin) assured delegates that there were many things that the Baptists of Germany could learn from their Malawian sisters and brothers. One matter would be on how best to plant a church. Malawians are planting new churches on nearly a daily basis. The Baptist Union of Malawi has
200.000 members in 1.500 congregations.

The church’s General-Secretary, Vincent Chirwa (Blantyre), called on German Baptists to testify of Christ in everyday life and not feel hampered by the general opinion that one should not speak publically about matters of personal faith.

Claas expressed her longing for a new mission awakening. All members are called on to utilise their talents and expertise ‘in order to win others for Christ’. She based her concern on the fact that membership in Germany’s largest non-state church has been shrinking slowly for years. What is to be done? According to the Federation’s President, Hartmut Riemenschneider, congregations need to open their hearts to new people. The claim that they were already doing so is in many instances only a hollow phrase, for congregations are often not concerned about the desires of their visitors.

(Adapted from the EBF news source at http://www.ebf.org, original text by Klaus Roesler)

The Baptist Union currently has a church planting goal of seeing one Baptist congregation planted in every one of Croatia’s 21 counties. The European Baptist Federation’s Indigenous Mission Project reports on the work of a church planter in Novi Marof, about 100km from the capital, Zagreb. Twenty people are meeting regularly there for prayer and worship.

The IMP co-ordinator, Daniel Trusiewicz, writes:

‘The meetings take place in a rented hall and are led by indigenous church planter Jonatan. The group has been meeting there for about one year and a good deal of growth has been notified since. There are counseling sessions twice a week in the same hall where the group meets for a Bible study on Friday night. People can come to talk or find advice about some spiritual or practical issues.

Jonatan says: ‘There are only two reasons that prompt me to plant a church in Novi Marof: the Great Commission and God’s love towards lost people who need to be saved. The target group is especially the young people burdened with various problems (addictions, unemployment, depression etc). In order to accomplish this goal we have started the Christian counseling. This ministry serves all who need advice and encouragement, and who seek the true meaning of life.’ Jonatan is married to Daniela and they have two small children.

The church plant in Novi Marof is supported by the church in Varazdin, some 15km away. The church in Varazdin was itself planted only 15 years ago and now has a building seating 50 people with an apartment for the pastor. Varazdin enjoys an educated congregation that is mission-minded, hence their enthusiastic support for the church plant at Novi Marof plus another at Ivanec. There are 15000 inhabitants in the town of Novi Marof and the new group is the sole Evangelical fellowship there. In the region of Varazdin – Novi Marof there are about 200,000 people but only three Evangelical churches.’

Research by the Bible Society shows that 56% of Danes turn to Google when they want to find something out about religion. This is an argument for Christian websites to pay more attention to optimising the search terms they use to ‘tag’ their pages. However, the Bible Society decided that they should be doing something proactive about the fact that most Danes are unable to decode religious language. According to interchurch.dk news, ‘The assumption by the editorial committee is that modern Danes do not understand the religious codes behind such words as ‘mercy’ and ‘repentance’, and the new version helps them into the religious world with recognizable and meaningful words.’

A sinful person is now somebody ‘who does not live as God wants’ and ‘confession of sin’ becomes ‘telling somebody about everything you have done wrong.’

The New Agreement is available on Facebook and Twitter and features over 1,500 revisions made following internet research.

Very likely the first Russian-language book dealing with Baptist life in the once-German Soviet enclave of Kaliningrad (German East Prussia) after 1945 appeared recently. Its author is Anatoly Krikun, the current Baptist Bishop (called “Starshy Presbyter”) of Kaliningrad/Königsberg. Publisher is the “Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists”’ “Moscow Theological Seminary”. The book is part of the Bishop’s work on a Master’s degree.

Intended to be a model zone for the socialist experiment, the newly-annexed region of Kaliningrad was to be denied any visible church life. Yet Krikun makes clear that despite persecution, church life on this once German turf never did disappear. The initial two-thirds of the book describes the German period up until 1945 and offers nothing new of substance to the German-language reader. But the description of the Soviet period from a Russian Baptist perspective indeed does break new ground. But the booklet’s title is confusing: “History of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists in East Prussia and Kaliningrad Region” (Istoria evangeliskikh khristian-baptistow w Wostotschnoi Prussi i Kaliningradskoi oblasti). German East Prussia never did sport a Russian Evangelical Christian-Baptist congregation.

In no way does the author gloss over the existential hardships and vandalism of some Soviet citizens during the initial years. Hunger occurred not only in the Russian “motherland” immediately after the War. Krikun notes that 51% of the settlers who arrived during the period from 1948 to 1953 chose not to stay. Being that only 7.000 new settlers had arrived by November 1945 and more than 100.000 Germans remained, church life was very much in hands of Germans until their final deportion. Without regard for anyone’s denominational loyalties, Germans and Soviet citizens gathered at first under the spiritual leadership of Germans to worship. German clerics were highly-respected: “Generally speaking, relations between the two groups were positive.” (p. 81). The lack of any Orthodox church structures made it particularly easy for Baptists to evangelise on their own terms. In Kaliningrad, a 60-member Baptist congregation headed by the German pastor Heinrich Fenner was granted state registration in 1947. Yet that congregation did not survive the deportation of the final Germans.

Baptist settlers first appear in the Soviet archives from 1947. The departure of the final Germans a year later nearly rang down the curtain on church life. That indeed appeared to occur among the Lutherans. Krikun does not mention that anyone wanting to attend a Lutheran service in the four decades after 1948 needed to travel to Lithuania. The Lutheran church in Silute (Heydekrug) in the Memel border region never was shut down by the Soviet authorities.

The arrival of ever-new settlers from Western Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus repeatedly restocked the meagre Baptist ranks. In March 1947, the double-amputated preacher M. P. Reitusky arrived from Zaporozhe in Ukaine. Until 1954, he served as the leading Baptist clergyman for the entire region. In 1950, his Kaliningrad congregation had 40 members; 30 more attended one in Chernyakhovsk (Insterburg). Other house fellowships were located in Gusev (Gumbinnen) and Sovietsk (Tilsit). One-hundred-thirty of the faithful attended a feast in 1961; Krikun reports on 70 “activists” at that time.

Beginning in 1964, ethnic German families from Kyrgyzstan with abundant numbers of children began to arrive. The arrival of these Germans furnished the Baptist movement with its first heyday lasting from 1976 until about 1989. Pavel Meissner already arrived from Kyrgyzstan in 1963; he headed the Baptist church of the region from 1965 until his emigration to Germany in 1976. In the years from 1966 until 1976, the Kaliningrad congegation usually gathered for worship at his house in the village of Pervomaiskaya near the former Bladiau far to the south of Kaliningrad. Thirty-percent of the region’s Baptists were of German ethnicity in the mid-70s – a fact which heightened the suspicions of state authorities. Krikun reports that government pressures forced Meisser to emigrate – his departure was followed by a wave of Germany-bound emigration. Today, only a tiny handful of ethnic Germans remain. In 1976, just before that initial exodus, the Kaliningrad congregation had 220 members.

A turbulant chuch life

Baptist church life did not remain free of divisions and strife. Pentecostals began to arrive from Western Belarus in 1951. After worshiping together for a year, Pentecostals decided to go their own way – taking a number of Baptist families with them. The primary issue of content was speaking in tongues.

Krikun reports that massive state pressure around 1959 – also in the public media – caused major discord among Baptists. Personal misconduct forced Pastors Reiutski and A.A. Mogila to terminate their leadership. Divergent opinions on how best to react to the government – and its KGB infiltrators – nearly finished off the Baptist movement. Pastoral authority was undermined: “Some of the less-stalwart left the church never to return.” (p. 101)

Yet the church was able to regain its footing and decided to ordain two additional men in 1965. New members were in need of additional care. Yet Moscow’s All-Union Council of Baptists refused to ordain, citing the fact that the Kaliningrad congregation remained unregistered. Church leadership therefore approached a non-registered congregation of the “Initiativniki” in Brest/Belarus. During the visit of a small delegation from Brest in Kaliningrad, the guests made clear they would only be of assistance if the Kaliningrad group halted all cooperation with the USSR’s registered churches. The hosts decided not to accept the offer; unauthorized ordinations without outside sanction followed. One other result of these contacts was the formation of a group of “Initiativniki” in Kaliningrad. The Master’s thesis of the Russian-German Alex Breitkreuz, which appeared in 2006, states that this unregistered group had a respectable membership of 300 in 2004.

Government repression appeared in waves. Krikun lists 1954, 1958, 1964, 1971, 1981 and 1984 as the years in which state pressure was the strongest. (p. 108)

Since the region’s congregations were unregistered and consequently illegal, it was impossible for them to open chapels of worship. All attempts after 1948 to achieve legality were repulsed. Yet a dramatic breakthrough occurred in May 1967: The Baptists were legally registered as the region’s first religious group. That can be seen on the webpage of Kaliningrad’s Baptist church („mir-kld.ru“). Yet Krikun writes in his book that Baptists were only “one of the first religious organisations” registered within the region. (p. 106) Significant in any case is the fact that this registration occurred long before registration of the Orthodox, which did not occur until April 1985. The Catholics and Lutherans were registered there in 1991.

Closely tied to registration issues was the matter of real estate. Only on the third try was it possible to dedicate with major festivities a small, brand-new house of prayer on 12 August 1979. It was located at Krylova Street 38 on the northern edge of Kaliningrad far removed from any means of public transportation. Even the region’s Secretary for Religious Affairs, Y. Y. Makhobaisky attended. A trusting relationship had developed between him and the church. Krikun describes Makhobaisky as an “honest and intelligent person”. “When it was called for, he would defend the rights of the believers.” (p. 114) The very early registration of the Baptists was very likely due to this special relationship.

Private houses had been obtained in 1965 and 1973 with the intention of remaking them into houses of worship. In the first case, the house was quickly confiscated by the state. In the second instance, after many months of official foot-dragging, the nearly completed building was torched by supposed arsons and leveled in 1975.

Following Messner’s departure in 1976, the chauffeur Viktor Shumeyev was appointed “Senior Pastor”. He had arrived in the region as a 10-year-old with his parents in 1950 from Belgorod region in Western Russia. He retired as a pastor in January of this year.

The 1946-born engineer Anatoly Krikun hails from Berdichev in Zhitomir region not far from Kiev, where his father Ivan had served as a lay minister. He arrived in Kaliningrad region in 1967 and replaced Shumeyev as Church Secretary in 1973. Krikun was ordained a deacon in 1993 and became a pastor a year later. He was officially named the Senior Pastor (Bishop) in 1996.

Krikun’s book suddenly ends with 1985 and Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to power. Krikun’s own naming as Senior Pastor is not mentioned. Also unmentioned is his congregation’s move to an impressive new structure at Gagarina Street 18 in the east of the city. A church centre with space for 500 worshippers was dedicated there on 23 August 1998. The event’s 700 guests included 100 from Germany. The Germans contributed most of the funding (500.000 German marks) for the building of the structure – many donors had been residents of long-gone Eastern Prussia. Breitkreuz reports that this Kaliningrad congregation had a membership of 318 in 2004; the entire enclave had 426 registered Baptists. Church life has remained stable; in 1999 a “Bible college” now enjoying state recognition was opened. That institution relates to the Germany “Bible Seminary Bonn”, which is run by German emigres from Russia.

William Yoder, Ph.D., Moscow, 19 May 2011

“rea.org@mail.ru” or “kant50@gmx.de”

This press release of the Russian Evangelical Alliance is informational in character and does not express a sole, official position of Alliance leadership.