Churches talk in Minsk - Christian interfaith organization in former Soviet Union

Christian Century, Oct 23, 1996

For the first time since the break up of the Soviet Union, 21 churches and Christian communities in the former U.S.S.R. have agreed to form a Christian Interconfessional Consultative Committee. During the late Soviet period various Christian churches in the U.S.S.R. maintained good working relations with each other. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union relations between the churches deteriorated. Moreover, the Russian Orthodox Church, the region's largest Christian body, strongly condemned what it described as "proselytizing" by foreign missionaries, many of them Protestants, who arrived in Russia and other traditionally Orthodox areas after the political changes of the late 1980s.

The consultative committee will promote cooperation and mutual understanding among the mainstream Christian denominations, including Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, in the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic countries. The decision to form the committee was made at a conference in Minsk, Belarus, October 1-3. On hand were 132 delegates representing 21 churches and Christian organizations, including Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Baptists, Old Believers (Old Ritualists), Lutherans and Seventh-day Adventists.

"My idea is to create a council of churches [of the former Soviet Union], but we have not grown up to it yet," said conference co-moderator Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, leader of Russia's Roman Catholics. The other two co-moderators were Metropolitan Kirill, chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Petr Konovalchik, the leader of Russia's Baptists.

The Minsk conference was particularly noteworthy due to the participation of representatives from the Greek Catholic churches of Ukraine and Belarus, which until recently had been locked in acrimonious dispute with the Orthodox churches in those countries. The Greek Catholic churches adhere to Orthodoxy's Byzantine rite but recognize the authority of the Roman pontiff.

One of the most heated debates at the conference centered on the issue of missionary work by Christian churches. A carefully worded final document condemned as "inadmissible" cases in which "Christians of one church are converted to another through ways and means contradicting the spirit of Christian love and violating the freedom of a human person." But the document omitted the term "proselytism" after strong opposition was voiced by Baptists and other evangelical Christians, who have been accused by Orthodox spokespersons of seeking converts in traditionally Slavic Orthodox countries such as Russia and Belarus. Metropolitan Kirill said this issue should be tackled by churches once the interconfessional process becomes better established in the region.

The final document reaffirmed the churches' commitment to play a "peacemaking role" in the political process, which is "aimed at a harmonious unity of people of various political convictions in the service of the common good." According to the document, "many different opinions" were expressed at the meeting on the issue of church-state relations--one of the most sensitive issues in several of the republics that used to be part of the former Soviet Union.

The document declared that participants "share to a great degree the understanding that relations between religious organizations and the state should be built on the basis of noninterference in each other's internal affairs and on the basis of law, including full respect for the spiritual choice of a person." But it also declared that equality before the law should not "engender an equivalence of the religious associations"--subtle but tacit recognition, in the case of Russia, of the special role played in public life by the Orthodox Church.