Thoughts of a Servant

I took a little mental trip to the Soviet today.  I am currently fascinated with foreign cultures and how they perceive certain events and topics.  So I spent some time observing Russia’s prominent religion: Православие, or Orthodox (announced: Pravoslavije).

I was surprised to see how much pride they take in their church.  Both believers and non-believers hold the church as a symbol for their heritage and development of their country.  Inside of this church you will find several denominations such as Roman Catholics, Armenian Gregorian and various Protestant.

Doing some research on the religions, I found that Christianity is not even a percentage of their population, 70% is orthodox and the others are very minimal ( <6%).  Jehovah’s witnesses appear to be more prominent than Christians.

There was actually an anti-religion movement from 1917 to 1928 where they followed Marxist beliefs and were radical against believers.

The tenth CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) congress met in 1921 and it passed a resolution calling for ‘widescale organization, leadership, and cooperation in the task of anti-religious agitation and propaganda among the broad masses of the workers, using the mass media, films, books, lectures, and other devices.

David E. Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study of Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975) p. 34;

The supression of religion was so great, they even had concentration caps strictly for believers.  They executed 95k individuals including clergy and bishops, etc within an individual camp by  a firing squad.

In the period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to less than 500.

…

There was a massive closure of churches (reducing the number from 22,000 to 7,000 by 1965

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[and so many more]

BUT in all of this repression, there is so much hope!

Riga priest Nikolai Trubetskoi (1907-1978) lived under the Nazi occupation of Latvia, and when the Germans retreated out of Latvia in 1944, he escaped out of a German evacuation boat and hid behind to await the Red Army, but he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to ten years of hard labour for collaboration with the enemy. This was because under the occupation he had been a zealous pastor and a had done very successful missionary work. In reference to missionary work in the occupied territory near Leningrad he wrote ‘We opened and re-consecrated closed churches, carried out mass baptisms. It’s hard to imagine how, after years of Soviet domination, people hungered after the Word of God. We married and buried people; we had literally no time for sleep. I think that if such a mission were sent today [1978] to the Urals, Siberia or even the Ukrained, we’d see the same result.’

Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 2: Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and Persecutions, St Martin’s Press, New York (1988) pg 92-93

Maybe the time is now.  A reformation started in the 80′s that openly accepted the Catholic Orthodox Church as an icon for their country.  But there are still levels of the bourgeois that will not be able to understand the “mumbo jumbo”.  Something similar to the Martin Luther reformation.  It could be a large movement that will shape these 100 million individuals into knowing a relationship…

What a picture…   What kind of love.