The eastern european countries’ “Pastors’ Conference”—a congress on evangelism held recently in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia—could signal new courage for Christian vitalities in lands under Soviet influence. Participants came not only from Yugoslavia, the only Eastern nation permitting Christian workers to attend the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, but also from Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, which had refused visas to pastors invited to Berlin. Once again, however, no representation was permitted from Russia, East Germany, and Bulgaria, where hostility to such Christion engagement runs deep, nor from Albania, where the present condition of the churches is unsure.
East European participants numbered more than 130, exceeding by scores the sponsoring committee’s minimal expectation. Not only did Yugoslav authorities not interfere with program planning and execution, but they were gracious to program participants. Many of the conferees are pastors of local churches; others are engaged in itinerant work and a wide diversity of evangelical efforts, some are professional men, and not a few are university or seminary students. Observers also came from Austria, West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Holland.
Major messages fell to Dr. Stephen Olford, pastor of New York’s Calvary Baptist Church, and to me. In Sunday church services before the congress opened, more than a score of first-time decisions for Christ were made in services we conducted in Belgrade and in Backi Petrovac; others also responded to opportunities for spiritual renewal and vocational commitment. During the congress, Dr. Olford covered pastoral and experiential concerns, while theological issues came my way. Translations were into eight languages.
European Baptists, who had wanted their own denominational congress on evangelism for Eastern workers, cooperated instead in the Novi Sad interdenominational effort and placed the ample facilities of the recently completed Novi Sad Baptist Bible Seminary at the disposal of the participants for meetings, meals, and lodgings. They have now projected an all-Baptist congress in 1970 in Prague for East European Baptist workers. Dr. Billy Graham, who addressed the European Baptist Congress in Vienna, did not go to Novi Sad because sponsors felt world publicity might jeopardize the event, but he called hearers of “The Hour of Decision” to prayer for God’s special presence and blessing.
Participants could not fail to be impressed by the larger freedom and initiative of Christians in Yugoslavia in contrast with other Eastern European lands. The Petrovac church, for example, had recently sponsored an evangelistic series that drew an average of seventy outsiders nightly, and within six months ten of these had been baptized on confession of faith in Christ. (In some churches, interestingly, active youth groups hold a lively expectation of the Lord’s imminent return.) Elsewhere a Christian reading room is being opened. These may seem small tokens alongside free-world liberties, especially in view of the absence of radio and television opportunities for the Gospel, and of city-wide meetings outside the churches. (Graham’s 1967 campaign in Zagreb was an exception; he may return in 1971.) But in the East European context they provide rays of hope, and Yugoslav Protestants feel they have more open opportunities than Protestants in Greece, Italy, and some other Western countries.
For not a few delegates, the meetings were the first of an extradenominational nature in which they had participated. Some found fellow Christian workers from their own areas of whom they had not known. They shared reports of remarkable conversions and of healings. A Baptist church in Hungary had recently baptized twenty-six persons. In Czechoslovakia, after the recent Russian invasion, scores of Christians presented Russian Bibles to the incoming soldiers; in Russia, Bibles have sold recently for as much as $200 because of the short supply. Czechoslovakian Christians are now preparing a modern translation of the Bible in their own language.
The congress was arranged by The Evangelical Alliance Mission through its European missionary-at-large, Thomas Cosmades. Numbers of American tourists who, in their travels, heard prayers in evangelical churches for the congress, came to share the blessings of the speaking sessions. Several Roman Catholic priests attended incognito.
Some delegates had been in prison, others had been persecuted and even prohibited from preaching, some are laboring amid physical and financial need and in discouraging circumstances. In some lands, particularly Hungary and Romania, some pastors are still under pressure to expound a biblical basis for socialism and to take the government line, if preaching permits are to be renewed.
It was clear that these workers had much to teach other believers about the Christian walk and witness. Some were products of earlier revivals such as that in Hungary twenty years ago; some were the fruit of the ministry of visiting evangelists; others came to Christ through a local church ministry of lay witness. They heard eagerly of developments issuing from the World Congress on Evangelism and of subsequent regional congresses. Most realized that for the near future at least their evangelistic efforts must mainly take forms other than mass evangelism. Some seemed strangely unprepared for aggressive evangelism. Even some Baptist pastors, asked to give a spiritual testimony, would recite the statistics of local church and Sunday-school attendance.
Delegates responded openly and readily to an invitation to rededicate themselves in quest of theological vitality and evangelistic virility; leaders publicly took their stand in a packed meeting to declare their determination to serve Christ obediently and earnestly. They came in Novi Sad to a new sense of the power of the Gospel and of the permanence of revealed truth in a situation of social change. They found a renewal of Christian life and ministry, a deeper joy in Christ, encouragement to labor in their restricted outposts to proclaim the liberty that is in Christ; and they left with a deep desire to nourish Christian virtues in their unhappy lands.
Nowhere in the Eastern lands has it become as apparent as in Yugoslavia that the socialist leveling of material possessions leaves wide ranges of human aspiration unsatisfied. That is why I stressed that the Eastern European peoples are homeless in the Marxist materialism of Soviet Russia and in the secular materialism of the Anglo-Saxon West, and are homesick for realities of spirit, mind, and conscience that are integral to their past religious and philosophical heritage. Secret believers are taking an open stand for Christ, and Christians who have not met across international boundaries for twenty years are assessing the Great Commission in new perspective. Their faithful witness alone could bring the truth of God to multitudes who have not heard about him for a generation.
CARL F. H. HENRY
