Georgia's Baptists Anxious After Losing Large Sum of Cash in Church Robbery

A central Baptist church in the center of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi was robbed of tens of thousands of dollars earlier this month following a series of attempts to intimidate minority religious groups in the former Soviet Republic.

Baptist officials said they suspected the robbery was linked to the attempts at intimidation.

Avtandil Guruli, deputy head of the Georgian Bible Society and a member of the Baptist church at which the robbery took place, told ENI in a telephone interview that late on March 14 five people tied up two elderly watchmen in the Baptist church and, after working for two hours with a blowtorch to open the safe, took away a significant amount of cash.

Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili, head of the Evangelical Christian Baptist Church of Georgia, which has several thousand members, told ENI that leading government officials including the head of the State Security Council, Nukzar Sochaya and the country’s Prosecutor General Gia Meparishvili, had personally assured him of a prompt investigation.

“They have assured me of the government’s assistance in our activities, guarantees of freedom of religion and promised to find the culprits,” Bishop Songulashvili said.

He declined to say how much money had been stolen, but said it was the equivalent of tens of thousands of US dollars, most of it earmarked for the construction of a senior citizens’ home.

“This is a huge amount of money for us,” he said.

He added that because of financial instability in Georgia, the church had to keep most of its funds in cash rather than in banks.

The robbery follows a number of attacks on religious minorities in Georgia. The most recent occurred on March 10 when a mob led by a defrocked Orthodox priest Vasily Mkhalavishvili stopped a truck loaded with copies of the Georgian translation of a book called Opening Up the Bible. The truck was travelling to Tbilisi from the port of Poti. Bible Society workers in the truck were beaten up and some of the books destroyed before local police halted the violence.

An appeal for prayers and donations, circulated around the world by the Baptist church and the Bible Society, lists other attacks on church activities. Most of the incidents involve groups associated with Mkhalavishvili, who allegedly has also attacked other minority religious organizations in Georgia.

Songulashvili said that Mkhalavishvili, who had been defrocked by the Patriarchate of Georgia, now belongs to a breakaway Greek Orthodox group.

“I think it will be hard to establish a direct connection between the robbery and previous cases of violence, but indirectly, they are certainly connected,” the Baptist bishop said, adding that the country’s main church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Ilia, had a “strange” reaction to the events. “On the one hand, they said the [attack on the truck] was not an Orthodox way of action, on the other hand they said that the cargo had not been cleared of customs and contained ‘un-Orthodox’ books. It is hard to consider that an act of support.”

Apparently the Patriarchate of Georgia is under pressure from fundamentalists within the Orthodox Church, who have already forced the patriarchate to withdraw from the ecumenical movement, including the World Council of Churches in 1997, despite Patriarch Ilia’s personal involvement in ecumenism several decades ago.

“They [the Orthodox] always have to navigate carefully between various church groups,” Songulashvili said. He pointed out that in February his church and the Orthodox Church had signed a joint declaration recognizing the “special role” of the Orthodox Church in Georgia’s history but condemning “religious fanaticism, hatred, violence and proselytizing,” and pledging joint work in the field of human rights protection and peacemaking.

Songulashvili also thanked Protestant churches word-wide and the Roman Catholic Church in Georgia for their support following the transmission of the Baptist plea for prayers and donations. He singled out for thanks George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is sending a personal envoy to Tbilisi to meet government authorities and Orthodox leaders.