The Trial of Georgi Vins

Soviet Baptist leader Georgi Vins was recently sentenced to five years in prison and five years in exile on charges stemming from his religious activities (February 28 issue, page 41). The date of the trial in Kiev was kept secret, but family members and other believers showed up nevertheless and maintained a vigil outside. The trial was held nearly a year after Vins’s arrest. Only persons with special passes, apparently persons hostile to Vins and evangelical Christianity, were to be admitted to the courtroom. Several family members, however, managed to get inside. Among these was Lydia Vins, Georgi’s mother, who like her son had spent time previously in Soviet jails for her faith. She tape-recorded her comments on the five-day trial, and aCHRISTIANITY TODAYcorrespondent in frequent touch with key Soviet believers sent the magazine a translated transcript. The following is an edited condensation of Mrs. Vin’s eyewitness account:

When I entered the courtroom and saw Georgi’s exhausted, sunken eyes, his pale face, I thought that he had not slept for nights. During a visit with him in prison in October, the first I had seen him since my own release more than four years earlier, we were not permitted to discuss what he had suffered. But during the trial he did say that only for the last two months of ten was he on his feet.

We had obtained Alf Haerem, a Norwegian Christian, to be Georgi’s defense lawyer. When the authorities found out, they sent for me. Although they had been very rough with me the week before, now they were polite and tried to persuade us to take an atheist as a defender, but we refused. They in turn refused to give Mr. Haerem an entry visa, and I so informed the court. At this, Georgi announced he was rejecting the composition of the court.

“The first reason,” he declared, “is that the court is one-sided, consisting of atheists, and they are not judging me, but they are judging the confession of faith of the Evangelical Christian Baptists, they are judging the Bible and the Gospel, they are judging the whole movement of our Christianity.

“The second reason is that the entire investigation was conducted with much violence, with psychological and physical terrorism, and that the investigation was not conducted by the proper authority but by the Committee of Government Security [KGB]. For two months an agent of the KGB threatened and menaced me, and now he is sitting here in this courtroom. I had been put into a cell with him and other agents who threatened to strangle and kill me.”

My son presented an eighteen-point petition to the court. In it, he asked that Christian lawyers be allowed to participate (“since we do not have any in this country, it is necessary to have them from other countries”). The petition asked for the creation of a commission composed of representatives of the government and of the churches to determine whether there is slander in the accusations against Georgi, which are really accusations against our entire brotherhood.

The petition asked the court to obtain from special organizations in Moscow information as to how many believers were arrested from 1929 to 1945 and how many of them died. And also from 1945 to 1974. Further, how many pieces of religious literature, including Bibles, Gospels, and songbooks were confiscated. Next, how many believers were excluded from higher institutes of education for Christian reasons but under various pretexts, how many prayer houses were demolished from 1929 to 1974, how many believers were deprived of parental rights, how many Christian children deprived of their parental rights, and other questions throwing light on the activities of believers during those years.

His petition was rejected.

The presiding judge did not conduct himself objectively. All the witnesses that my son requested were refused. Georgi declined to defend himself in the absence of Mr. Haerem. At one point he said:

“I insist that in our country there is a physical destruction of believers. If you refuse to answer and get facts, then I will state that from 1929 to 1945 25,000 believers were arrested and 22,000 died in camps. From 1945 to 1974 20,000 Christians were arrested, and 6.000 were excluded from higher institutes of learning. Since 1929, ten million pieces of literature have been confiscated. Christians right now are being physically destroyed in camps and prisons.

“I could be at home today. During the first month of my arrest I was offered a position as a coworker with the KGB. I would be allowed to remain in the Council of Churches and to live at home with my wife and children, but this I refused.

“I know now that the Lord appointed this [trial], and I accept from his hands what he appoints.”

The experts then took their turn. They accused my son first of all of slander against Soviet reality. In the Soviet Union, they said, is no persecution whatsoever. Yet, they claimed, various reports of the Christians contain antigovernmental, criminal, and slanderous statements by Georgi. (He had included in the reports biographies of Baptist leaders of the past, their messages and letters. He had also written a family chronicle of the fates of his father [who allegedly died of torture in a prison camp], mother, and others.)

Before the verdict was announced, my son was offered a final word. He declined, saying, “My Lord will say the last word, he who said ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ ” After the verdict was given they asked if he understood. He replied, “I understand. Praise be to Jesus Christ. Praise be to Jesus Christ.”

Suddenly relatives began throwing him flowers. They had carried the flowers into the courtroom under their clothing from the believers outside. My grandson, throwing flowers, said, “Daddy, this is for your courage.” His wife cried out as she cast flowers: “You have won this trial.” His little daughter Natasha stood on a chair and declared: “Daddy, the works of the church will not die, just like the love of Christ will not die. With Christ in prison it is freedom, but without Christ in freedom it is prison.”

He gathered the flowers, and they led him out. “Greet all my friends,” he called.

Nearly 500 believers were gathered outside. They had stood for days in the freezing temperatures. Now they took off their hats and began to sing: “To live with Christ and to die with him, can you find a better part? It pays to work, it pays to humble yourself, it pays to give your whole life for this.” They sang on: “Fruitless land, empty plains, grim region, cold Vorkuta, you received in iron shackles the witnesses of Christ who were driven out of the south.”

They were singing in the street. The traffic was paralyzed. Nobody moved. Then I started to walk with my grandson, who took me by the arm and took off his hat. It was just like at a funeral procession. Everybody stepped aside, and we walked through them.

Instead of bringing Georgi out the front entrance as before, they took him out the back, where a prison car was waiting. The young people broke through the cordon of police and rushed to the rear. Georgi listened as they sang: “For the evangelical faith, for Christ we will stand.” A crowd of policemen threw themselves against the young people, but they did not move until Georgi was led away.

His wife was allowed a brief meeting with him a few days later. Separated by a glass partition, they spoke to each other on a telephone. Georgi asked for very warm clothes. Apparently they gave him a hint that he would be sent into deep Siberia. But we do not know what the Lord will do in this.

The hardest thing in all these experiences, especially when you are in the camps and prisons, is to recognize that you are alone, that everybody in the whole world has forgotten you. Then it is that the Lord alone is with you as your truest friend.

The realization that God’s children are praying for you always revived us and gave us new strength. According to the testimonies of many who have served in these prisons, the prayers of God’s people are felt. The greatest thine that Christians throughout the world can do now is to pray. Pray that Christians living here can breathe freely, if such is the wish of our heavenly Father.

SUBDUED

As the Greyhound bus approached Daytona Beach, Florida, last month, a passenger pulled a gun and ordered the driver to “take me to Tampa or I’ll shoot you.”

A fellow passenger, Ena Cuff, a member of the Baptist Church of the Good Shepherd in Miami, knew just what to do. She began preaching. Within minutes the man dropped his gun and was subdued and led off to jail. The bus went on its way.

“The teachings of the word of Jesus Christ were enough to make his hand go limp,” explained Ms. Cuff.

Pressing On

Four women and three men were tried and sentenced in the Soviet Union last month for their part in operating a clandestine publishing house for the outlawed Council of Churches of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (CCECB). They had been seized in a farmhouse in Latvia in October and their equipment and supplies confiscated (see December 20, 1974, issue, page 27). Soviet agents reportedly had planted radioactive paper supplies in several stores, then used helicopters and special detection equipment to locate the paper after it was purchased.

A few days after the trial was over it was evident that a second secret printing press was at work. One of the first publications was a report of the trial, naming the seven defendants, their ages, and the sentences they received (from 2½ to four years in prison).

An appeal to the Soviet heads of state appeared in the latest issue of the Fraternal Herald, a CCECB publication. It claimed the arrest of the seven was a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which upholds the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to receive and impart information. It asked for the release of the workers and the return of the printing press, 15,000 copies of the New Testament, tons of paper stock, and other materials.

According to sources at Michael Bordeaux’s Keston College research center in England, the owner of the Latvian farmhouse and his wife were interrogated at length. His wife was apparently tortured and had to be hospitalized as a result.

Unrelatedly, Baptist evangelist Sammy Tippit of San Antonio and Illinois layman Fred Starkweather were deported from the Soviet Union on the day before Easter after preaching and handling out tracts to university students in Leningrad. Tippit had intended to preach on Easter Sunday at the tomb of Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square.

War Wounds

As of mid-month there still was no word about the seven missionaries and child missing after the fall of Ban Me Thuot in South Viet Nam (see April 11 issue, page 31). Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) officials drew a blank from official Viet Cong representatives they contacted in Saigon.

Meanwhile, all but a handful of missionaries were evacuated from the country. Those who stayed behind were helping with medical needs or huddling with national church leaders and tending to last-minute administrative details.

Churches and relief agencies were funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of food, medicines, and other goods into the stricken country.

One of the last Americans to leave Da Nang was Dr. Robert Long, 38, director of the 100-bed Hoa Khanh children’s hospital, a well-equipped and stocked facility built by American GIs in the 1960s and operated by the World Relief Commission of the National Association of Evangelicals. Before leaving, Long discharged most of the children and gathered many of his 105 national staffers for a final farewell. Amid tears and prayers Long was told that twelve staff persons had just received Christ, mostly because of the witness of Nguyen Thai Kahnh, the head nurse. Long offered to try to get her aboard a rescue flight, but she waved him away.

“I’ll stay,” she said quietly. “The Viet Cong need Jesus too.”

An estimated 30,000 or more persons affiliated with the CMA churches and more than fifty pastors reportedly came to the Da Nang area as refugees. Their fate is unknown. The bodies of Catholics and Protestants alike were among the thousands of dead strewn along the routes out of the highlands. Despite Hanoi’s announcement guaranteeing “freedom of worship” in the Communist-held areas of South Viet Nam, leaders of the churches say they expect to be executed in a Communist takeover.

World Vision was to have dedicated a 100-bed children’s hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, this month. Instead, it was turned over to World Vision, CMA, and Catholic Relief Services national workers for use as a general hospital, treating mostly wounded war victims.

EDWARD E. PLOWMAN

CHURCH ANNOUNCEMENT

The United Church of Canada congregation in Grenfell, Saskatchewan, is getting good readership by placing notices in the classified ad section of the newspaper. A sample:

Even in this age of inflation,

The wages of sin remain the same.

The United Church of Canada,

Sunday, 11:30 a.m.

Canons And Conscience

The four Episcopal bishops who last year participated in the irregular ordination of eleven women to the priesthood are off the hook. Four other bishops had charged the prelates with violating church policy. A ten-member denominational lay-clergy board of inquiry ruled in late March that “the core of the controversy is doctrinal” rather than a question of canonical law or polity. Doctrinal charges must be considered by the full House of Bishops, and only upon the accusations of at least ten bishops. The house can then proceed with a heresy trial, but only if two-thirds of the bishops agree. It is highly unlikely that the bishops would approve such a move regarding the controversial ordination issue.

In its 8–2 decision, the inquiry panel said the “basic doctrinal question is not simply whether women should be ordained” but “whether this church’s understanding of the nature of the church and the authority of the episcopate permits individual bishops, by appealing solely to their consciences, to usurp the proper functions of other duly constituted authorities” of the church.

This month, Rector William Wendt of the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D. C., is scheduled to go on trial for permitting one of the eleven women, Alison Cheek, to celebrate communion. He is accused of violating church law rather than doctrine.

Wendt’s diocesan bishop, William F. Creighton, announced this month in a letter to his fellow bishops that he will not ordain any more men to the priesthood until he can also ordain qualified women. Said he: “To ordain men who are deacons while being compelled to refuse ordination to women who are deacons has become conscientiously impossible and a form of injustice of which I can no longer be a part.”

The denomination, having failed to approve women’s ordination in 1973, is scheduled to vote again on the issue next year.

Meanwhile, it was learned that an official Episcopal-Catholic consultation to discuss theological issues involved in the ordination of women is being planned.

The woman-priesthood issue is surfacing as a major concern in Catholic circles. A convocation on the topic has been called by a task force representing the national organizations of nuns, a number of laywomen, and some priests. The meeting is to be held in Detroit in November.

Mormon Monopoly

The Justice Department has urged the Federal Communications Commission to reject the license renewal applications of KSL, Salt Lake City, which operates AM and FM radio stations and the city’s largest television station. The licenses are owned by a corporation of the Mormon church. Also owned by the unit is Deseret News, Utah’s largest daily, and the Newspaper Agency Corporation. The latter, under a joint agreement, prints and handles business functions of the Salt Lake City Tribune, the only other daily in town.

The church corporation also owns the city’s cable television service and fourteen other cable TV services in the state.

The government contends that such a semi-monopolistic ownership and control of the news media violates the principle of free enterprise and competition in the media.

GLENN EVERETT

Religion In Transit

Catholic bishop Leo Maher of San Diego ordered the barring of elective office and the sacraments, including communion, to any Catholic who “admits publicly” to membership in the National Organization for Women or other pro-abortion groups.

Logos International, the charismatic-oriented publishing firm based in Plain-field, New Jersey, plans to launch a national Christian tabloid this summer. Logos, which recently purchased a newspaper plant and press in Plainfield, hopes to publish it weekly, although it may appear less frequently at the outset.

Resigned: George H. Williams, as president of the 13,900-student American University, a United Methodist-related school in Washington, D. C. He was under pressure from students and faculty over questions of academic leadership and fund-raising ability. The school has an annual budget of about $30 million, of which $175,000 is contributed by the denomination. The ties to the denomination are under review.

Dissension between the administration and the majority of the twenty-three faculty members at the 750-student North Greenville College, a Southern Baptist school in South Carolina, led to the resignation of Harold E. Lindsey as president. The teachers, backed by a student boycott, were upset over salaries, policies, and the way Lindsey treated them. Trustees have asked all parties to cool it while they try to work things out.

Lack of financing has led to the dissolution of the three-year-old Fund for the Reinhold Niebuhr Award. The recipients of the $5,000 awards were Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh, West German’s Willy Brandt, United Farm Workers head Cesar Chavez, South African theologian C. F. Beyers Naude, and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident Soviet physicist.

Gulf Oil nominated a Catholic nun to become the thirteenth member of its board of directors. She is President Jane Scully of Carlow College, a women’s school operated by the Sisters of Mercy in Pittsburgh. Gulf has been under pressure from nuns opposed to its strip-mining policies.

Romanian Orthodox bishop Valerian Trifa of Detroit is the target of Jewish efforts aimed at getting the U. S. government to revoke his citizenship. They say Trifa took part in Nazi atrocities in the 1940s in Bucharest and misrepresented his past when he was naturalized in 1950. A government attorney last month said a federal suit would be filed against Trifa soon.

Mormon legal sources confirm that the U. S. Justice Department warned the Mormon church last year about illegal use of tape recordings and wiretaps in church-court excommunication proceedings. A tape recorder was used to get evidence in an adultery case, and a wiretap was used in a polygamy case.

Pastor Robert K. Nace of Greenville, Pennsylvania, is the official nominee for Moderator, the top elected post in the 1.9-million-member United Church of Christ. He will be voted on at the biennial synod in June.

Moderator Lawrence W. Bottoms of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. (Southern) predicts the long-discussed reunion between his denomination and the United Presbyterian Church will not come to pass. It might be approved at the general assembly or national level but not at the local level, he said. Too many people have too many fears about the merger idea, he said.

“Have a Good Day,” the monthly four-page “non-tract tract” has reached the million circulation mark. The soft-sell witness tool, published by Tyndale House, is distributed through 7,000 churches, 3,000 individuals, and more than 700 bookstores.

The 1975 National Religious Broadcasters Directory lists 634 religious radio stations in the United States, both commercial and non-commercial, eight religious TV stations, and 289 program producers.

DEATHS

LEVI T. PENNINGTON, 99, long-time Quaker leader and president emeritus of George Fox College; in Newberg, Oregon.

JOHN REBLE, 87, first full-time president of the Canadian synod of the Lutheran Church in America; in Kitchener, Ontario.

Personalia

“Deprogrammer” Ted Patrick of San Diego has been banned from Canada by immigration officials. No reasons were given. Patrick had attempted to deprogram a 19-year-old girl away from a Krishna Consciousness Group and a 21-year-old away from a Catholic commune in Ontario. He called on the government to investigate his activities, alleging that 500,000 Canadians are entrapped in cults that have brainwashed them.

Leslie Parrott, president of Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, since 1970, has been elected to a similar post at 1,800-student Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee, Illinois, succeeding Harold Reed who is retiring after twenty-six years at Olivet.

Rabbi Bertram W. Korn of Philadelphia was promoted to the rank of rear admiral in the Naval Reserve, the first flag officer of Jewish faith in the 200-year history of the chaplain corps.

Basketball pro Elvin Hayes, long known as a troublemaker around the National Basketball Association, was traded to the Washington, D. C., team and helped make it a top winner in the NBA. He attributes his new attitude to “a complete change [that] came into my life when I accepted Christ as my Saviour a year and a half ago.” He told reporter Roy Wolfe he’ll “probably become a minister” after his playing days are over.

World Scene

More than 100 members of Parliament and thirty-seven ambassadors turned out last month for the eleventh annual Canadian Parliament prayer breakfast in Ottawa. Former Iowa senator Harold Hughes was the main speaker. About twenty politicians attend a weekly prayer breakfast.

The Central Armenian Communist party newspaper, pointing out that several dozen unregistered evangelical groups in the Caucasian republic are converting numbers of young people, called for a decisive struggle against religion and the Church.

The Vatican’s investments around the world are worth less than $120 million, none of it in companies that make munitions or contraceptives, according to the Vatican’s chief financial officer.

Penetration ’75, an evangelism campaign in Panama by the Central American Mission, registered more than 500professions of faith. Prior to Penetration, the thirteen CAM churches in Panama had fewer than 150 baptized members. More than 90 per cent of the nation’s 1.5 million population is Catholic. Baptists and Episcopalians are the largest Protestant groups.

Archbishop Stuart Blanch of York and his diocesan synod, second in status in the Church of England after Canterbury, voted in favor of the ordination of women priests. The voting in the other forty-two Anglican dioceses has been fairly even so far. Final results of the poll will be presented to the General Synod of the church, at which time official action may be taken.

The 300,000-member Methodist Church in South Korea split early this year over several issues. A United Methodist team from America found at least five factions. The team devised a plan to channel funds to designated projects and programs, eliminating support of the headquarters administration in Seoul. This, it is hoped, will buy time to work for reform and reconciliation.

After two years of controversy, the Church of England has sold for about $240,000 half its 70,000 shares in a British firm with gold-mine interests in South Africa. The firm was accused of practicing segregation and underpaying its black workers. Other shares will be sold when the price is right, says an Anglican finance officer.

A high Mexican award for research in anthropology was conferred upon Phillip Baer and William R. Merrifield, Americans who work for Wycliffe Bible Translators and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, for their study of the Lacandon people. Baer has been doing linguistic and translation work with the tribe since 1941.

For the third time, the Evangelical Bookstore in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was damaged by a bomb blast. A bomb went off inside the building, destroying many Bibles and books and causing extensive damage.

Everything is in short supply in Burma, from food and medicines to Bibles, according to a recent visitor. The government has neither sufficient paper nor will it grant import permits for Burmese Scriptures, and the Burmese Christians—who are growing in number—say the need is urgent.

Swedish publisher Lars Dunberg announced a near sell-out of the 50,000 first-edition copies of the Swedish-version Living New Testamentwithin a week of publication.

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