Eastern Europe, Soviet Union: An Overdose of Glasnost

As well-meaning Westerners rush into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, they may be hurting as much as helping.

For more than six months following Romania’s revolution, Paul Negrut, pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Oradea, was able to preach only once to his congregation. The reason? Not government restriction, but an endless stream of Western visitors to his church—as many as 20 on a single Sunday—each invited out of customary hospitality to speak from the pulpit.

The problem is not Second Baptist’s alone. Across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, churches are finding that the blessing of glasnost has opened them to a near-suffocating embrace of Western Christians. For the most part, the onslaught of evangelicals grows from a genuine desire to help. But despite good intentions, the Western church’s response to the fall of the Iron Curtain has been marked by confusion. In some cases the disjointed effort has hurt the church more than helped. And missions experts warn that valuable time is being lost as ministries scramble to find their way in the East.

No Strategy

To say Western efforts lack coordination is “a major understatement,” according to a recent report from the Missions Research Group, a consortium of 11 agencies working in Eastern Europe. Church leaders in both the East and West admit the Eastern Bloc’s sudden turn toward democracy caught them unprepared. “Fortune 500 companies had operational plans and programs ready on the shelves for the day the East opened, but most Christian groups had absolutely no strategy, short- or long-term, to change that part of the world,” said Ralph Mann, president of Mission Possible, a Dallas-based ministry that has operated covertly in Eastern Europe for 15 years. Individual projects abound among the more than 300 groups working in the area, Mann says. What is lacking is any coordinated approach and long-term vision.

The result has been a deluge of Western preachers, ministry executives, church groups, and personalities into the newly opened countries. Romania and the Soviet Union, once the most restrictive, yet holding the largest evangelical bodies, have received much of the attention. Most visitors have traveled to the best-known churches in the largest cities, often ignoring smaller churches with greater needs. The sheer number of Westerners has taxed the meager resources of their European hosts. And the smorgasbord of doctrines and styles they have brought with them has disrupted church life.

Of equal concern to veteran observers, however, is the impact of a flash flood of Western aid. Decades of scarcity taught Eastern church leaders to store rather than spend, said Peter Lascau of the Romanian Missionary Society (RMS). They also learned to accept every promise of help, realizing that only a fraction would be delivered. Now, those old lessons, combined with the West’s lack of coordination, have led to hoarding and duplication of effort. For example, Lascau said, Mission Possible and RMS recently discovered they had both agreed to pay the salaries of the same six full-time church workers in Romania.

The new openness is also reshaping church leadership in some unhealthy ways. New leaders are emerging, not because of their spiritual maturity or ability, but because they have the best English and the most contacts in the West, according to the Missions Research Group report. Experts caution as well that ill-planned aid can create dependency on the West.

Hard Questions

Lost in the rush have been the most basic missiological considerations, said Peter Deyneka of the Slavic Gospel Association. “It’s as if all we’ve learned about cross-cultural work has been forgotten,” he said. Perhaps because of the tremendous needs, people think “Eastern Europe is the only mission field they can go to unprepared,” Deyneka observed. He urges partnerships between experienced agencies and newcomers, and some discernment by all.

“Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done,” said Sandy Oestreich of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), who has spent over 20 years in Eastern Europe. She and other seasoned workers have fielded requests to help almost every type of ministry imaginable—from baseball Bible studies to make-up and fashion seminars—expand into the Eastern Bloc.

The past year also has been “a fundraiser’s dream” for Western agencies, as one mission executive put it. Groups that have never before ministered in Europe are rushing into the territory. And others are engaging in activities such as Bible distribution that they have not undertaken in the past.

Mark Elliott, director of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Marxism in Wheaton, Illinois, calls for more accountability on both sides. “In the past, [missions groups and Eastern Christians] could legitimately argue that secrecy and low profile were necessary to protect contacts and ministry.” Now, Elliott says, “potential donors in the West must ask harder questions of groups working in Eastern Europe, and Western groups must ask harder questions of their contacts and counterparts in Eastern Europe.”

Information Exchange

To their credit, several U.S. mission leaders have convened several meetings in recent months in an effort to coordinate their work in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Last February, more than 100 representatives of some 60 organizations gathered in Dallas to share information and resources. The meeting was unprecedented in its openness, and has been followed by similar discussions at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois, and at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. However, progress so far has gone little beyond exchanging information. Linking actual ministry projects and plans is only beginning.

Another major effort at coordination will take place in October, when more than 1,000 pastors and lay leaders from across the Soviet Union will meet in Moscow with representatives of 150 selected ministries in a congress organized by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE). Western participants are being invited only if they agree to strict conditions that emphasize the express needs of the Soviet churchmen.

What’S Needed, What’S Not

Though needs vary from country to country—indeed the Eastern Bloc is anything but a monolithic bloc of culture—missions experts agree that Bibles and Christian literature are in tremendous demand. In spite of massive efforts to supply Scriptures, such as the United Bible Societies’ (UBS) distribution of 1.7 million copies last year in Central and Eastern Europe (with more than 850,000 going to the Soviet Union alone), the dearth of Bibles continues. The UBS estimates 30 million Bibles are needed to meet demands in the Soviet Union in the next four years. Lack of distribution channels and restrictions on indigenous printing remain major obstacles.

Leaders also point to the need for Bible-reference works and topical Christian literature.

The past practice of excluding Christians from higher education has created an urgent need for theological education. Most church leaders lack formal training. According to LCWE, of those leaders expected for the Moscow congress, fewer than 1 percent have seminary education, 2 percent have university education, about 10 percent have technical schooling, and the rest have high-school-level study or less.

What is not needed, mission experts and Eastern leaders agree, are more American preachers who deliver a sermon and leave. “We appreciate them coming so far to our country to be with us, but we want them to join us in serving the Lord,” said one Soviet pastor, who noted that Americans often arrive without a translator, but with a video camera.

Missionary “generalists” also need not apply, according to Deyneka. “There are hundreds of willing workers” in Soviet churches, he said. “What they need is training and education in specialized areas, from someone who can help them adapt principles to their culture.”

Urgency, Not Frenzy

For mission leaders, one of the most difficult challenges at hand is responding to glasnost with urgency, but not frenzy. The needs are undeniably great. “But we’ve spent six to eight months now spending money and using personnel merely learning [about the Eastern Bloc],” says Mission Possible’s Mann. “We may not have another six or eight months. We’re dabbling in one of the most important areas of the world, with one of the greatest opportunities of our lifetime.”

Guesses abound as to how long the window of opportunity may remain open in the East. Political and economic instability continue to drive Christians to make the most of every moment. Added pressure comes from the influx of other religions and beliefs, from Hare Krishna to “health and wealth” theology, all of which are being devoured by spiritually hungry Easterners.

In spite of decades of spiritual famine in the East, however, “non-Christians are going to reach a saturation point” as they are inundated with spiritual messages, warns YWAM’s Oestreich. “They will soon become as jaded as we are in the West and won’t want to see another piece [of religious literature].”

When that day arrives, the eastward rush of Western Christians may not be over, but the window may be closed.

By Ken Sidey.

Islam Shares in Benefits of Glasnost

As Christians across the Soviet Union have enjoyed new freedoms under glasnost, so too have the more than 50 million Muslims living in the USSR. In the past few months, Soviet Muslims have campaigned in Moscow for greater freedom to make pilgrimages to Mecca. Mullahs are now permitted to conduct meetings in factories and on the streets. Soviet authorities have reportedly granted permission for the publication of 50 million copies of the Qur’an. In Tashkent, the capital of the central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, Islamic leaders have begun publishing a semimonthly newspaper in Arabic to provide theological instruction.

Nationalistic fervor in the five central Asian republics and Azerbaijan, all once part of various independent Muslim states, has also led to violence during the past year. And recent reports from the area indicate Christians there are growing fearful of the increasingly militant Islamic resurgence.

Most of the Christians in Soviet central Asia are of German or Russian origin, forcibly resettled into the area by Joseph Stalin in the 1940s. Viewed as foreigners by more radical Muslim nationalists, many Christians have received threats and are now emigrating to other parts of the Soviet Union or to the West. Whole churches have been forced to consider leaving, but they face the loss of all their individual property because no one will buy their homes.

Though most Muslims appear interested only in reasserting control of their homelands and are not aggressively evangelistic with their faith, the Muslim population (about 19 percent of the total) is growing five times faster than the remaining population. And despite the new freedoms extended to Islam, Soviet officials are worried by its growth. Mikhail Gorbachev himself has expressed apprehension about a “revival of Islamic fundamentalism” in the USSR.

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