c. 1996 Religion News Service

MOSCOW (RNS)-Just outside the walls of the Kremlin, an angry man yelled to a crowd of Russians that”foreign missionaries and Jews are destroying our fatherland.” Nearby, men sold audio tapes labeled”SS Marches”and”German Historical Songs.” The collapse of the U.S.S.R. and communism in 1991 brought religious freedom-and a renewed spirit of nationalism. Anti-foreigner sentiment persists in both the country’s new democratic politics and, some religious observers say, the Russian Orthodox Church.

A half mile from the Kremlin, at the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian, Father Aleksandr Borisov has won a reputation as one of Russia’s few Orthodox Church reformers.”I’m different from many Orthodox priests in being open to all Christian denominations,”he declared. Nonetheless, he said, there are priests who betray hatred and anti-Semitism.

Borisov’s ecumenical views-he shares leadership of Russia’s Bible Society with Anatoli Rodenko, a Baptist-have made him foes in the Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox Church has called for bans on proselytizing, a move that has met some resistance in political circles.

President Boris Yeltsin has scuttled several attempts to push through laws to curb the religious freedom of evangelists, and he recently appointed leaders of the 11 largest confessions to the newly formed Council for Cooperation with Religious Services, which will probe religious grievances.

Aleksi II, the Orthodox Patriarch of Russia, supports ecumenism. But at a gathering in Moscow in late 1994, he said,”It’s worrying that charismatic practices among young priests are disturbing the balance of religious life in some parishes.” Not all Western religion experts fault the Orthodox Church for its resistance to evangelical activity by non-Orthodox groups. Many feel the church has been unfairly maligned by outsiders, including some Protestant evangelists.”Such is their ignorance, missionaries sometimes think Orthodox Church members who don’t worship the same way (they do) aren’t Christian,”said Chad Coussmaker, canon at a British church in Moscow and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative to Russia’s Patriarch.

Other western religious officials echo the point.”The Orthodox Church sees evangelists buying up a lot of TV time and can’t compete financially, which explains its concern,”said Richard Chapple, U.S. Mormon missionary president in Moscow.

The Right Rev. Feodor Kovalchuk, Ohio-based chancellor of the Patriarchal Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USA, said it is not the”major Protestant”groups that the Orthodox Church is wary of, but rather aggressive”sectarian”groups that have”no type of Christian or religious background to them in reality.”They literally buy souls by offering $5 bills or some candy or so forth,”he said.”To people who had been … educated under militant godless atheism, the church is very wary about that and feels these (sectarian groups) are not there for any good purpose.” But in the roiling spiritual marketplace of the former Soviet Union, which has attracted all manner of religious organizations from the mainstream to the fringe, it is difficult to determine exactly what”sectarian”means.

Igor Tsiupak, a Pentecostal pastor who teaches at a non-denominational Bible school in Moscow, claimed the Orthodox Church had created problems by writing to the district authority to prevent his group from building new churches.”In the past, the persecution came from communists. Now it is from the Orthodox Church,”said Alice Thompson, a Canadian missionary who recently set up Pentecostal churches in Siberia, where she met Christians whose feet had been amputated after freezing in labor camps in the pre-perestroika era.”I have often come across articles branding Pentecostals as satanic,”Thompson said.”Orthodox priests are influential and can persuade officials to bar evangelicals from using public halls.” Nicolai Kornilov, who teaches church history at a Baptist seminary in Moscow, said Orthodox priests had obstructed Baptists from building churches in Moscow.”Propaganda against Baptists by the Orthodox Church has been going on since last century,”he said.”Some of the propaganda is extreme, trying to stereotype us as people who would sacrifice children.””There is little chance of the Orthodox Church sympathizing with our work,”said Alexander Zaichenko, a Baptist who helped initiate courses at the recently opened Russian American Christian University in Moscow, which has evangelical aims.”The problem is that the main church doesn’t like any rivals.”

MJP END MURPHY