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Baptists and Pentecostals assess activism, unity, and reregistration in the Donbas region’s occupied Luhansk and Donetsk.
Trying to help, Vitaly Vlasenko was labeled a spy.
Traveling 650 miles south from Moscow to Luhansk, Ukraine, at his own expense, the now–general secretary of the Russian Evangelical Alliance (REA) waded into a war zone. Russian-backed separatists have held control of the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine since 2014, and by 2018 had crafted laws to re-register churches, ostensibly under the principle of freedom of conscience and assembly.
But two years prior, the rebel authorities in Luhansk declared Baptists and Pentecostals a security threat. Pastors had been murdered; churches were seized. In total the conflict has killed over 14,000 people and displaced 2 million of Donbas’s 5 million people.
And currently, tens of thousands of Russian troops are on the border, threatening a full invasion.
“Our brothers in Christ in Ukraine are crying out: ‘Why don’t you pressure Russia to stop this aggression?’” said Vlasenko. “We tell them we are a small minority with no standing and no clear information, and officially Russia is not a part of this conflict.”
It does not go over well, he admits. Relations between evangelicals in the neighboring nations have become strained, and some assumed the worst of his December 2018 trip to speak with rebel authorities about the registration process.
Only the KGB-connected could get access, Vlasenko heard.
In reality, the visit was arranged through prior connections with the Russian Orthodox Church metropolitan in Luhansk. Your church received registration, the REA leader told his Orthodox counterpart; where is our Christian solidarity?
Without registration, churches were disconnected from the gas and electricity grid. All remaining evangelical ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
Umn ministry
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