Biography
V. Bruce Rigdon currently is chairperson of the National Council of Churches Committee on Relations with Churches in the Soviet Union and he is also a member of the Inter-unit committee on International Concerns of the NCC. His teaching at McCormick Theological Seminary includes courses on the history of Christian doctrine and worship as well as the history and theology of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Additionally, Dr. Rigdon has conducted many academic seminars in eastern Europe, the middle east and the Soviet Union. These seminars, sponsored by McCormick Seminary, focus upon the history of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the modern social, political and religious milieu.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"No Longer Strangers: Christianity in the U.S.S.R." 
“We are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." [Ephesians 2:19]

I can still remember, as a child growing up in a Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, those occasions when our Pastor and lay-church leaders urged all of us in the congregation to imitate the peace and tranquillity of the early church. My memory is that those admonitions usually came on the eve of one of the many quarrels that I recall in that congregation. As I grew older, and the church taught me to read the Scriptures with more discernment, I began to realize that, if one meant by "peace and tranquillity" an absence of conflict, then perhaps there was relatively little peace and tranquillity in the early church.

I can imagine that there must have been days when it would have been difficult for the apostles, Peter and Paul, to be in the same room together because of the difficult issues with which they were dealing. And if you add to their numbers someone like James, the head of the church in Jerusalem, with the problems of the church there, perhaps, at times you had the makings of a real "brouhaha." The amazing thing is not that there was conflict in the early church. After all, the apostles faced very difficult issues in their struggles with one another and the Word of God. They had to discern what their particular tasks were - how they could be faithful Christians. That this led them into disagreement sometimes is not amazing. What is amazing, however, is that, in the midst of conflict, they continued to love one another, continued to listen to each other, and always regarded one another as brothers and sisters in a common household of faith.

Do you remember our first quarrel in the church? We hear echoes of it in Ephesians 2:11-22. It was the issue of whether or not those who were Gentile Christians, coming into what at first was a largely Jewish Christian community, would have to become culturally Jewish in order to participate fully in the life of the community, especially, to be together at the Table of the Lord, where Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians were to break bread and drink together from a common cup. The resolution of that problem was an extremely important one for the history of the church. It made it clear that forever, men, women and children from all of the world's national and ethnic communities, from all racial groups and economic groups are invited to that Table by faith to become this new family of God.

Three centuries after our Lord came into the world, into the Roman Empire, an Empire full of peoples with long memories and ample reasons for hostility, suspicion and even potential violence toward one another, the leaders of that Empire legalized Christianity. Soon after that, they made it virtually the only legal religion of the Empire and apparently for one very interesting reason: as they looked out across this Empire of people caught in conflict, they saw a particular community, perhaps the only one of its kind, which demonstrated by its attitudes and behavior that the Gospel which called it together and formed it allowed individuals and communities to transcend all of the differences which so typically divided people in the Roman world. One might say that the Emperor reached out to take the Pax Christi - the Peace of Christ - in order to make it Rome's own in the hope that it could become the basis of Pax Romana - the Peace of Rome, hence to buy the Empire another thousand years of existence. We know, of course that was not to be so.

Centuries later, I suggest to you, relatively little in human nature has undergone any change. The world in which you and I live is still an expanse of territories filled with people with long memories and ample reasons for hate, suspicion and potential violence. If anything has changed, it is perhaps the context in which the human family lives. You and I know, whether we like it or not, we are now members of a global village. Our enemies are no longer oceans away, but whispers away. They stand at our elbows. The lives of the nations are now so bound up in one another that what affects our economy affects the economy of other peoples long distances away. We are a global community, nonetheless, still full of those reservations about whether or not we prefer to live peacefully together. Of course, the other change in our context is technological. You and I belong to the first generation in that global village capable, at the touch of a button, of destroying every man, woman and child on the earth.

This is the context for today's discussion about the relations of Christians in the Soviet Union and the United States. It is not simply a matter of reporting, as one often has done in churches, about the state of a Christian community in another part of the world. It really seems to me to be bound up with something utterly central to the Church's mission and to the Church's self-understanding. After all, the world is not terribly surprised when, for example, white middle-class, Presbyterian or Methodist or Episcopal congregations can get along together since the world perceives these people as essentially alike in any case. What the world has always found surprising is when enemies, when people who have little in common, begin to act toward each other in a way that the world cannot possibly understand.

In the case of our relations with Christians in the Soviet Union, one goes to the year 1956. In that year, in this country, in the midst of McCarthyism, a time when we were very fearful of Soviet power and anticipating deep conflicts between the Soviets and the United States, a few church leaders did something which was then quite unpopular. They crossed an ocean and a continent to rediscover the brothers and sisters in the churches in the Soviet Union from whom they had been virtually cut off since the Revolution in 1917. In the years since then the relations between our churches have gone through many phases. They have been enlarged and strengthened and I think are now a very significant factor in both our nations. This year marks the thousandth anniversary of the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev and the people of Kiev. For a thousand years, the influence of the Gospel has made itself felt on the cultures of Ukrainian and Byelorussians and Great Russians and all of the peoples of the Russian Empire, finally extending as far as Alaska and with missionaries who came down the western coast of the United States as far as San Francisco.

What did the American Church leaders discover when they visited the churches in 1956 and what will thousands of American Christians, travelling to the Soviet Union this year to participate in the Millennial Anniversary, discover? All of them, I believe, will bear witness to the fact that Christianity in the Soviet Union is alive and well and flourishing despite all of the difficulties, all of the suffering, which churches have undergone in the last seventy years. One way to point to that is just to look at statistics. The largest of the churches in the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church, consists today of at least 60 million faithful. (The most conservative estimate I've heard recently is fifty million, and there are those who mention figures of seventy-five and eighty million. Let's say sixty million.) That makes it a community larger in its membership than all of the Protestant and Orthodox Churches in the United States who are member churches of the National Council of Churches. This is a very large and significant community of persons, but by no means the only church in the Soviet Union.

If you travel from Moscow northwest to the Baltic Republics, you find a population of Lutherans and Roman Catholics. I'm told that about half of the population identifies itself with one of those two churches. One also finds among them a number of Methodists and scattered congregations of Reformed Christians.

Travel southward from Moscow to Armenia and there the numbers become very difficult to estimate. The Armenian Apostolic Church is much older than the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, it was established in the Fourth Century with the conversion of the Armenian King. It is a national church community which has known enormous suffering across its centuries of existence and even in this century with a holocaust in the period of the first World War at the hands of the Turks. Through all of that suffering, that church has kept alive the culture, the faith, all of those things which are central to Armenian identity. It's quite difficult to estimate numbers, because almost every member of that national community feels some sense of loyalty and gratitude toward the institutional community which has kept alive its faith and hope. Much the same could be said of the Georgian Orthodox church just to the north of Armenia. If one visits there today one finds, as in so many other places, a vigorous, witnessing Christian community.

Of course, one must mention Protestant communities. In addition to Lutheran, Methodist and Reformed in the Baltic Republic, there is a community of Reformed Christians, who are Hungarian speaking, along the common border between Hungary and the Soviet Union, and perhaps as many as three and a half million Evangelical Christian Baptists, whose congregations are spread all across the Soviet Union.

I should also mention the presence of a very large group of Roman Catholics in the Ukraine, most of them Uniate Christians, or Eastern Rite Roman Catholic Christians, whose legal existence has been denied by the Soviet Union since the end of the Second World War. So like some other communities, they have been forced to live a more or less underground existence. Many of us are hopeful that in the coming years we will see permission given for that community to emerge publicly and to be able to carry on its mission and ministry in ways which are much more favorable to it.

These are only statistics and they have, by the way, no necessary political implications. They simply suggest that a much larger part of the Soviet population is a believing and Christian population than most Americans might imagine. If you add to those numbers thirty-five to forty million Muslims, several million Buddhists, the world's third largest Jewish community (between two-and-a-half and three million), you discover that, in the Soviet Union, perhaps as many as a third of the population, after all the attempts to discourage that, still identify themselves in one way or another as members of believing communities.

In the last few years, the Church's role in the Soviet Union has been changing. The Church has been permitted to be present, for example, in mass media in ways not previously given to it. The Church has been able to hold major international conferences, mostly on peace and disarmament issues. Doubtless, they were permitted to do that because the Soviet government recognized that as being in its own self-interest. But the churches have undergone, both in mission in Soviet society and in their internal life, great renewal.

If you could visit with me a typical Orthodox congregation today you would see large numbers of young people. If you read editorials in Soviet magazines and newspapers, you would recognize that even the government speaks publicly now about the fact that many people in the new generation in the Soviet Union, for whatever reasons, have begun to come and to participate in the life of the church and have begun to make commitments of their lives as Christians.

I'd like to celebrate with you in closing today four gifts which have come to us as a result of the relationships between American and Soviet churches. The first of those that I would celebrate is the discovery that so many of us have been able to make in these relationships of how powerful the work of the Holy Spirit is in our baptism. We discover all over again that we did not choose God. It is God who has called us, God's people, through the Waters of Baptism, into the Church to constitute a new family. That's very significant in this case, for since we did not choose God, but respond to God's calling given to us, it's equally true that we did not choose one another. We discover that we are brothers and sisters, not so much because we agree about things, but because by a gracious act of God, we are constituted as a new family.

Can you imagine what that means in the Soviet Union? It gives one permission with a Soviet Christian or with Soviet Christian communities to sit down almost from the beginning to talk about the things which divide us, to speak about the things about which we disagree with the assurance that in doing so, we will not destroy a relationship which we did not create. We simply discover, again and again, that the Grace of God sustains that relationship in the midst of conflict. And, curiously, it's my experience at least, that some of the things that were the most off-putting in the beginning, some of the things that seemed strangest about Soviet Christians, in years of committed listening to one another and growing together, have become significant gifts for me as a Christian, and gifts I think for churches outside the Soviet Union.

The second gift that I would celebrate, and you are free as brothers and sisters to disagree with me, is that God is not on our side. God is not on the side of the United States. God is not on the side of the Soviet Union. God stands where God has always stood - on the side of justice, mercy, and peace. He is calling to His children in all of the world's national communities whether they are in the context of good governments or governments not so good. He has given them possibilities in each situation to witness to and work for justice, mercy and peace. That seems to me an important insight for American churches, for so long as we dare to identify God with a particular economic system, a particular ideological position, a particular national community, I think we are unable to hear the fullness and richness of the Gospel.

The third gift is difficult to describe. It is the discovery that, though our situations are radically different, nonetheless, both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, our churches face highly secularized societies. The challenge is, in that sense, the same in each context. It is to embody and demonstrate, in the lifestyle of persons and communities, what it means to live in the world as if God were truly there and as if the world did, in fact belong to God.

The fourth gift that I would celebrate is the discovery that God has called us into the Church not because God prefers us to others among God's children, but rather, that God calls us into the Church that, in a world at the end of the Twentieth Century, threatened with nuclear destruction, there should be a living embodiment of God's intention to redeem His creation, to redeem the world, and that the world should one day, indeed, become God's Kingdom. We are called to demonstrate again that God's love, extended to us in the Gospel, transcends all of our differences and makes of us a community which is God's sign of God's intention from the beginning that all men, women and children should receive this gift of brotherliness and sisterliness, should discover that we are indeed God's family, called to be the bearers of love, one toward another.

Sometimes I think I have seen this concretely embodied when, coming down the aisle of an Orthodox Church after a service, an old woman reaches out her hands and takes mine in hers. Her face is deeply lined. In her eyes I can see a reflection of the suffering of generations of Soviets, but she reaches out to me and, for that moment, she and I, along with others touching one another, become the visible bridges between our churches and our peoples. Once again God has used what seems weak and poor and insignificant.

What will happen to the churches in the Soviet Union in the future? I am not a prophet. I am only certain of one thing. I am hopeful that the Gorbachev era will mean new possibilities for the church's ministry and mission in the Soviet Union. But, whether the future for Christians in the Soviet Union is full of darkness or light, I am confident that, as has been the case for a thousand years, in good times and bad, a community of God's people across that nation will continue to welcome each day as the gift of God, and at the end of that day, will bless God, the Giver of Life. For the survival of that community and for its continuing witness, all of us must give thanks, and in our relations with those communities of Christians, join in a common partnership to struggle for justice and mercy and peace for all God's children everywhere.