For a while Christians considered the Soviet Union to be a great potential mission field; nevertheless when the door for the missions opened wide, it happened unexpectedly. Despite thousands of missionaries and millions of dollars invested immediately in spreading the gospel in the post-communist world, after a short-term tide, church growth declined back to pre-perestroika level. The research made during that period demonstrated that the so-called awakening had nothing to do with the biblical concept of repentance (i.e. a radical change of a person’s worldview). An explanatory model of the worldview transformation dynamics in post-communist society is developed as an attempt to understand what actually happened with the people worldview distribution during the collapse of Soviet Union.
Introduction
I wonder if anything similar has ever happened to you: it is time for you to get up, but you are still asleep and dreaming that you already woke up, got up, washed up, dressed, and now you are hurrying about your business. However when you finally do wake up, it turns out that your so-called awakening was just a dream, an illusion, and in reality you have desperately overslept.
The fall of the communist totalitarian system was a long-awaited but, at the same time, unexpected event. For a while many denominations considered this area to be a great potential mission field; nevertheless, when the door for the missions opened wide, it happened unexpectedly. Many Western churches and missions immediately responded by revising their missionary plans, projects, and budgets. Thousands of missionaries and millions of dollars went to the new mission field for the sake of spreading the gospel in the post-communist world (Sawatsky 30).
By all appearances the sowers came to soil that has long been waiting for the seeds, and the immediate harvest was abundant. The former Soviet Union demonstrated a quickening of keen interest for everything “spiritual”: religious teachings, the Bible, traditions, and services. The influx of people to the church resembled an avalanche. In those days evangelists could just go out into the street and shout, “Jesus loves you!” Immediately a crowd of people would surround them and literally grab evangelistic booklets out of their hands. The next day one in five people who heard the shout would come to church, and out of them half would respond to the call for repentance (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 5). One could pitch a tent on the outskirts of a city, and people would come all by themselves and beg for some religious literature. Churches would be quickly filled with people. Everyone had a chance to hear the good news at least once. When asked in public opinion polls, 80 percent of the population declared themselves believers (Sipko 34). All of a sudden the former Soviet Union, the former stronghold of atheism, turned into the most believing country in the world.
The illusion was like the long-awaited awakening is finally here; However, just a decade passed, and the tide of interest disappeared like it had never existed. After the sudden attendance upsurge in church in the beginning of the nineties, the response number went to a level lower than it was at the period prior to the collapse of communism (Ibid.). An enormous amount of seed was sown, and the first young crops were so plentiful. If the number of sowers grew, one could logicaly to expect that harvest would multiply as well. However, the result was opposite. The harvest happened to be an illusion.
The problem is that the church often mistakes the outward appearance for the real harvest. This outward appearance is a side effect rather than the desired result. Considering the ratio of the outcome to the investment in human resources, finances, printed materials, education, and other efforts, the long-awaited evangelization in the countries of the former Soviet Union was the greatest failure of the church in the twentieth century (Levoushkan 27).
At the highest tide of the awakening a study was made to find out why the methods of mass missionary activity of the last decade of the twentieth century did not affect people’s worldview despite the change of their identity from unbelievers to believers. The study became a motivation for developing an explanatory model of the worldview transformation in post-communist society (Golovin, Ìèðîâîççðåíèå 52). The main reason for the shortcomings of the traditional Western evangelistic methods in Eastern Europe is related to the fact that they are far away from biblical practice. One will never find in the Scriptures most of the expected common elements of the evangelism of today: the Four Spiritual Laws, the invitation to make a decision for Christ or to open the door of one’s heart to Jesus, the altar call, or the repentant sinner’s prayer. All these practices have no direct connection with Scripture; they are rooted in traditions developed in historical Western culture. When those traditions are taken away from the cultural ground where they were developed, they turn into para-spiritual techniques or technologies. In order to reach peoples of former communist countries, the church should return to biblical methods of evangelism and develop applications of those biblical methods appropriate for the exact context of each particular regional subculture.
Furthermore, the failure of evangelism in Eastern Europe could be a timely warning to missions in the West. If biblical relevance of the traditional methods depends on the cultural context, then the current postmodern culture shift may make these methods irrelevant even in the countries where they were developed.
Only one verse in the Bible does have Jesus knocking on a door—not of somebody’s heart but of the church. This church is quite comfortable with its own programs and projects. It keeps itself busy with answering questions nobody asks and by dreaming of awakening. The church should decide either to wake up and let Jesus in or to keep sleeping in a comfortable setting of homemade traditions.
Biblical Concept of Repentance
New Testament translations often (in Russian always) use the word repent as the equivalent of two original words—μεταμελομαι and μετανοεω. However, the synonyms have different etymology and semantics. The first etymologically means a change of what one cares about, which is exactly what happened to Judas when he saw that Jesus was condemned (Matt. 27:3). “To change one’s mind” or “to regret” are proper equivalents for the word; however “to repent” is used as well (e.g., in English, Matt. 21:32 KJV; NIV). As the research has demonstrated, this meaning is the very one people see in the concept of repentance most often. Nevertheless, the Scripture associates only the second word, μετανοεω, with repentance as an act of conversion to Christ. Its etymologically means a cardinal change in the way of thinking; turning the understanding of the basic principles of life “upside down”; a revolution of the entire mind-set; or transformation of the worldview. (Golovin, Ìèðîâîççðåíèå 10)
The success of the evangelistic crusades in the twentieth-century pre-postmodern Western culture, which is homogeneous in its basic worldview, has provided an illusion of the two basic belief groups: those who are Christians already and those who are not yet. Repentance came to be understood as a common action equally applied to all individuals of the latter group; evangelism was reduced to a set of simple methodologies or even technologies.
Forgoten Meaning of the Well-known Parable
Christians agree that repentance leads various individuals to more or less a basic set of beliefs called Christian worldview. However, the starting point of the process is different for people in different cultures and societies or even in the same multicultural pluralistic society such as the ancient Roman Empire or postmodern societies of today. In my opinion the well-known but not always the well-understood parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-15) is a key text for evangelism strategy. Following the disciples of Jesus, modern Christians are quite satisfied with the explanation of the symbols he provided; however, the parables of Jesus usually have a direct pragmatic application to the question, “What do we need to do?” For this reason some authors consider a broader interpretation of the parable as an evangelism strategy model (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 12).
From their point of view, the parable unlikely means to “throw the seeds of the Word of God everywhere without thinking, and then, come what may” because if it were true, the followers of Jesus would not need the meaning of the parable at all. Jesus was also not telling them to “look carefully where to sow and where not to sow, so that you do not waste the seeds; sow only where there is good soil” because Jesus himself was saying that “[t]he Son of Man came to save what was lost” and “your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost” (Matt. 18:11, 14, NIV). The main point of the parable is also not that one should be looking for soil more suitable for sowing; otherwise noone would have a chance to sow at all, since the world is corrupted by sin, and the Word of God is alien to it. The world naturally rejects the Word.
I would rather agree with the authors who see the following application of the parable to the evangelistic context: If one wants to reap an abundant harvest, necessary to prepare the soil for sowing first; otherwise, the seed will not bear the desired fruit (e.g., Coleman, Master’s Way 71). The experience of agriculture tells that no matter how good the quality of the soil is one cannot expect a good harvest on virgin land without preparing the soil for the sowing beforehand. A farmer needs to plow up the virgin soil, uproot the stumps, pull up the weeds, and remove the stones. Often necessary to use fertilizers, drain swamps, and strengthen the productive layer of the soil (Ham 59). Undeveloped land cannot bear abundant fruit all by itself. “We often have to clear away rocks and pull weeds and plow the field before we can plant; irrigation may be necessary” (Hunter, Radical Outreach 182). The very same thing can be said about the world: no fertile field in it that could receive the Word of God immediately. If a rich harvest is the goal, then one need to labor purposefully to prepare the soil; otherwise, the expectations will fail:
There is a constant battle going on for the soil of the culture, a battle that is rarely recognized as such because it takes place at an evolutionary pace. It is a grand conflict, the eternal struggle, the ultimate battle—but strangely, it has become the evangelical world’s Vietnam. Instead of being recognized as the crucial ministry that it is, sowing has become an unofficial war waged by unsupported, underequipped personnel who return from daily battle unnoticed, unheralded, unworthy of the recognition due those who serve in True Ministry [of harvesting]. (Downs)
The church should recognize the work of the plowing and soil preparation through the worldview persuasion as a strategically important part of evangelism. After all, the Scripture warns, “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing” (Prov. 20:4), but “when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest” (1 Cor. 9:10).
Post-Communist Awakening in the Soviet Union
The passing of the law “On the Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations” in the Soviet Union in October 1990 and the abrogation of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution on the “Leading Role of the Communist Party in the Soviet Society” were indisputable signs of change in a country that had been closed to the gospel for many decades. A long-awaited door for the good news suddenly opened widely. Both national churches and foreign missions gained unlimited access to the mission field of former Soviet Republics.
As a result, the country immediately saw a quickening of keen interest for everything spiritual: religious teachings, holy books, historical traditions, and the heritage of the past. Western churches and missions immediately responded with money and projects (Sawatsky 30). The influx of people to the church resembled an avalanche (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 5). When asked in public opinion polls, 80 percent of the population declared themselves Christians (Sipko 34). All of a sudden, the stronghold of atheism turned into the most believing country in the world. “There appeared to be a quite amazing phenomenon of Russians from all walks of life seeking Christian faith” (Sawatsky 25).
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The new religious organizations’ (e.g., churches, missions, monasteries, and unions) annual relative increase reached a record level—7.7 percent in 1991 and 8.5 percent in 1992 (see Figure 1; Kargina, “Î äèíàìèêå”). If only twenty-eight denominations operated (seven of them without state registration, i.e. illegally) in the USSR in 1990, by 1993 the number of registered ones alone became sixty-three (Yurash). Estimating the number of unregistered groups was practically impossible because their operation was no longer illegal. By all appearances the long-awaited awakening had finally come.
However, the harvest time was very short. The increase in the relative number of new religious organizations has been declining very fast since 1992 (see Figure 1). One could expect that though new church planting slowed down, the existing churches might keep growing. Nevertheless, in the same way, the number of baptisms in existing churches decreased as well. Figure 2 shows the number of baptisms in the traditional denomination of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. This group, which maintained legal status and survived the communist period, did the best job of collecting and reporting data; nevertheless, the picture is common for all groups.
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Most polls evaluated the number of Christians in Ukraine by the end of the Awakening at about 80 percent; however, many sociologists doubt the veracity of these results depending on the criteria or definitions (“Äîêóìåíòû”). Representatives of the Orthodox Church insist that self-identification of a person as Christian is sufficient (Sinelina). However many experts believe religious identity works in this case as a euphemism for cultural and ethnic identity and has nothing to do with the person’s worldview. For instance, at the Russian Dooma (the parliament) election at the very end of the twentieth century, an almost equal amount of believers (19.7 percent) and unbelievers (20.1 percent) voted for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Mchedlov), and six years later 59 percent of the CPRF supporters positioned themselves as Russian Orthodox Christians (“Ðåëèãèÿ”). More conservative sociologists insist that more rigid criteria, such as attendance at church services, knowledge of the basics of doctrine, and participation in communion, should be applied (Kaariaynen and Ôóðìàí). Depending on the criteria’s rigidity or flexibility, the value of the parameter can vary for the same group in different studies from 4-6 percent, 70-80 percent, or even more (“Äîêóìåíòû”). Apparently belonging to the formal institution of the Russian Orthodox Church just became a marker of ethnic identity (Clarke and Reid 19), replacing the one of belonging to the state communist system.
Because Protestant/evangelical forms of Christianity are foreign to the cultural and ethnic traditions of the region, the statistical data on them is more reliable but not very encouraging. Only 1 percent of Ukrainian people confess themselves as Protestant/evangelical Christians (“‘Îáîçðåâàòåëü’”), and the relative number of them in society has not changed for several years (Kargina, Ïðîòåñòàíòû). The post-communism evangelical churches of the first decade of the twenty-first century in the Ukraine are generally characterized by
1. a lack of positive social identity,
2. an inclination to Western rather than national models,
3. random rather than strategically planned ways of development, and
4. a dependence on Western financial support (Cherenkov, Òðàíñôîðìàö³¿)
I believe the loss of the worldview persuasion element in the proclamation of the gospel message is the main reason for this sad situation. Interestingly Steve Saint reports on the similar situation with churches in the Amazon among Waodani tribe believers, the converts from the paganism. He makes the following conclusion:
I believe the problem isn’t a lack of sincere effort but misunderstanding of the Great Commission and resulting use of counterproductive methods.… To fulfill our commission, we need a new paradigm; actually it is an old one we need to go back to” (19-20).
I believe worldview dimension of evangelism is that missing paradigm.
A Study on the Post-Communist Worldview Transformation
In order to put to the test the hypothesis of the systematic mistake in the generally practiced approaches in the estimation of the religious conditions of society, an attempt was made to evaluate the basic worldviews spread throughout society in order to determine how much the traditional methods of evangelism had impacted the most common beliefs of the population in post-communist Ukraine toward the Christian worldview during the period of the most intensive missionary intervention in the last decade of the twentieth century. The study provided a more realistic picture of the spiritual conditions of post-communist society.
The research was made in 1998, at the time of the highest church attendance of the so-called post-communism awakening. It sought to find out how much the beliefs and ideas of people are concordant with their claimed worldview and the result of which practically destroyed the generally spread myth of the great evangelism success and the spiritual awakening in the former Soviet Union countries immediately after the collapse of the totalitarian system based on communist ideology.
The population of the study was a group of young Ukrainian men from practically all regions of the country, who by virtue of their citizenship, age, education, family, legal, and health status, happened to be drafted for the military service at the same time and by chance were enlisted to a military element of recruits who arrived at the same time to the same field base for their basic military training. The newly drafted privates of eight companies each with two to three hundred men were invited to participate voluntarily in the survey. Everyone agreed with enthusiasm, and the total number of the respondents reached two thousand persons.
A questionnaire developed to study the respondents’ general beliefs for the sake of the estimation of their worldview consistency contained sixty items that could be classified into three major categories.
About 30 percent of the questions were directly related to the issue of the study and dealt with the beliefs of the respondents. A respondent had to identify himself as a believer or nonbeliever (these general categories were used intentionally to avoid association with any organized religion, denomination, cult, or sect). Some questions dealt with the deity attributes and with the role of the respondents’ understanding of the role of religion. Some questions were designed for finding out the position of the respondent on the issues that indicate the polarization between biblical worldview and other worldviews (e.g., life after death, resurrection, reincarnation, astrology, extraterrestrials, ape-to-human evolution, superstitions, abortion, euthanasia, suicide).
The other 10 percent of the instrument’s questions were designed to serve as indicators of the consistency of the respondents’ answers. Examples included, for instance, either no-option questions such as, “Do you always tell the truth?” or they could be the same interrogative statement formulated one time in the positive and another time in the negative.
The other 60 percent of the questions were designed with the sole purpose of masking the actual goal of the survey from the respondents who, if they knew the goal of the study, could be tempted to provide insincere answers just to meet my expectations. In addition, these questions concealed the goal of the study from the element’s higher commanders who, as former hardcore communists, were still suspicious of anything dealing with religion. Some examples are random personal questions such as, “Do you have a girlfriend?” “What is your favorite meal?”, or “What kind of beverages do you prefer?”
The Soviet anti-religious propaganda during the times of communism constantly used the term believer as a fright opposing it to a virtue to be an atheist. As a result the term became a euphemism for Christian and refers to it semantically most of the time without implication to any particular church denomination or doctrine. For that reason, I prefertd the neutral terms believer and unbeliever to avoid any specific wrong associations.
Limitations of the study. The research clearly indicated the inconsistent tendencies in the worldview of the post-communist Ukrainian people. Nevertheless, despite sufficiently random sampling of the respondents, the methodology of the study required an extended generalization of the average Ukrainian beliefs because all the respondents represented only a specific stratum of the society, which was limited by the following parameters:
1. Gender. All respondents were male. Only male conscription is compulsory in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Female military service is voluntary and contract based.
2. Age. The age group of the respondents was 18-23 with the overwhelming majority of those being 18 years old because that is the legal draft age unless a deferment can be provided due to health conditions, family status (having two or more children, a rare phenomena for that age group), or studies at a state college or graduate school.
3. Education. Most of the respondents were high school graduates (the lowest educational level for the country with the history of a compulsory high school education). Only few are either college graduates or student dropouts.
4. Marital and family status. Most of the respondents were singles and were a part of their parents’ household before they were drafted for military service.
Generalizations of the study. Nevertheless, several factors in the study increased the research results’ representativeness and allowed the study to be generalized for finding the common tendency in society:
1. Geographic and social sampling. The respondents were the random sampling of the 1997 nationwide draft—the recruits who by chance went to that specific training center. They represent various regions and subcultures of the country, both urban and rural residential group, and high and low income households.
2. Age representation. The respondents experienced as teenagers the recent changes in society right after the collapse of communism. The social tendencies of society’s transitional period impacted the shaping of their worldview shaping especially effectively.
3. Enthusiastic reflection. The survey focused on their personal values, preferences, and beliefs, which was in great contrast to the respondents’ current daily experience. Almost every item of the recruits’ training practice had a goal of their depersonalization. In that specific context, the study of something related to their personal interests produced a great enthusiastic response.
4. Independence of judgment. All respondents were far away from any of their referent group (e.g., family, friends, colleagues) whose presence could influence the respondents’ judgment directly or indirectly otherwise.
The research results, after being systematized, showed good correspondence with the data of other studies (e.g. Sipko 34; Shangina), providing an optimism for the possible generalization of all the studies results, if not as an estimation then at least as an indicator of the average post-communism Ukrainian worldview inconsistency.
Findings of the Studies. Because the most of the respondents (about 80 percent, good correspondence between all studies) identified themselves as believers or more believers than unbelievers, the findings on the beliefs of those who consider themselves believers were more reliable statistically and, after all, more relevant to the goal of the study; however, some responds of the “unbelievers” provided the food for thoughts as well.
The findings of the study were grouped into five basic categories reflecting various aspects implied in the question, “What do our believers believe in?”
The first category deals with the divine attributes comprehended by the respondents. The second one deals with their understanding of the purpose and goal of religion and the church as well as their own role in them. The third category deals with the beliefs related to human origins and the sanctity of human life. The fourth category deals with beliefs related to life after death issues. The fifth category includes the issues of the popular false teachings that reflect the polarization between biblical worldview and other worldviews—issues such as reincarnation, astrology, extraterrestrials, and beliefs in omens.
Divine attributes beliefs. First of all, important to know how the basic understanding of the deity by the respondents correlates with the biblical concepts of divine attributes.
Not surprising that 100 percent of the believers provided a positive answer to the question, “Does God exist?” Nevertheless, an unexpectedly high number of the unbelievers (11 percent) responded in the affirmative as well, which means that every tenth unbeliever does believe that God exists, This finding sounds as an obvious contradiction in terms: Something exists, but I do not believe in it, or do not want to believe in it, or just do not care; it does not bother my way of life. The decades of communist brainwashing trained people not to worry about contradictions.
The expectations of comprehending God as a person by unbelievers are random and unpredictable. Personal attributes of God are meaningless for unbelievers after all. The shocking fact is that only 36.7 percent of believers considered God a person.
The partial clarification of this surprising revelation could be found in the fact that 40 percent of the believers understood God as some certain impersonal supernatural supreme power. Regretfully, the method of the study did not allow the discovery of the concepts of God as held by the other 23.3 percent of believers.
The question of understanding God as Creator, the “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen” (“Nicene Creed”) was intentionally asked in negative form, and the responses to it was a double surprise. Only a little more than half (56 percent) of the unbelievers agreed that God did not create the world. More than every fifth believer (21 percent) agreed with the statement, probably due to the influence of the brainwashing through the atheistic naturalistic education system the state still monopolizes. Possibly a big part of the believers possess mostly a deistic rather than a Judeo-Christian understanding of the ultimate reality.
The respondents’ beliefs in the divine attributes are represented in Table 1.
|
Belief |
Believers % | Nonbelievers % |
|
God exists | 100 | 11 |
| God is a person | 36.7 | 18.7 |
|
God is a supreme power | 40 | |
|
God did not create the world | 21 | 56 |
Religion and church role beliefs. Very important also to figure out the role and value the believers see in the religion and the church.
About one-third of the believers (30.1 percent) thinks that all religions lead to God eventually. Less than one-half of the believers (42.2 percent) agree that faith provides the meaning for life, and for less than every fifth believer (18.8 percent), his faith or religion means relationships with God, so the concepts of faith or religion are not related to the idea of the ultimate truth for the respondents.
Beliefs about the church are even more lamentable. More than one-half (58.1 percent) of believers can do without the church. Almost every eighth believer (12.7 percent) does not know any reason why the church should exist at all.
Predictable that a large part of believers (72 percent) actually consider themselves to be Russian Orthodox Christians; however, the most amazing fact is that 27 percent of unbelievers consider themselves to be Russian Orthodox Christians as well (Russian Orthodox atheists would be better term for them). Obviously the term “Russian Orthodox Christian” merely serves as the cultural and ethnical identity indicator and has nothing to do either with the Russian Orthodox Church doctrines and traditions or with the person’s worldview. For many it is accepted by virtue of infant baptism, which was observed as a ritual even during the days of state atheism without much biblical meaning.
The respondents’ beliefs on religion and the church’s role are represented in Table 2.
|
Beliefs | Believers % | Nonbelievers % |
| All religions lead to God | 30.1 | |
|
Faith gives life meaning | 42.2 | 8.1 |
|
Faith is a relationship with God | 18.8 | 2.2 |
| A believer can do without a church | 58.1 | |
| Church is not needed at all | 12.7 | 100 |
| I am Russian Orthodox Christian | 72.8 | 27.8 |
Beliefs related to the human origins and the sanctity of human life. Three unavoidable questions for which any worldview system should provide answers are, “Where do we came from?” “Who we are?” and “Where we are going?” The first question is the most important: The origin foreordains the value and the destiny (Golovin, Ýâîëþöèÿ 14).
Unexpectedly, almost similar numbers of believers and unbelievers (21 and 24 percent respectively) believe that humans naturally evolved from apes. While the population of the study is the very generation shaped in the times when the propaganda based system collapsed, every school keeps using secular science textbooks with the focus on Darwinism. But as the study shows, people are not very much influenced by the idea of the natural evolution of humans in general. Surprising also that the presupposed worldview filter does not influence very much if at all the difference of the believers’ and unbelievers’ openness to the idea of human natural evolution form apes. The difference in 3 percent only could make one doubt the involvement of any worldview filter here. One can only speculate why the decades of purposeful brainwashing in the naturalistic Darwinism based secular humanism impacted the believers so much or did not impacted unbelievers that much.
Sanctity of human life seems beyond the understanding of believers. Generations of communist rule make people see only the pragmatic value in a person’s life and no other axiological dimension. Not surprisingly, only about one-third of the believers (29.8 percent) consider abortion as murder, and almost one-quarter of them (23 percent) justifies euthanasia.
As for suicide as an option for the escape from life’s problems, 54 percent of believers consider suicide to be a justified way out of a crisis situation, while only 46 percent of unbelievers would choose this option. The respondents’ answers to the questions related to human origin and sanctity of life are represented in Table 3.
| Beliefs | Believers % | Nonbelievers % |
|
Humans evolved from apes | 21 | 24 |
|
Abortion is murder | 29.8 | |
| Euthanasia can be justified | 23.4 | |
| Suicide can be justified | 54 | 46 |
After-death destiny beliefs. The beliefs of destiny after death are among the most crucial issues of any worldview and/or doctrinal system.
Surprisingly, just a little more than half of the believers (58.6 percent) believe in life after death. An unexpectedly high amount of unbelievers (15 percent) agree with them.
Notable that more believers believe in the existence of heaven rather than in hell (61.1 percent versus 55.3 percent) while unbelievers demonstrate the opposite position—more of them believe in hell rather than in heaven (16 percent versus 15.5 percent).
The most shocking fact is that only 20 percent of the believers believe in the resurrection of the dead, despite the fact that “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” is the concluding statement of the Nicene Creed, which is recited by the worshipers at every Russian Orthodox Church liturgy service as the formal doctrinal statement. Therefore, again, self-identification of the respondents as believers has nothing to do with either the practice or teaching of any church but is used as a cultural and/or ethnical identity indicator.
The respondents’ beliefs on after-death destiny are represented in Table 4.
| Beliefs | Believers % | Nonbelievers % |
| Life after death is a real | 58.6 | 15 |
| Havens are real | 61.1 | 15.5 |
| Hell is real | 55.3 | 16 |
| Resurrection of the dead is real | 20 |
Biblical worldview consistency indicators. Our greatest interest of studies results was focused on the last group of the questions where respondents had to indicate their views on the issues incompatible with any conservative biblical worldview system and with the Russian Orthodox Church’s official position in particular.
Concerning various superstitions, believers are in the leading position on every point here. 67 percent of believers believe in extraterrestrials, while for unbelievers this parameter reaches 62 percent only. Almost the same amount of believers (59 percent) and of unbelievers (57 seven percent) put their trust in the omens. Considerably more believers (41 percent) then unbelievers (31 percent) rely on the astrology. Finally, the amount of the believers who believe in reincarnation is five times bigger than unbelievers—30 percent versus 6 percent.
The respondents’ answers to the questions used as biblical worldview consistency indicators are represented at the Table 5.
| Beliefs | Believers % | Nonbelievers % |
| Extraterrestrials exist | 67 | 62 |
| Omens are trustworthy | 59 | 57 |
| Astrology is reliable | 41 | 31 |
| Reincarnation is real | 30 | 6 |
Summary of the Studies. Hard to refrain from repeating after the apostle, “I see that in every way you are very [emphasis mine] religious” (Acts 17:22). The believers in post-communism Ukraine believe in everything they could but what the Bible tells them they should believe.
Regretfully the context of the formal ideologically neutral sociological survey at the post-Soviet military base did not allow me to ask direct questions on the respondents’ views about the Bible itself, but one can be sure in the vast variety of the ideas related to the issue.
As for the available data, in short the following could be concluded:
1. People who consider themselves believers, which is a euphemism for Christian in Ukranian culture, do not have a clear idea about who the God of the Bible is. They have a wide spectrum of the ideas on the divine attributes with the various elements from deism to New Age.
2. Religion has nothing to do with the concept of truth for most of the respondents who consider themselves believers, the church is an obsolete institution that a believer can easy live without or nobody needs at all.
3. Many believers believe in the natural origin of humans and do not consider human life holy. Many believers do not see anything wrong in using abortion or euthanasia as a way to solve problems, and more than half of the believers would consider suicide as an option.
4. Only a little bit more than half the believers believe in some form of the life after death, but only for one out of five does it mean resurrection of the dead.
5. People who consider themselves believers ure uncritically open for the ungrounded beliefs on any idea at all much more than unbelievers do.
As one can see from the study results, the change in the statistical reports of the unbelievers to believers ratio from eighty to twenty in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century for the reverse ratio of twenty to eighty by the end of the decade cannot be interpreted by any means as a Christian awakening like some political and/or religious groups are trying to present (Sinelina). The worldview shift processes in the post-communist society have nothing in common with either the results of the historical awakenings in the West or with the ones in Russia at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Many native and foreign evangelists, missionaries, and church leaders kept themselves busy at that time applying uncritically the evangelism methods that used to work a century ago in Russia or decades ago in the West, but do not work anymore even there. Because the worldview persuasion element was often lost in the evangelization projects and activities, the results led to even worse conditions.
The Dynamics of the Great Post-Communism Awakening Illusion
In order to understand general mistakes with the missions in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism to figure out the current status and to provide the recommendations for more effective evangelism in the region both national evangelists and foreign missionaries need to understand what actually happened with people’s worldviews.
Biblical Classification of Worldviews. Traditionally a person who is encountered on the mission field falls into one of two categories—Christian or nonbeliever. The recently popular term seeker is often used as a synonym or even euphemism for the latter one.
Interestingly the biblical practice of evangelism classifies individuals into four basic groups, not two, according to their relation to the gospel message. The evangelistic approaches found in Scripture have many similarities within the given category, but they are always different when applied to people from different categories. The basic worldview categories could be conditionally called Gentiles, Jews, infants, and the faithful (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 10-15). The first two categories are traditionally called unbelievers, and of the last two Christians.
Difference between the Gentiles and the Jews. The best biblical illustration for the difference in the reaction of nonbelievers from different worldview categories to the gospel message can be found in Acts 26, where Paul is under arrest in Caesarea Philippi and gets the opportunity to present his case to the governor Festus and King Agrippa II. Two people are listening to the same message. Both are noble and well educated in a classical Roman way. However, one of them, the governor, loses his patience from listening to the nonsense (26:24). The apostle is not at all surprised by such a reaction. “Sorry, your Excellency,” he responds politely, “I am talking not to you but to his Majesty, who understands me perfectly because I am speaking the words of truth and common sense. Isn’t it so, Your Majesty?” The king cannot find a better response than to force a joke.
In this example two unbelievers are listening to one and the same speech, but for the first one it is folly, complete nonsense, while for the other one it is words of wisdom and common sense. One may wish the earth could swallow him up so that he does not have to answer the question; the other one listens and can understand absolutely nothing. The difference is not their education or social status but their worldview—Festus’ is Gentile, and the king’s is Jewish. The terms are used here in a general sense, not meaning a formal religious system but the worldview of a person. A Gentile worldview has no place for the one and only God or for any kind of absolutes or supernatural revelation.
References to prophecies and other Old Testament messianic teachings do not make any sense to Gentiles but are a very important element of witnessing to Jews:
Whether we are looking at the sermons of Peter, the preaching of Paul in Romans or the Dialogue of Justin with Trypho, we find that the matter is argued and settled entirely on the basis of the Scriptures. Do they or do they not back up the claims the Christians are putting forward in the name of Jesus? That is the issue. (Green 119)
Luke, for instance, is clear that using Old Testament testimonia “was the apostolic method of preaching the gospel to Jews.” However, “he does not, apparently, use it himself, nor does he represent it as the normal approach to Gentiles” (Green 104).
The Gentile worldview does not involve a concept of the bad news of the Fall and corruption. The world in which they live is exactly the way it is suppose to be (Ham et al. 161). Without knowing the bad news, the good news does not make any sense to them. They are their own gods, deciding by themselves what is right and what is wrong (Golovin, Ýâîëþöèÿ 85). According to the Jewish worldview, they are monotheists. They acknowledge the existence of the highest and the absolute. They can call it a certain “supreme power,” “universal mind,” “noosphere” (a totality of individual minds of all being), “original impersonal cause of being,” and, finally, God. Jews acknowledge a design and purpose to the world. They understand what sin is, and they are looking for some way to be saved. They wonder, “Can Christ be that way?” That is the stumbling block for a Jew (Ham 39-47).
As Paul writes, preaching Christ crucified is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). As seen here, Paul’s message is a stumbling block to Agrippa: he does not know where to put himself. However, for Festus this address is complete foolishness.
A conversion (μετανοια), a complete overhaul of thinking, is necessary for a person to pass from being a Gentile to being a Jew. That kind of transformation is the goal Paul reaches at the occasion where he addresses the intellectual elite of Athens at Areopagus. The apostle does not refer to Moses or the prophets because such references do not make sense to the audience. He quotes from Greek poets such as Epimenides and Aratus to proclaim the sound doctrine in the very language of his listeners. “This is … true evangelism, where the content of the gospel is preserved while the mode of expression is tuned to the ears of the recipients” (Green 182). Actually, in the Athens address, Paul uses the method of Plato’s famous dialogue to find the god’s relation to the concept of good (if the gods are submitted to the good, they are not gods than, but the good is the god because god is a supreme being and cannot be submitted to anything by definition). The apostle leads the listeners by way of the ontological and cosmological applications of Plato’s axiological argumentation, of which they are aware: God is the one who created all people; therefore, something people create cannot be god (Golovin, Ââåäåíèå 20). In fact, by applying that approach to the talk with Gentiles for the sake of converting them to a Jewish worldview, Paul actually forestalls both the second and third way of Thomas as well as Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence (Miethe and Habermas 70-71).
Because a Gentile-to-Jew type of conversion is not related to a visible action, such as baptism in Christian conversion, the number of people who are reached by Paul’s Areopagus address is unknown. Nevertheless, at least four of his listeners are smart enough to follow the ultimate direction Paul sets and to accept Jesus, thereby experiencing a multiple-level conversion (from Gentile to at least an infant).
“Peter and Paul adapted their message to the worldviews of their respondents. A comparison of Peter’s message on Pentacost (Acts 2:14-36) and in the house of Cornelius (10:34-43), and of Paul’s messages in the synagogue in Antioch in Pisidia (13:16-41) and on Mars’ hill in Athens (17:22-31) will reveal the profound appreciation for the differences between monotheistic Jews and Gentile God-fearers [both are Jews according to their worldview] and between Jews and polytheistic heathen” (Hesselgrave 401).
Difference between infants and the faithful. Not all people who come to Christ have the same worldview. Some people go to church to get something; others to give. Although all believers are called to do the latter, it does not happen right away. Not surprisingly “many Christian books, as well as much Christian teaching and thought, essentially begin with man and implicitly portray God as man’s need-meeter” (Stone and Smith 9).
Bob Sjogren and Gerald Robinson wittily call the difference between the approach of these two categories to the Master as “Cat and Dog Theology”: “A dog says, ‘You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me, you must be God.’ A cat says, ‘You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me, I must be God’” (13). The theology of the former is “thou-ology,” and of the latter, “me-ology”—“It’s all about me” (14).
Generally new converts are infants in Christ (1 Cor. 3:1) for a certain period of time. For some it is a longer period; for others shorter. They are, generally speaking, not capable of giving yet. As infants they need to be fed, they need to be taught to cope with their natural desires, and they need someone to change their diapers. They need to be constantly guided and protected. When they fall, their knees need to be treated with medicine, and they need to be taught how not to fall. To demand anything more from them is just like accusing a five-year-old of not being an adult.
Reaching a certain level of maturity takes time. When a person accepts Christ, he or she declares Jesus as Lord and Savior. In the beginning, however, the only thing in which the person is interested is salvation. Only some time later does the new believer realize what the lordship of Christ really means. Only then the person reaches the point traditionally called commitment. At this point the worldview of the person (ideals, goals, values, priorities) undergoes a serious transformation that can even be considered another μετανοια—a cardinal change of the mentality, the one to which everyone is called:
Nor is any individual conversion complete until a Christian mind is formed within. To bring our every thought into captivity to Christ, to think Christianly, to see all of life in relationship to the Creator and Lord of all, this is not an optional appendage of secondary importance but is at very heart of what it means to be Christian. (Holmes 11)
The Bible calls these people the faithful (e.g., 1 Pet. 5:12; 1 Cor. 4:17; Eph. 1:1).
Some churches with an intentional strategic focus on spiritual growth and discipleship develop more detailed classification of the stages of maturity (Hunter, Church 154-56). However, all of the stages can be systematized according to worldview into two categories: infants and the faithful. Comparison of two of Paul’s letters—1 Corinthians and Ephesians—provides clarification. The reason for the difference in approach can be found in the very address of the second letter: “To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus [emphasis mine]” (Eph. 1:1,). The letter to the Corinthians is also addressed “to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy” (1 Cor. 1:2); however, as infants they are not ready for the solid food (3:1-2) of understanding the administration of the “mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God” (Eph. 3:9).
Conversion as a process. The gospel is never heard in isolation but it is always heard against one’s worldview context (Craig). “Conversion is usually not a single event but an evolving process in which many aspects of a person’s life may be affected” (Rambo 10). It involves several stages of worldview transformation. “For some, that change is abrupt and radical; for others, it is gradual and very subtle in its effects upon a person’s life” (6). If, for instance, “Paul provides the classical example of sudden conversion, that of Peter is much more gradual” (Green 226).
James F. Engel and Norton H. Wilbert make an attempt to develop a scale that would allow the evangelist to determine where the listeners are on their way towards God (45). However, this scale was designed specifically for direct evangelism; in other words, it is applicable starting only at the level of Jews. Even in a later work, Engel and William A. Dyrness do not consider persuading the skeptics (i.e., Gentiles) and traditionally treat conversion as a decision-making process (100-01).
Engel’s approach was developed later by other authors and in various ways, from Rambo’s Stage Model of conversion (16-17) on the one end of the spectrum to the practical classifications of believers some churches adopt for intensive purposeful discipleship (Hunter. Church 154-56) on the other. Nevertheless most of the authors still neglect the need for worldview persuasion at the gentiles’ level.
Remembering a “fundamental communicating principle: begin where people are, not where you wish they were” (Henderson 30), the Church should equally consider the mind-set differences between people in all of four worldview categories. Hard to underestimate “how flexible the early evangelists were, getting inside the mindset of pagans and Jews alike, and transposing the gospel into appropriate key in order to intrigue and engage them” (Green 18).
The kingdom message should be communicated and approached differently within the categories, and the role of the communicator of the message will be different as well. The worldview persuasion element is important in every category (Pritchard). However, on the levels of Jews, infants, and faithful, it is secondary to the functions of proclamation, mentoring, and equipping accordingly, while on the level of Gentiles the function of persuasion is the primary one (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 30).
Post-communism worldview transformatiom dynamics model. To provide a model for the dynamics of the post-communism awakening illusion, four biblical basic worldview categories—Gentiles, Jews, infants, and the faithful— we used as a sort of scale. One end goes towards minus infinity, towards complete departure from God; the other end of the line goes towards positive infinity, complete unity with him (see Figure 3).
A zero point at the scale represents the conversion point. After all the analogy is not bad because the Bible does speak of conversion as a turning point. A person’s attitude toward Christ is negative before conversion and positive after it. One really needs to turn into zero, to realize complete insignificance before God, and put all hopes upon him and not upon oneself or somebody or something else. As mentioned earlier, the very word metanoia does mean a complete turnaround, a U-turn of the mind or radical changes in the person’s worldview. Not without reason, all of the traditional evangelism methods are concentrated around this point, where God grants a person forgiveness and eternal life, justifies, cleanses, and does not count the sin any more.
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However, as discussed earlier, the worldview change is rather process than event, and surrender to Christ is not the only point of drastic mind-set change on the scale. The worldview change from Gentile to Jews requires a conversion, metanoia, as well. This point is conditionally marked at the scale as negative one for the visualization sake. Another special point, often referred to as commitment, is the point of conversion from infant to the faithful. It is marked as positive one.
The Fuel Analogy of the Mission Field. Because Russian/Ukrainian culture is rather Eastern in its essence, an inductive approach is more common in its thinking; therefore, analogies are helpful for understanding concepts. After all, an analogy is the very way Jesus taught his disciples, and his followers will be faithful to his methods by using analogies as well. Applying the basic worldview scale to a missionary field, an analogy with an automobile engine functioning could be provided, where people are compared with the fuel.
Following the model of Figure 3, those on the far right, the faithful, are the fuel that works in the engine’s cylinders, providing the motion. The infants are the carburetor where the fuel is treated with air (i.e., the Spirit—wonderful that in Greek the word is practically the same) until brought to the required condition, to the state when it can do the work effectively. The Jews are the fuel tank. From here the fuel has access to the carburetor.
Finally, the Gentiles are the natural resources—the crude oil that still in the ground, which still needs to be discovered, drilled, extracted, purified, and distilled. Extra efforts need to be made is that area. No matter how good the oil is, it still needs to be drilled and processed into gasoline.
Returning back to the farming analogy, Gentiles are the type of soil that cannot yield rich harvest without advance preparation. For them preaching of the crucified Christ is foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23). No matter how rich the microelement content of the soil, if it is paved with the rocks of unbelief on top, sowing there is pointless without breaking the ground up first.
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Statistical Expectations on the Normal Distribution of Worldviews. In order to build a visual model of what actually happened with the harvest in post-communist countries, one needs to apply the basics of probability theory to the situation.
A given random parameter probabilities dispersion is performed graphically by normal or Gaussian distribution. It is graphically portrayed by a bell-shape curve also known as the Gaussian curve (see Figure 4).
Any random variable parameter normally has such a distribution of probabilities. Applying it to the basic worldview scale, natural to expect that a standard distribution of people would be described by the same curve in any society (see Figure 5). Nevertheless, the width of this bell and the position of its maximum will vary at different times and in different countries. For instance, a religious awakening in a given society causes the bell to shift to the right, while secularization shifts it to the left. In the same way consolidation of the society makes the bell shape become steeper, while growth of pluralism makes it wider.
Evangelism Approach Response Differences
Accordingly with the different placement of the maximum of the Gaussian distribution at different periods in history, the majority of people will respond differently to different methods of evangelism within the same society. One could take North America for example. As an example, for many years the good news spread in North America without hindrance, and the distribution of the statistical expectation was normal. If my outsider’s understanding is correct, two hundred years ago, when the significant part of the population could be classified as infants according to their worldview, the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edward became a sufficient trigger for the Great Awakening. All the terms and concepts used in the message were within people’s worldview framework: They understood that they were sinners, they knew who God is and about his wrath and they just needed to be reminded of its ramifications.
However, one hundred years later, a significant worldview shift occurred. The majority of the population was now Jews by their worldview. At that time the popular gospel tracts under the general slogan “God Loves You” were the most effective means of evangelism (Henderson 223). People knew that God exists, and they knew what real love is. They just needed to be reminded that God is love.
As the Northern American society becomes humanistic and secularized, these methods become less and less effective (Hunter, Church 69). More and more people become Gentiles in their worldview. They are still told, “God loves you,” but in their understanding the word “god” means something else, and “love” means something totally different. Instead of asking, “Who is God?” they sometimes even ask, perplexed, “What am I?” Somehow or other, the Gaussian distribution remains normal in North America, but the bell shape becomes wider or steeper. In general, the bell shifts in times of spiritual awakening to the right, and in times of society’s departure from God, to the left.
Worldview Distribution Distortion in the Soviet Union
The natural (probably more unconscious than realized) expectations of evangelists in the former Soviet Union were for the normal worldview distribution. However, these expectations were far from reality.
For several generations, preaching about Jesus was forbidden in the country. Eventually, the interval where all the infants are supposed to be was empty (see Figure 3). No one can remain an infant in Christ for a long time. As soon as individuals started thinking about faith, they found themselves under serious pressure at work, in the family, and in relationships with the people around them. They had to move along quickly, become strong believers, and stand up for their beliefs; otherwise, they had to retreat because they were not able to withstand this pressure. Because maturity requires time, the latter outcome was more common than the former one. As a result, the section of the curve that represents infants in Christ was missing as if it had been cut out. The church resembled a family with no children.
The ministers of some churches that steadfastly went through the period of persecutions complained privately in personal conversations:
I miss the times of persecution so much! That’s where the real church was! Then there were only strong believers in church: everybody knew where to go, where to sit, where to stand, when to stand up, when to sit down, when to open the song books, when to close them. Nobody was walking back and forth during the service. No one had uncut hair. No man went unshaved, and no woman was uncovered by a babushka. Persons were ready to stand up for their beliefs to the very end. It was a real, strong church! (Golovin, Ìèðîâîççðåíèå 56-57)
Easy to understand the feelings of the ministers, who face a new circumstances when the church began to be filled with infants, while all of their life they used to serve at the church of the faithful only.
Moreover, many of these individuals are infants in Christ but by no means are young in age and are suffering from the “Nicodemus syndrome.” They have extensive experience in various secular organizations and are trying to “squeeze” this treasure of secular experience and knowledge through the needle’s eye into the kingdom of God. They give advice to ministers about managing the church (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 17). Not every pastor appreciates their help. Infants also like asking questions. Sometimes these questions are ones ministers have never encountered (Faust 19).
A church filled with infants is less predictable, but they are exactly what a growing church should include. In order for the church to develop in a normal way, a large number of young people (both spiritually and physically) should be in it because they are the future leaders of the church. They still have to grow and master the skills of walking with the Lord, being rooted in the Word of God. Otherwise, when the present-day ministers leave the church (either by naturally leaving this world or by moving someplace else), no one will be there to replace them.
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The church without infants will be strong and ready for persecution, but it will also be dying. As an oriental wisdom states, “A household with children is a bazaar [i.e., an open market, a place of noise]; a household without children is a mazaar [i.e., a cemetery, a place of doleful silence].” However, that is exactly what happened during the times of communist persecution. The life itself was different from normal;. Accordingly, the worldview distribution was distorted from the notmal as well. Practically were no spiritual infants in the society. Those people who under normal circumstances would become infants remained Jews (see Figure 6).
Coming back to the engine analogy, during communism all of the efforts of the Soviet authorities were aimed at not allowing the fuel to reach the cylinders and go through the carburetor. To influence the faithful was impossible for the officials—the saints who acknowledged the heavenly authority to be the highest one, just as saints should do. Those, who under normal circumstances (see Figure 6, as a dash line) would be in the carburetor, still remained in the fuel tank. While the cylinders had some fuel, the carburetor was almost dry. At the same time, the fuel tank was overfilled considerably.
Post-Communist Soviet Worldview Shift Dynamics. The situation prior to the collapse of communism was explosive. The pressure in the fuel tank was so high that as soon as a crack was open for evangelism, the contents of the fuel tank rushed into the carburetor and flooded it (see Figure 7), providing the illusion of the mass awakening.
People who just poured into the churches were still a mission field. Using Ralph D. Winter’s terminology (“New Macedonia” 295-97; “Task” 318), most of them were subjects for “E-0 evangelism,” that is “winning people to Christ who are already church members” (“Evangelism”). Because their conversions were understood as their responses to invitations without often challenging their worldviews, those who came to church were not freed from their false basic beliefs. Without a worldview persuasion element in evangelism, the soil is not prepared for the sowing and the converts’ worldviews do not undergo radical change (metanoia).
The experience shows that in order for a growing church to develop in a normal way it needs to have five, maximum ten, infants in Christ for every faithful person. If the church has bigger infants of them, then many are left out and are not given attention, teaching, mentoring, and care. When the carburetor is flooded, the engine is not capable of processing all of the fuel. When fuel that is not sufficiently enriched with air (the Spirit) is fed to the cylinders, the engine starts to emit smoke due to improper burning (the burning of faith). Large amounts of fuel spill out onto the ground altogether, making the task of collecting it and pouring it back into the fuel tank much harder.
People would come to church, but they could not find a place for themselves there. They were not part of any meaningful fellowship within the body of believers. The churches were just not able to absorb such an amount of neophytes (Levoushkan 27). Apathy to any involvement with the religion replaced the curiosity. Next invitation to the church meets the passive resistance of the kind “I’ve been there, tried it. It helps you—great. Didn’t help me any. That’s not for me.” (Golovin, Ìèðîâîççðåíèå 59)
Of course, one can easily say that these people were not seeking God sincerely enough. If they been seeking him harder, they would have stayed in church. Nevertheless, they were looking for God, while God’s children, entrusted with the keys to heaven, who were not ready for the coming of this new people. The church failed to foresee this course of events and were not ready to receive such a large number of newcomers; it had neither ministers prepared to work with newcomers nor adequate training programs. No soil preparation job was done.
Leadership Training Program’s Failure. In the given situation with the distorted worldview distribution as represented in Figure 7, the biggest felt need of the church became not bringing new people to the church but keeping them from leaving it. The only obvious direct way was to increase the faithful to infants ratio.
Leadership training became the crucial goal for missions to consume as much fuel in the carburetor as possible before it spilled onto the ground. Every denomination in nearly all the communities set up training courses to prepare ministers, regional colleges, and various seminars in order to process as effectively as possible the fuel that has accumulated in the carburetor. However, three cultural factors have undermined the expected effectiveness of the traditional leadership training approach in the former Soviet Union (Golovin, Ìèðîâîççðåíèå 60-61).
First is a semantic one. The word “leader” already had a very strong specific meaning in a post-totalitarian culture, and it was completely opposite from what Jesus meant for his disciples:
You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave. (Matt. 20:25-27)
Therefore, youth ambitions and pride were often the usual elements of longings for the church leadership motivation.
The second factor was the Nicodemus syndrome. The communist society was swarming with a multitude of social, political, trade, and other civil organizations, and many congregations were formed in accordance with the model of organizing secular unions they came to know from their childhood because no other model existed.
Third, and the most dangerous factor, was the application of training methods borrowed from the business world, which requires a certain spiritual maturity level for proper biblical use. Very few of the candidates had matured to that point because all were new believers.
A very good analogy of what happened with the leadership training programs in the former Soviet Union could be drawn out of the apostle’s instruction on the subject of setting up a church: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind [emphasis mine]. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Rom. 12:2). In other words, the church needs to depart from the worldly models and ideas through the transformational way of the renewing of the mind.
The very choice of the word the apostle uses provides a great analogy. The word metamorfousye, which is translated as “be transformed,” is most often found in fairytales of ancient literature (in the famous works by Ovidius and Apuleius the word is even used in the titles), and it carries the meaning of an immediate magical act when one kind of entity or object turns into another. Practically the only one common application of the term to the events of the real world is the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly.
Newborn Christians are like caterpillars. They are no longer eggs, but they are not yet butterflies, either. They are capable of creeping and consuming the spiritual vegetation only, in order to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18). They have to devour a lot every day—Bible study, prayers, fellowship with the believers, and worship. Only then some day without any caterpillar’s effort, the magic transformation will take place: the caterpillar will die and the butterfly will come out instead (Golovin, Î ïîäïðûãèâàþùèõ ãóñåíèöàõ). For the average Christian leaders the time of maturing “was fifteen years after they entered their life work before they began to know the Lord Jesus as their Life, and ceased trying to work for Him and began allowing Him to be their all in all and do His work through them” (Kuest 119). Even for the apostle Paul maturing to be ready for the proper missionary work took about twelve years, as one can estimate it from the Luke’s account.
God has intended for his children to be butterflies. May be for that reason a caterpillar can easily be convinced that its purpose is to fly. But the conviction itself will not make it fly. Caterpillars can start studying the basics of aerodynamics, piloting instructions, and the art of navigation. They can even start hopping, for practice. Those who are hopping better can be considered leaders. Then the courses could be set up for training the hopping leaders. The caterpillars will be hopping better and higher, but they will still be nothing more than hopping caterpillars. They will still not be able to flutter about—“the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth” (John 3:31). To be able to fly, the caterpillar has to turn into a butterfly first; it has to undergo a new birth. Before it can do this last thing, it has to die, along with its unique caterpillar motives, ideas, and experiences. A supernatural act of metamorphosis must take place, an act of the renewing of the mind. Only then will their flying be natural, free, and beautiful.
Training courses can help caterpillars consume the vegetation more effectively for the metamorphosis to come faster, but they cannot replace it. This process needed time while the churches needed the leaders immediately. As a result the Christian leadership in the former Soviet Union still lacked butterflies but had plenty of hopping caterpillars who developed fatigue, frustration, burnout, and apathy.
The Awakening’s Impact on Gentiles. The situation caused by the worldview distribution distortion within the post-Soviet churches consumes a high level of time and energy to come to a resolution; however, the greater problems are being revealed as the churches are realizing that they should exist not for the sake of those who are inside but for the sake of those who outside them. In Figure 7 those to the left of negative one, the Gentiles, were impacted by the Awakening’s processes but in the different ways.
Preaching of the crucified Christ for Gentiles is foolishness to them (1 Cor. 1:23). Their soil has not yet been prepared to receive the Word, and the calls of street evangelists to them for repentance do nothing but trample down this hard soil all the more. The Gentiles are aware already that something is wrong with Christians, and after listening for the intensive and passionate preaching of foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23), the listeners just proved themselves right: “We no longer believe just because of what somebody said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that Christians are really absurd.” (cf. John 4:42)
The Post-Awakening, Post-Communism Mission Field Conditions
Nowadays, the churches in the former Soviet Union are trying to shift the focus from doing everything possible in order not to lose those who came to church toward the world of the lost—the very reason the church as the body of Christ exists.
The Worldview’s Status Quo. As soon as the problem of the overfilled carburetor was solved, the church immediately faced another problem—the fuel tank was empty (Golovin, Ìèðîâîççðåíèå 64). No one today runs excitedly to shout, “God loves you!” Passersby shy away from the tracts offered to them. More and more churches refuse to do their former traditional annual large-scale evangelism meetings: the exerted efforts are no longer justified—everything testifies to the emptiness of the fuel tank. All this time no one was engaged in developing natural resources and preparing the soil. Evangelism methods that became traditional in Christian society do not work in post-communist society. The church has not developed any new techniques (if not take into account the propaganda of questionable commercial and historic advantages of Christianity) and have forgotten the old ones, the ones the apostles and the early Church were practicing.
Worldview—the Missing Dimension. The change from in the former Soviet Union when 80 percent of the population declared themselves as atheists during communist control until after the collapse of communism when 80 percent of the population proclaim themselves to be believers can hardly be considered as a Christian awakening. Vast missionary intrusion into former Soviet countries during the last decade of the twentieth century produced only an illusion of the harvest. It very slightly challenged the worldview of the people if at all. Massive evangelistic campaigns were considered just as an enrollment into a new type of organization.
Well-intended evangelists and missionaries believed they were working out the Great Commission to “go and teach” (Matt. 28:19), but because the worldview persuasion aspect of teaching was lost, it worked out as “go and get them.” Collecting of the gospel tracts, the response to the formal traditional invitations to make a decision for Christ because he is knocking on the door of one’s heart, as well as the reciting of the repentant sinner’s prayer text of unknown etiology was the same meaningless ritual in many cases and often had nothing to do with what the Scripture calls μετανοια, the radical mind-set change.
Many of the ministers and missionaries I interviewed believe that rejection of these practices means rejection of the gospel itself; however, none of them is connected directly with the Scripture. They are rooted in traditions historically developed in Western culture. For instance, nowhere in the Bible is Jesus knocking on the door of a person’s heart. The only parallel that can be found in Scripture is Jesus knocking on a church door in Revelation 3:20. This particular message is for the insiders, not for outsiders, and it is still a great challenge for believers. Jesus is still not being let into the church often, probably because easier to operate the church this way, to stay with human methods, rules, regulations, and traditions. The revelator invites the churches to open up the doors for Jesus and his methods, the goal of which would not be making the disciples busy with operating the church but seeking out and saving the lost.
When the fourth-century writer Macarius of Egypt, in his homilies on the perfection for which Christians should strive, makes for the first time the analogy where Jesus is knocking on the door of the individual believer’s heart “so that he may come in and rest in our souls” (Macarius), combining the Revelation text with Ephesians 3:17 (both texts are addressing Christians not nonbelievers), his approach still has a valid biblical apostolic meaning (Green 192). However, for the Gentiles this message is nonsense—both for the ancient and for the modern ones. The text provides a good analogy within the proper cultural context, but when those particular applications are taken away from the cultural ground where they were developed, they become unbiblical.
The soil of the former communist countries requires different methods of gospel-message contextualization, and the worldview persuasion element is a missing link there (Golovin, Áèáëåéñêàÿ ñòðàòåãèÿ 44). The evangelical campaigns, focused on receiving instant observable effect, paved the easiest way for decision making, where was “easy to omit discussion of such things as repentance, submission, obedience, community and accountability” (Henderson 26). They were making people more “consumers of faith rather then being consumed by Christ” (27). Proclamation of the good news to the Gentiles without the bad news of the Fall, without persuasion on the worldview level, simply led to the promotion of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “cheap grace” of “preaching forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession,… grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ” (36). The message could be often lost behind the concerns about activities, methods, and the congregation’s numeric growth. “Once the fundamental root of conversion to Christ is severed from the Christian message, it becomes a broken and lifeless plant, however beautiful flowers of Christian concern and social involvement it displays” (Green 208). Going that way the church easily shifts the focus from the kingdom spread to the recruiting of members. “To foster the opinion that conversion is anything less than a changing worldview is at its heart unethical” (Miller 127). To restore the missing dimension of evangelism is strategic need of the church in the Ukraine as well as in the rest of the post-communist world.
Worldview Shift in the Western World
Western culture is foreign to me; therefore, I doubt I am able to provide an adequate analysis of the worldview shift dynamics there and must mostly rely on published sources. However, I am afraid the lack of the same worldview persuasion element of evangelism is strongly felt in some ways both in Europe (Cunningham) and North America (Downs).
The History of the Issue. All the authors agree that the Enlightenment had the greatest impact on the worldview shift in Western society. “Enlightenment has induced much embarrassment about divine activity in today’s world, and this tendency has outlived the demise of the Enlightenment” (Green 26). However not easy to trace the turning point for North America as it could be done for Europe. Noll, for instance, thinks that the “difficulty came when some Pietists began to view Christian faith as only a life without a concern for beliefs at all” (42). Nevertheless, Edwards and other leaders of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, following the tradition of reformers, were consistent in keeping a proper balance of experiential orthopraxy and intellectual orthodoxy. However, the Second Great Awakening of 1795-1830, despite all its positive points and real revitalization of Christian life in America, actually neglected its intellectual aspects. As a result, that “lack of attention to the formation of worldviews undermined the long-term health of Christianity in the United States” (47). “A failure to balance evangelistic and reforming zeal with zeal for the intellect left the church as a whole unbalanced and eventually weakened its ability to cope with the particular problems of modern existence” (51). As a foreigner, I probably have nothing to add.
Current Situation. Looks like the early twentieth century traditional ways of evangelism are no longer as effective in a Western cultural context as they used to be. “A steady decrease of most ‘old-line’ denominations” can be observed since 1966” (Miller 14). “We fail to gather the harvest, and even destroy some of it while trying to gather it!” (Hunter, Church 24). “From the Christendom legacy, most churches continue ‘doing church’ as usual, as though most people in our communities are Christians” (23). The worldview environment in our times is more closely resembles the one “in an Apostolic Age—much like the age the early Christianity engaged” (23). “The methods that once gathered great harvest later yielded diminishing harvest and, in time, virtually no harvest” (69). The time has come to “rethink our approach to evangelism” (Henderson 211) in the Western context as well.
David W. Henderson further writes:
When the tracts The Four Spiritual Laws, Step to Peace with God and The Bridge were written several decades ago, their authors correctly read where our culture was. … [However, all tracts such as these] begin with the personal God; today’s world doubts such a being exists. They appeal to spiritual ‘laws,’ but the world has rejected the idea there is such a thing as an absolute. And they use the Bible as an authoritative source in a world that dismissed it as irrelevant. (223)
Tim Downs finds the problem in the same way:
There is no doubt that the soil of our society has eroded significantly in a short period of time. Over the last forty years, many parachurch organizations and churches have struggled with a thinning harvest in America. In an attempt to recapture the glory of past harvests we have recruited more harvesters, sharpened our sickles and scythes, challenged our workers to greater commitment and longer hours. Maybe it’s time to analyze the soil.
Various other authors agree with this understanding of the situation. “Failure to work at taking the mind captive for Christ invariably leads to the weakening or the collapse of Christian vitality” (Noll 30).
Following the culture drift to consumerism (Henderson 48), “the church is encouraged to be relevant so that the religious consumer buys into it” (Miller 24). Doing its best in answering the questions nobody asks, the church “has gotten used to talking to itself” (19).
Sir Frederick Catherwood, a former vice-president of the European Parliament as well as former president of the U. K. Evangelical Alliance even raises a prophetic warning:
Although we have swept our European house clean of fascism and of communism, and we now have democracy and freedom of speech from the Atlantic to the Urals, we also now have a Europe emptier than before of the Christian faith which once permeated society. In the words of Christ’s parable, Europe is a house swept clean, ready for seven devils worse than the first to come in. (Catherwood)
Considering changes in North American society, such as urbanization and multiculturalism, Hunter forecasts that it also “will soon look like a Corinthian continent” (Radical Outreach 23). “Due to the centuries of secularization, churches in North America and Europe find themselves, once again, in an extensive ‘mission field’” (197). “The Church, in the Western world, faces population who are increasingly ‘secular’—people with no Christian memory, who don’t know what we Christians are talking about” (Celtic Way 9). Again, I am just an occasional visitor in Western countries and it is hard for me to develop valuable opinion on the situation there. But comparing these diagnoses to the situation in former Soviet Union I do see many things in common. It sounds like methods that did not work during the recent massive missionary intervention in our part of the worls are not working anymore even in the countries where they were developed.
The Challenge
In spite of the historical, cultural, traditional, doctrinal, and other differences between the Western world and the countries of the former Soviet Union, one can see many analogies and similarities in regards to worldview current status. Therefore, I believe some applications of this study could be useful for evangelism in Western countries as well. The twenty-first century church should restore the missing link of worldview persuasion in its evangelism methods according to Jesus, the apostles, and the early Christians, who, after all, “lived in a world more relativist and more pluralist than our own” (Green 21).