From the April-June 2009 Issue
In Belarus today
Martin Leech
Orthodox Church, BelarusLittle by little the Belarusian nation is coming back to God. Only 27% of the population of Belarus can say that religion has any part in their life. In our society it is just becoming a tradition to attend church, but mainly people do not like to see religious symbols because they feel uncomfortable.
Belarus is different in its religious attitude and condition. Even during the communist regime one of the former Soviet Union leaders proclaimed that Belarus (which was one of 15 republics in the USSR) would be the first totally atheistic republic, but the western part of Belarus messed up this plan.
Today the attitude to Evangelical churches is similar as to sects. There is an opinion that Evangelical Christians are damaging the political system and the whole basis and identity of the Belarusian nation. Belarus is promoting a new national idea (the same as Russia): to be Belarusian is to be Russian Orthodox. From one side we can say that this is the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church, but the demand is also formulated by the government, because the government is seeing in Protestantism a political threat (western culture and religion).
Some statistics
Officially in Belarus there exist 972 registered Protestant (Evangelical) churches and about 300 unregistered churches (they are unregistered for different reasons; some because of religious opinion, some because of bureaucracy), 427 Roman Catholic, and about 1300 Russian Orthodox.
Nevertheless, the statistics tell that Russian Orthodox churches are attended by about 150-200,000 and we have approximately the same number of Evangelical Christians in our churches. Last Christmas about 150,000 Russian Orthodox Christians attended their churches (the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on 7th January). That is 1.5% of the population of Belarus. Christmas and Easter events are the best church-attending times for the Russian Orthodox Church. But it is practically impossible to find a Christian in our country who attends church twice a year and claims himself to be a Protestant.
More restrictions?
Moreover, the regime is creating fear and makes the leaders of religious organizations appear to their flock in the role of something like the Religious Affairs Committee. The same principle remains in force here, that everything which is not specifically allowed is forbidden.
On 6th February 2009 two Danish visitors to Belarus were detained by the police and are being deported as they expressed ‘ideas of a religious nature’. ‘We were praying, reading and speaking from the Bible, greeting the people, and praying together’, one of them said. The KGB secret police closely monitors all religious communities. The deportation of the two Danish visitors – who are banned from Belarus for one year – brings to 31 the number of foreign citizens barred from Belarus in recent years for their religious activity.
The death of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, 79-year-old Alexiy II, may cause problems for Evangelical Christians. The Russian Orthodox Church has a new High Priest Kirill and the interdenominational climate will depend a lot on his ‘policy’, but for the moment we do not expect a better situation, because some of his public statements do not sound optimistic. Over Evangelicals there will be more control and more pressure because Kirill claims that Russia belongs to the Orthodox Church, or that the Orthodox Church should be the state church in Russia, like it used to be before the Revolution. And this opinion goes for Belarus as well.
Economic difficulties
The global economic crisis has also come to Belarus. At first the government was saying that it could not touch our country, because we do not have strong economic links with other countries. But for the last two months prices have increased by 5.3%, and accommodation bills by 20%. Many organizations and factories have made shorter working time (4 hours) and salaries were reduced, yet prices are increasing. About one million people were working in Russia and now they are coming back, because they have lost their jobs there. Officially we have less than 1% unemployment, but in reality it is much more and soon it could be about 12-15%.
Then there is also the catastrophic situation with alcoholism. The alcohol production in our country is so high that if it were to be divided equally between all the citizens of Belarus (including infants, children and elderly people) there would have been 12.4 litres of pure spirits each last year. This is twice as much as in the year 1990.
Of course we have to pray that these economic and other difficulties will stimulate people to find real treasure in God and put their hope in him.
Church building work
The church building work is going ahead. Every year it is more difficult to get renewed permission to continue the building work. So it would be good by the end of this year to finish the main work of installing interior doors, the fire alarm system and to receive the certificates for the electrical part and the heating system, and then to obtain the main document allowing us to use this new building.
At present we are still working on the heating system and gas project, which took more time than was planned at the beginning. It has turned out not a good idea, but it is a part of our old system and we cannot change it yet in our country. Many companies promise to do the work in a certain period of time, but in practice it takes much longer. For example, I started to work on the gas project 18 months ago and it should have been finished by November 2008.
Renewed opposition
We have met with another period of opposition. It is because we had to put a gas pipe along the block of flats in which lives a famous woman, who was a very active member of the first group against building the church. In the will of God we were not moved with our church building project away from town, but actually came even closer to her home. So maybe she wants to take revenge, but she continues to write petitions on behalf of the citizens to the local government, different departments such as environment, and even to the country’s authorities. So I have to give many reports to different departments about our building process and to prove these with documents and pictures. It takes a lot of energy and has distracted attention from the main work. We may need to pray for this woman more because God has not allowed us to escape from her.
In the congregation
I would like to say that we have a good technical team and two young men have started to take part in the service. It is a big encouragement for me. Two people have been converted.
As a church we are involved in charity work. In particular we have links with an orphanage. It is more like a refuge centre, where children can stay for six months, because they have various problems in their family – mainly it is the alcoholism of the mother or even of both parents. We are glad that the government allows us to visit them and help in different ways.