Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Union of Evangelical Christian Baptist Churches (WCC ECB) Valery Antonyuk spoke to TBN UA host Vitaly Stebenev about relations with Russian churches and the roots of spiritual blindness.
Tell us about the relationship with Russian church leaders before the war began and what is the relationship like now?
This is a sore point, because our view, from the point of view of ecclesiology, the view of the church, we understand that the church is from all peoples, from all nationalities, including from Russia. We had difficult conversations even before the full-scale war. Because the war began in 2014 and then there were more meetings, more exchange of information, there were some discussions and visits. Let’s say they came here to Ukraine more and we tried to convey what the Russian government was doing in Ukraine. That this is an aggressive war, a war of aggression, we showed what is happening in the Donbass, what happened to Crimea.
But when a full-scale war began, their first reactions were completely incomprehensible to us. They absolutely perceived this as a war of liberation – Ukraine was about to be freed from Nazism, from some kind of fascists, Banderas, as Russian propaganda preaches on television. And they thought that this was really true.
It was quite powerful, I mean now maybe not all the ministers, but most of those responsible people. And, of course, we then made statements and many of our brothers around the world, in all countries, they made such balanced, sober statements regarding Ukraine – condemning the war, aggression, Putin’s policies, the entire FSB strategy that was being implemented in Ukraine. And, unfortunately, the Russian brothers did not do this.
I wonder why they trust their power, and do not trust you, other leaders, Christians of Ukraine, our position? What is the root?
I have observed this from the very beginning and now, Christians on this basis have a lot of disputes, debates, confrontations, even to the point of war. I am convinced that we, as Christians, should not wage such wars according to the flesh – they will achieve nothing. It is humanly impossible to prove such things to them. I see here the spiritual roots and the problem that people lose their spiritual sense of what is happening in a particular country when such a policy is followed. In order to calm people down, impose your ideology, and then do all this. After all, what Russia is doing did not start yesterday. This is something that was not eradicated back in the days of the Soviet Union; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia did not become different. Russia remained a hotbed of godless ideology of chauvinism, imperialism, greatness, which it wanted to restore. And believers should have understood this.
At some time I discovered for myself that believers in Russia perceive the collapse of the Soviet Union in a completely different way. For them, this is not God’s miracle and deliverance, not the result of God’s intervention in answer to the prayers of all believers around the world for decades. For them, this is what Putin said was a “big mistake.” And many new Christians in Russia who do not know persecution, do not know the times of atheism, atheism, for them this is a more understandable position.
And this suggests that people were losing spiritual sensitivity, they were becoming deaf. They didn’t go deaf right away, but they didn’t compare everything the government did to the word of God. The assessment was not given on time. The ministers were silent. They asked more: “What is going on with you? Why it is like that with you?” They tried to get by in such a way that they would not be affected, they compromised with the authorities. These compromises were small at first, then more and more, and then there were skilled servants who went completely to the service of “this king” and eventually became deaf and blind.
And today our perception of such ministers and believers in Russia is that they are spiritually disabled. I say this not from the point of view of some kind of pride and I have no desire to humiliate them but these are spiritual pathologies. I think this is complete spiritual impotence. They have lost all sensation, all power, all ability to discern and therefore the Holy Spirit does not work as it should.
We cannot be offended by a deaf person because he has become deaf – there is a need for surgical intervention, there is a need for treatment for a blind person because he has gone blind. They have become blind and, unfortunately, many churches and ministers in Russia are in this state today.
In Ukraine, I urge you to pray for Russia, for such a church in Russia. Indeed, there are believers there, there are sincere Christians, there are those who did not bow their heads to the dictator. There are those who discern the system, of course perhaps someone is afraid to speak and they need the courage to raise their voice. But by the way, for example, when we had a meeting with the ministers of Russia last year, it was on neutral territory, we asked this question – How do you plan to live further? Are you ready to live underground and be, like during the Third Reich, a professing church that was born during the time of Hitler, but distinguished between good and evil? How prepared are you to be that kind of church? Are you ready to gather your ministers, perhaps not all of them, perhaps first a narrow circle, then wider, and then somewhere else. Perhaps somewhere beyond the Urals, in Siberia, no matter where, we can start talking about how the church in Russia can resist everything that the devil does through the power of Russia.
Unfortunately, I did not feel that they had such plans. To the question – How are you going to teach your pastors who are supposed to teach the church? Because in the Soviet Union, I captured a little of that time, there was no Internet, there were no such opportunities, there was an Iron Curtain, we were told “I don’t know another country like this,” “everything is better here”… My father told me “Valera, do not believe what they say in school in terms of ideology,” I grew up and the church ministers were taught this. We were gathered when we were young and green, but we understood this system, we understood the work of the devil there and it didn’t matter what it was called, how it was polished, how it was presented. Both we and the church stood, the church had power. Generations came, others died, but the church lived, it called black black, lawlessness lawlessness. We understood this dictate that somewhere in the west, we listened to radio, some kind of Christian programs. And we could tell the difference. This is what Russia should be doing today.
Unfortunately, I think that starting from the most, we say, separated churches, unregistered ones, which in those days passed and said then “we stood against the system” , unfortunately, starting from them in Russia and ending with Patriarch Kirill, I see a very dangerous trend in Russia – this is ecumenism around the “Russian world”.
This is a terrible thing, and when they say that we are against ecumenism, they are afraid for some liberal things, I think that many ministers have already swallowed a camel when they were squeezing out a mosquito. And Pentecostals, Baptists, Adventists, various Protestants, and the Orthodox Church, which protects all this from the authorities, united ecumenically. And, unfortunately, this is the ecumenism of the Russian world.
And we need to pray very hard so that God will raise up the professing church in Russia and there are ministers there who, even at the very bottom, even in such a way that we cannot hear, will do God’s work.
By the way, when they began to mobilize, we made an appeal to the ministers and churches of Russia, and the request to make this appeal came from Russia. Their pastors who are on the ground asked us to speak because their ministers would not speak. And so we pray and believe that God must change something in Russia, there must be a strong church there, even if it is underground.
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