The Times, UK
Feb 26 2005
Bravery that offers beacon of hope in Georgia
by Michael Bourdeaux
A Baptist bishop’s efforts have eased troubled inter-church relations
GEORGIA is a country of outstanding natural beauty. Spring comes
early to its fertile fields and vineyards protected beneath the
towering peak of Mount Kazbek and the Caucasus range, the highest in
Europe. It has one of the oldest Christian civilisations in the
world, dating from 326, and its Church is in the mainstream of the
Orthodox tradition. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is
also a land of chaos.
Stalin, who was born there, attended a seminary and always granted
his homeland special privileges – not least allowing the Church to
exist under its own identity, while abolishing the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church. He encouraged a semi-independent economic development, so
Georgian agricultural entrepreneurs prospered, while collectivisation
brought famine to other places.
This relative prosperity suffered its first blow when Mikhail
Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign led to the grubbing up of some of
Georgia’s best vines. Ethnic strife tore the country apart in the
early years of independence under Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Gorbachev’s
former Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, a man of international
reputation, returned to his homeland to become president – and,
incidentally, to be baptised into the Orthodox Church – but he failed
to bring the separatists back under central control.
The `Rose Revolution’ in 2003 brought Mikhail Saakashvili to power in
a well-monitored election, but the strange death of the Prime
Minister Zurab Zhvania in a gassing accident this month is a huge
setback.
Church life, too, has been troubled beyond measure over the past
decade. Even in the heyday of Soviet atheism, Georgians were proud of
their ancient Christian heritage and since the 1960s its Orthodox
Patriarchate took part in international ecumenical affairs – until
1997, when they withdrew from the World Council of Churches, stating
that they no longer recognised other faiths as legitimate.
Malkhaz Songulashvili, born in 1963, is perhaps the most remarkable
figure in Georgian church life today. He was secretly baptised in a
river at 17. Gifted at languages, he also studied history and
archaeology at Tbilisi University, before Patriarch Ilia II invited
him, as a Baptist, to collaborate in the first modern Georgian Bible
translation.
In his mid-thirties he made the first of periodic visits to begin a
thesis on church relations in Georgia, in which he set out to
demonstrate that Protestants and Catholics were not peripheral to the
Georgian Christian scene, but were part of its lifeblood. Baptists
had existed in Georgia since the mid-19th century. Pastor
Songulashvili struck all his new friends as a gentle, quiet man. No
one guessed that he would soon be propelled into the centre of the
stage, butt of a wave of violence which erupted against non-Orthodox
believers in the late-1990s.
The Georgian Baptists, who in their tradition have bishops, conferred
that title on Pastor Songulashvili, as their leader. From 1997 they
were victims of a campaign of violence instigated by Basil
Mkalavishvili, a defrocked Orthodox priest, now claiming to be an
`Old Calendarist’ and subject, he says, to the jurisdiction of this
tiny branch of the Orthodox Church in Greece. He has led dozens of
assaults against `sectarians’, targeting Jehovah’s Witnesses, a well
as Baptists. Unrestrained by police over nearly a decade, he stole
and burnt what he called `anti-Orthodox’ books in March 1997. On
February 3, 2002, he led a mob which looted the Baptist Union’s
warehouse in Tbilisi and burnt more books, including Bibles.
Even worse was a pogrom against a united Christian service (including
Orthodox representatives) held in the main Baptist church on January
24, 2003, marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Worse
violence was averted only when the organisers of the service told the
worshippers to disperse before the service had begun.
President Shevardnadze condemned this and other incidents, but
Mkalavishvili continued unchecked. Only after the `Rose Revolution’
were he and his gang brought to account.
At the trial last November there was a dramatic moment when Bishop
Songulashvili publicly forgave Mkalavishvili and heard words of
repentance in reply. The case dragged on, however. Of the seven
defendants, five were charged only with resisting arrest, while
Mkalavishvili received a sentence of six years, an associate four
years. Hundreds of others have gone unpunished, however, and
Songulashvili has called for a full investigation into the
background, on the lines of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
in South Africa. He estimates that more than one hundred incidents
have occurred.
Amid this turmoil he has found time to devote himself to the causes
he passionately embraces: building up the work of his own Baptist
community, promoting ecumenism and teaching at Tbilisi State
University. After the violence of January 24, 2003, he worked with
other Christian leaders to reinstate the prayer service on March 14,
attended by President Shevardnadze in person. On Holy Saturday 2003,
Bishop Songulashvili wrote to me: `Yesterday we celebrated Good
Friday. It was a great occasion for us. We observed it by a
six-hour-long procession with a Cross in the streets of Tbilisi and
devotions in different churches (the Roman Catholic and Armenian
Apostolic Cathedrals, the Lutheran Church of Reconciliation),
followed by a service in our own Baptist church.’
Further shocks were to follow, however. On the following Whit Sunday
fanatics, still unidentified, burnt down the Baptist church in the
Kvareli district of eastern Georgia.
This did not deter Songulashvili from promoting his ecumenical work
in practical ways. Most notably, in December 2004 he went with two
Orthodox priests to support the Ukrainian democrats on Independence
Square, Kiev. They met Christian leaders and appeared on television
(with a fishing rod converted into a staff to carry the Georgian flag
they had brought to identity themselves).
Peaceful inter-church relations may still seem a long way off for
members of Georgia’s minority denominations, but the commitment and
bravery of Bishop Songulashvili and his supporters stand out as a
beacon of hope for the future.
Canon Michael Bourdeaux is the founder and president of Keston
Institute, Oxford, which monitors religious freedom in the communist
and former communist countries ()