Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Protestants Now Outnumber Russian Orthodox in Russia’s Borderlands

Vienna, June 1 -- Members of Protestant churches now outnumber those affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church both in Siberia and the Russian Far East and in Karelia and Kaliningrad, according to a prominent Moscow sociologist of religion.

In an interview carried on the Religiopolis.org site, Elena Kublitskaya, a senior researcher at the Institute of Social-Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says that this reflects intense Protestant missionary work in these places (www.religiopolis.org/religiovedenie/506-religija-v-rossii-vzgljad-sotsiologa.html).

Specifically, she says, “the number of believing Protestants exceeds the number of Orthodox believers in “Siberia, Buryatia, the Komi Republic, the Sakha Republic, Primorsky and Khabarovsk krays, Amur and Irkutsk oblasts, Sakhalin, Yamalo-Nenets district, the Karelian Republic and Kaliningrad oblast.”

And that pattern, the result of often intense missionary work by Protestant groups, “is capable of leading in the future to a sharpening of inter-confessional relations and conflicts on the basis of the dissatisfaction of the Russian Orthodox Church.”
Read the rest here.

4 comments:

Ed said...

I seriously hope this report is in error.

Anonymous said...

I don't think people realize how aggressive and well-funded American fundamentalist/evangelical groups are. I certainly won't say they aren't Christians, since only God can decide that, but what they are propagating is not Christianity. To here of this kind of penetration of parachristian sects in a historically Christian country is the most depressing thing I have read in a very long time.

Russian Christians lack the propaganda, don't employ the manipulative tricks and out and out lies that are common to evangelical "conversion" efforts, and simply do not have the money to pursue folks in the way that these sects can.

It's happening here too in the US. I recently visited Denver - by all appearances you have more Russians involved in parachristian "evangelical" activities than you do in Orthodox Churches. Orthodoxy doesn't offer pop culture trappings and promises of an endless party. Nor should it. But it does have to come up with some mechanism to protect Christians from these movements. Where is our St. Irenaeus?

Ingemar said...

St. Irenaeus is your St. Irenaeus.

Anonymous said...

Fair enough. But someone needs to be forthright: American evangelicalism is more than simply 'heterodox': it is a Christian heresy that by historical standards of the Church ought to be understood as 'anathema.'