Waiting on the White Smoke: The Russian Evangelical Alliance\u27s 15th Annual Convention in Moscow

Moscow — It took a while for the white smoke to climb up the chimney. That’s the Roman Catholic metaphor the 66-year-old Alexander Fedichkin, the Russian Evangelical Alliance’s president, used to describe the protracted internal negotiations leading up to his appointment for an additional three-year term. Consequently, the REA’s fifteenth annual conference, held on February 22, 2018, in Moscow’s Lutheran Peter-and-Paul-Cathedral, began late. Fedichkin, a long-time Baptist Union pastor in Moscow, has served as president since 2013. General-Secretary Sergey Vdovin, a pastor within the “Association of Churches of Evangelical Christians” in Moscow, has held this position since 2011. The initial head of the REA, the Baptist seminary lecturer, Vladimir Ryaguzov (born 1950), suffered a debilitating stroke in 2013 and is now residing with his spouse and children in Seattle/Washington. Ulrich Materne from Wittenberg in Eastern Germany, the German Alliance’s representative to Eastern Europe and a friend of the Russian Alliance, retired in 2016

Project 150

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Recent Protestant Developments in Ukraine and Russia

Topics covered, with commentary, include: Ukraine Baptist Union Breaks Its Ties with John MacArthur Seminary Suspensions in Russia; Moscow’s Baptist Seminary is Back in Operation New Inter-Confessional Body in Ukraine Surviving Past–And Future–Blockades; A Russian Prayer Breakfast Met in St. Petersburg Commentary: Franklin Graham in Moscow A Bridgebuilder between East and West: Siegfried Springer Has Die

How Reasonable Is “Reasonable”? The Search for Satisfactory Approach to Employment Handbooks

Although courts, in considering the enforceability of employment handbooks, have relied on a single source of principles, contract law, their inconsistent approaches have produced inequitable and irreconcilable results. This Note argues that courts should abandon their dependence on contract law when analyzing handbook claims and instead adopt an employment-based approach that balances the needs of employers with the realistic expectations of employees. Accordingly, this Note proposes three rules for analyzing the legitimacy of handbook modifications: (1) employers should always be permitted to unilaterally modify handbooks; (2) employers must provide employees reasonable notice, defined as a length of time set by the type and importance of the promise made in a handbook, before modifying a handbook; and (3) handbook disclaimers should be ignored, as they often have inequitable results for employees and employers alike

Atomization, Decentralization, and Sustainability: Prominent Trends on the Russian Protestant Church Scene

At least in Russia–and China–the age of euphoria prominent 30 years ago is gone. The church missions committed to short-term gains have left for greener pastures and the congregations remaining behind are now, more than ever, required to determine their own fates. Increasingly required to live from their own funding, church projects are becoming more sustainable. Huge building and educational projects are only a memory. This general and expected course of events can be attributed in part to short attention spans in the West; increased government pressure is only one of numerous factors

Do Iron Curtains Happen More than Once?

Two separations significant for World Christendom commemorated their 50th birthdays on 13 August: the construction of the Berlin Wall and the splitting up of the “All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists”. On 18 August, in one of two major Russian-language commentaries on the second event, Moscow’s Mikhail Cherenkov celebrated in the news service “Protestant” the maverick and courageous spirit of the underground, “Initiativniki” Baptist movement. He described them as a “mighty spiritual” and “radical reformist” movement and exclaimed: No one could have expected that an “anti-church directive” put out by the All-Union Council could “invoke such massive resistance on the local-church level”. Who would have reckoned that “simple, uneducated, inexperienced pastors from the most remote of provinces could organise a resistance movement capable of engulfing the entire Soviet Union?” Cherenkov compares its martyrs to the early church fathers who died with “For Christ alone!” on their lips. The Initiativniki were in any case also part of the “down with Moscow” sentiment still alive in the wide expanses of Russia. The author also compares three of Moscow’s newest Baptist congregations. Finally, he discusses the rehabilitation of large numbers of addicts by Protestant churches in Russia