My vision in 1958
How did the idea of creating such a community come about? I committed my life to serve Christ as my Savior and Lord in 1957, and about one year later, I received a vision as I stood on the balcony of a U-shaped apartment complex. A voice said to me, "Remember this plan: you will build it many years from now, when you're an old man." I asked, "Why do I have to wait so long?" Then I saw a map or outline of Russia in the sky, and also was given the clear impression that there was something very unusual and special about the stairways, but I didn't understand what it was. Immediately after receiving this vision I began studying about Russia. Over the course of years I drew these plans several times, even built our own passive solar house incorporating some of these ideas, but there was always that nagging question about the stairways.
Our preparation and experience
I've been a student of Russian and central European affairs since 1961 (diploma as a Russian interpreter, B.A. in Central and East European Studies), and have been actively working for freedom of religious confession and for mutual understanding among Christians since 1969. I am fluent in Russian and German, have studied Ukrainian, French, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Udmurt and Mari, and also have a third diploma and about twenty-five years of experience developing computer software. Then I earned M.Min. and D.Min. degrees while working in Russia from March 1991 to October 2007. At the end of 1996 we became acquainted with a very talented handicapped young man in Russia, and immediately I understood what was wrong with my plans - those "stairways" should be ramps!
My wife is a rehabilitation nurse (B.S.) and a Certified Rehabilitation Counsellor (M.S., C.R.C.) who has worked several years in vocational rehabilitation. We have worked at universities in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic, and in Ioshkar-Ola, the capital of the Mari El Republic in central Russia, both east of Moscow, and then we worked in Moscow until October 2007.
During all of these years, I investigated and thought much about various Christian communities from the first century up to the present. Also, my wife and I have lived in an apartment in a Christian community, and we have visited various other communities. Believers in the first century "were together, and had all things common. They sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, according as anyone had need" (Acts 2:44-45). Two important facts about the first-century church is that they gradually gave of their accumulated wealth (Acts 4:34-37... note that the verbs here indicate a continuing action, not a one-time completed action), and they retained ownership of their wealth and freedom to decide how much of their possessions to give (Acts 5:1-5). How different were the first-century Christians from twentieth-century communists, who forcibly confiscated all of the wealth from everyone, whether they believed in communism or not!
Was the first-century Christian community a noble experiment that failed? Some theologians and church historians think so. They claim that collective ownership of property reduces personal responsibility to take care of material goods and limits individual initiative and creativity. The apostle Paul on more than one occasion collected offerings for the poor Jerusalem church. But other theologians and church historians say that the poverty of the first-century Church in Jerusalem was due to famine and social rejection, ending finally in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The truth most likely lies somewhere between these two positions.
Throughout history, Christians have experimented with various forms of community living and caring for the sick and needy in their midst, from monasteries to hospices to villages where Christian families could live together and share some or all of their material goods. Most often these community living experiments wither and die within two or three generations. The causes seem to be two-fold:
1) How does the community retain the spiritual zeal and enthusiasm they had at the beginning? Young people marry, have children and see the need to provide materially for their family. This is normal and good. But communal ownership of goods doesn't permit them to accumulate enough to give their children a higher education or help them to a good start in a trade. Then the parents grow old and sick or frail, and their children either assume their responsibility to care for elderly parents, or the children deny the faith and do not participate in the community.
2) How does the Christian community deal with this problem of children who deny the faith? One way is not to have children, that is, celibacy. Monasticism is a voluntary decision to dedicate one's life totally to worship and service to Christ, not becoming encumbered with responsibilities to spouse and family. It is difficult to perpetuate this kind of community, however, without natural reproduction. The alternative is to marry and bring up children in the faith, trusting God that they will remain faithful to Him in their adult lives. But if this doesn't happen, the children who have left the faith still inherit their parents' property and can live as unbelievers in the midst of a Christian community that thus gradually becomes less and less Christian.
This problem of continuity in the Christian community has existed for twenty centuries both in East and West, but has sharpened in the last century as the Church in the East had its social responsibilities ripped away after the bolshevik revolution, and as the Church in the West voluntarily abdicated its social responsibilities to the state that was gradually becoming more and more socialist. Thus the Church seemed to those outside to become more and more irrelevant. In both cases the outcome for the poor, lame, maimed and blind, for widows, orphans and elderly has been nothing short of disastrous. The state promises to care for the sick and needy, but these promises become empty words when the majority of the population sees itself as sick or needing state support, the number of socially productive people shrinks, and state budget deficits grow. Christians in East and West must cooperate to recover what was lost in the last century. That is what Agape Restoration Society is about, not merely to rehabilitate handicapped people, but also to rehabilitate society from its loss of agape-love, to help Christians re-learn how to love their neighbor as themselves in practical ways.
Historical roots of the present situation
Why should Evangelical and Orthodox Christians unite to cooperate in the Agape Restoration Society? Let us look at the historical roots of the present situation. The first ten centuries of Christianity witnessed a Church that was by and large united. Then the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches separated. A few centuries later, Catholics and Protestants separated in the Reformation. For centuries these communities of faith have been kept apart by what was formerly considered vast distances, as well as by different political empires: Protestants in the West mainly under English and German rulers, and Orthodox in the East largely under Ottoman and Russian rulers. Each experienced its own cultural development, in different directions.
With the dissolution of the Ottoman and Russian empires at the end of World War I, the geographical distance separating Russia from the West was replaced by vast political and philosophical differences - communism versus democracy, "atheism versus Christianity" - and the area formerly under Ottoman rule was broken up into the several Balkan states. With air travel, the rest of the world became neighbors. But the former geographical and later philosophical distance led Western Evangelicals to mainly perceive Orthodox as some kind of strange Catholics, and Orthodox also to perceive Evangelicals as the nearly same thing as Catholics. December 25 is called "Catholic Christmas" in Russia! Thus, a great deal of what divides Evangelicals and Orthodox is a lack of understanding of each other's cultural and historical expressions of Christianity, rather than insurmountable doctrinal differences.
Also in the beginning of the twentieth century, a great chasm opened up between the "social Gospel" of the liberal part of Christianity and the "spiritual Gospel" of the conservative part. Those who advocated the social aspects of the Gospel became enchanted with social change and often became part of the socialist movement. The far left of that movement, the communists, were atheists who relied entirely on human effort to improve mankind. This caused the conservatives to reject the "social Gospel" as humanistic or atheistic, and advocate a disembodied, "spiritual" form of the Gospel focused on personal piety and saving souls, thus abdicating the social sphere to the state.
Urgent need to build a bridge
After the "demise of communism" in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989-1991, a huge flood of often well-meaning but ill-trained Evangelical "missionaries" poured into Russia. Knowing virtually nothing about the more than one thousand years of Orthodox Christianity here, they attempted to "win those atheists to Christ." The cooperation against a common foe of state-enforced atheism that had existed between small groups of experienced Western Christian workers and the Orthodox Church evaporated as the latter witnessed this flood of high-financed missionaries doing what the Orthodox considered "sheep-stealing." Sadly, the atmosphere of euphoria and openness to the West immediately after the demise of communism has been replaced by the poisoned air of nationalism and xenophobia that has historically seen periods of ascendancy in Russia.
In order to overcome these emotions and cultural barriers, some common ground for unofficial cooperation between these two communities of faith must be found. It is not appropriate to expect the East to adopt Western culture or external religious rituals. There is no doubt that Orthodoxy is historically the spiritual foundation of the Russian nation. The cultural, geographical and demographical facts are that Evangelicalism is largely a Western phenomenon, and Orthodoxy is largely Eastern. Only about 1-2% of the population in the West are Orthodox, and conversely, only about 1-2% of the population in the East are Evangelicals. The West, including its Christian communities, has greater financial resources than the East at this moment in time. If there is to be cooperation between them instead of rivalry, we must take all of these facts into consideration and build a humanitarian bridge between these two Christian communities. Here is how we propose to do it:
Part 2