Archive: Rõõmsad Teated! Good News in Estonia

by Mark Elliott, Associate Professor of History, Asbury College, Wilmore, Kentucky

A college professor discovers a thriving Methodist congregation—and Good News supporters—behind the Iron Curtain.

How often do you get to shake the hand of a pastor who accepted imprisonment rather than obey government orders to close his church? That was my rare privilege last March as I led a tour of the Soviet Union.

Our itinerary included visits to many imposing sanctuaries restored at great cost. They have been turned into museums by a government of atheists. Soviet guides explained this paradox by noting Moscow’s desire to preserve the country’s “cultural and architectural treasures.” This may be true, but a Western Christian leaves these tombs of churches with sadness and surprise at Russian communism’s attempt to suppress Christianity yet painstakingly preserve its most impressive houses of worship.

This part of our tour was educational, but the inspirational highlight for many of us was the chance to visit churches still open for worship. (The Soviet Union has perhaps a tenth the number of functioning churches it had in 1917 at the time of the communist takeover.) It was in one of these “living” churches that I gained an altogether new appreciation for God’s ability to work in difficult circumstances.

On March 22 some of our tour group worshiped in the Methodist Church in Tallinn, capital of Soviet Estonia. This city is hardly 50 miles by water from Finnish territory. But it might as well exist in another world, given the contrast between Democratic Finland and Estonia, one of the western outposes of the Soviet empire. The Tallinn congregation of 1200 is the largest of 15 Methodist churches in Estonia, the only Soviet republic in which the denomination is permitted to work (Moscow forced the closure of Methodist churches to the north, in Leningrad, after 1917 and to the South, in Latvia and Lithuania, after World War II.) A membership of some 1200 may not seem remarkable by American standards, but it is the largest Methodist church not only in the Soviet Union but in all of continental Europe.

Still, it was not the size of this church so much as the spiritual fervor of its members that thrilled us that Sunday morning in March. Quickly, I revised private thoughts of myself as a short-term missionary in Russia and readily acknowledged that I was a pilgrim who had stumbled upon an isolated but dynamic outpost of faith.

The church itself was quite plain, inside and out. It had a white stucco exterior with a steep gable roof and a small spire that reminded me of northern Germany. Inside, a wooden barrel vault ceiling covered an unadorned sanctuary in sharp contrast to the ornate interiors of Russian Orthodox churches. Some of the simplicity may stem from the fact that by state decree Seventh Day Adventists use the same space for worship on Saturday, and the same two congregations may have different ideas on church furnishings.

While some members of our group attended Russian Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist services that Sunday in Tallinn, nine of us worshiped with the Methodists. Because two of my students and I arrived before the service began, we were ushered to the platform to sit with the church elders facing the congregation. At 10:00 a.m. four men entered from the back of the choir loft and took seats directly in front of us: Rev. Olaf Parnamets, senior pastor and Superintendent of the Methodist Church in Estonia; Rev. Heigo Ritzbek, associate pastor and Secretary of the Methodist Church in Estonia; an elderly gentleman who had been the head of the church in the late 1940s; and a young man who was a ministerial candidate. The senior and associate ministers spoke excellent English and talked with us briefly before beginning the service.

To our amazement they were visibly excited that we came from Wilmore, Kentucky, and Asbury College. I mentioned Asbury’s Methodist heritage but they already knew that. Then Rev. Ritzbek specifically asked us if we knew anything about a magazine called Good News! After the service he told me he had been praying that the Lord would send someone to him with knowledge about the Good News movement. What an exciting-and-awesome-experience to know you are the answer to someone else’s prayer!

These men must have had confidence in Asbury College and Good News—because they asked us to participate in the service the moment they met us. Dave Lanpher and Jim McHugh, college history majors from New York and New Jersey, gave personal testimonies with grace and Christian maturity, representing their Lord to His credit. As Dave began speaking and as Pastor Ritzbek translated, “I greet you as brothers in Christ,” every hand in the congregation went up and a wave of that “tie that binds our hearts in Christian love” flowed in our direction in a way I shall never forget.

I was ready for a testimony myself, I thought, but the pastors decided otherwise. They must have felt I had a sermon in me because that is what they asked for. I quickly said, “Wait a minute! I’m a teacher, not a preacher.”

They still presented the opportunity as an offer I ought not refuse; so there I sat facing 800 plus with my New Testament and five minutes to construct my first sermon ever. I chose as my text II Timothy 1:7—”For God hath not given us a spirit of fear but a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind.” The part about “God hath not given us a spirit of fear” I decided was appropriate not only for the predicament of believers under communism—but for history teachers called upon for extemporaneous preaching in Soviet Estonia!

Looking over the congregation I could not help but be moved by how intently everyone listened to four sermons in two hours (how would that go over at First Church, U.S.A.?); how people not only filled every pew but the aisles as well; how they sang with conviction from memory or hand-written song sheets or a few very worn hymnals; but above all how their unhurried and passionate prayers swelled in a chorus of petitions to the Lord.

This spiritual oasis, in seemingly one of the most improbable of locations, makes one smile at a 1965 Russian account of Protestants in the U.S.S.R. which predicted that, any time now, “one should anticipate” Methodism’s “complete disappearance” from the Soviet Union (F.I. Fedorenko, Sekty, ikh vera i dela).

After the service a number of us had an opportunity for fellowship with the pastors and ministerial candidates in the Methodist headquarters building in a picturesque section of old Tallinn. Here we talked and prayed in a room with the likenesses of John Wesley and George Simons, pioneering American Methodist missionary to Russia, hanging from the wall and keeping us company. Here also we sensed some of the frustration, but above all, the dedication of pastors who face countless restrictions on their activities. We sensed, also, the frustration of ministerial students who yearn for formal training but who must make do with self-instruction because not one Protestant seminary is open in the Soviet Union.

The Christian fellowship that day was rich, and surprisingly, a great deal of it was in English. But there was one handshake, from the elderly former pastor who could speak only Estonian, that spoke the most to me. This 20th-century saint had refused to dissolve his church on Stalin’s orders in 1949 and went to a labor camp for his convictions. Only Stalin’s death in 1953 saved him from 20 years of imprisonment.

Recognizing the difficult plight Christians have faced in the Soviet Union in this century, we might conclude that they are to be pitied. But in a way our churches are more pitiable. American congregations have people in the pews who are there out of habit or because it is good for business or for any number of wrong reasons. But behind the Iron Curtain people worship for the right reasons. There, a life of faith, at the very least, is “bad for business.” It can ruin chances for higher education and a good job.

A Russian Orthodox priest, Dmitrii Dudko, who spent the first half of 1980 in a Soviet prison, put it well in his spiritual autobiography entitled Our Hope. Speaking of believers in the U.S.S.R. he said, “We’ve happened upon the greatest of joys—to be in the position of the first Christians.” Consider this alongside the conclusion of a Methodist Superintendent in Finland who related the following to Dr. Charles Keysor last April: “The Estonian church, because of its persecution, is no doubt the strongest and most vital church in the Northern Europe Annual Conference of the Methodist Church.” Let us hope that it does not take Soviet-like conditions to revitalize the United Methodist Church in America.