Songulashvili, Malkhaz Evangelical Christian Baptists of Georgia: The History and Transformation of a Free Church Tradition (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 556 are confronted with church leaders who dislike party politics and elections, who support authoritarianism and what they call ‘traditional Russian social structures’. Would that today Russia’s Orthodox Church top brass included people who thought like Novgorodtsev. London Xenia Dennen Songulashvili, Malkhaz. Evangelical Christian Baptists of Georgia: The History and Transformation of a Free Church Tradition. Studies in World Christianity. Baylor University Press, Waco, TX, 2015. xxviii + 508 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $79.95:£66.99. Georgia’s small Baptist community is, arguably, one of the most interesting and innovative of the country’s religious communities since Georgia emerged from the Soviet Union. It is also one of the most divided, with supporters and opponents of the initiative led by Archbishop Malkhaz Songulashvili to make the church more liturgical and closer to what the supporters of the reforms believe to be an authentically Georgian expression of their Christian faith, tied to their national culture yet outward looking. Not only is the church liturgical, it is outspokenly ecumenical, gender-sensitive, anti-homophobic, anti-nationalist, charitable and ready to speak up for those who find no place in the dominant culture of today’s Georgia. Those who opposed this vision have left, while Songulashvili and others work on from their base at Tbilisi Peace Cathedral. The impetus and purpose of this history is clear: as church leader from 1994, Songulashvili wrestled with the history of his church and the direction he was leading it to take. A time of academic study in Oxford — interrupted by troubles back home to deal with — led to a doctorate and this book, which was ‘written in the context of my personal, my church’s, and my nation’s turmoil’ (p. xxiv). As the reader might expect, this is not dispassionate history. Songulashvili is looking for elements in his community’s history to justify the turn the church took from the early 1990s. Despite his insistence that he ‘aimed to work as a historian’ and therefore did not drawn upon ‘ethnographic methods of participant observation’ (p. xvii), his interests, experience and aspirations are clearly seen in the choice and presentation of material. Songulashvili traces the origins of Protestantism in what is now Georgia from the 1570s, when European Protestants met Georgians in Constantinople. A Georgian prince ‘took a personal interest in the Lutheran faith and even invited Lutheran ministers to start their work in South Georgia’ (p. 29). REVIEWS 557 Brethren missionaries soon visited, meeting King Erekle II. German Pietist settlers arrived from Swabia from 1817, eager to find religious freedom. They were joined by Russian crypto-Protestants (Songulashvili calls them ‘essentialists’, p. 34), including Molokans, Dukhobors and Sabbatarians, exiled to the South Caucasus by Tsar Nicholas I. By the later nineteenth century, Tiflis was a cosmopolitan city, ‘a centre of religious ferment’ that ‘facilitated the birth of yet another religious group’ (p. 46). The third Baptist church to be founded in the Russian empire was in Tiflis and, interestingly, ‘Not one of the three principal founders of the Tiflis Baptist Church was Georgian, not even born in Georgia’ (p. 49). One was a German colonist, one a Syrian migrant from Persia and the last a Russian Molokan. A Russian Orthodox priest left the earliest description of the Russian-speaking church at worship in 1879 (translated on pp. 340–47). By the early twentieth century, Georgian-speaking churches emerged, one Baptist and the other Evangelical, though they remained little studied until Soviet researchers in the 1950s. The Baptist community remained divided by language, with separate Russian, Georgian, Armenian and, later, Ossetian communities, with Russian the dominant culture and ethos. Songulashvili notes the failure of the Russian Baptists to convert ethnic Georgians, with the first convert only in 1912. Ilia Kandelaki, baptised the following year, became an inspiration in developing a Georgian-language church (and an advocate of Bible translation into Georgian). Songulashvili translates the contemporary account of his 1927 ‘martyrdom’ after preaching in a village near Tiflis (pp. 376–80). The church was crushed into silence by the 1930s, re-emerging only when Baptists, Russian Orthodox and others were allowed to revive their activity during the Second World...