Submission to "God Alone" Newly exiled Georgi Vins speaks for Soviet Reform Baptists
On Thursday morning he was stuck in a jammed and filthy Siberian prison cell. Three days later, dressed in a dark blue suit issued to him by the Soviet government, he sat in the First Baptist Church of Washington while his host, the President of the United States, conducted a Sunday School class on I Kings 21. Even to secular eyes, this turn of events might seem miraculous; to the Rev. Georgi Vins, 50, it is quite literally an act of God.
Vins is an uncompromising Baptist. The trade that brought him and four other Soviet prisoners of conscience to the U.S., in return for two spies sent back to the Soviet Union, has presented the world with a new sort of religious witness. The stocky preacher and poet, who spent seven of the past 15 years in Siberia, is the first leader of the tens of thousands of breakaway "Reform Baptists" to reach the West. Fourteen years ago, they formally seceded from the government-recognized All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in order to fight for more religious freedom than Moscow permits. In an interview with TIME'S John Kohan, Vins painted an extraordinary portrait of a beleaguered religious movement and of a life that in some ways recalls letters of the imprisoned Apostle Paul to the early church.
"Our situation is difficult for Western Christians to understand," he says. Since the days of John Bunyan and Roger Williams, Baptists have traditionally believed in total separation of church and state. But attempts to practice that belief have had hard treatment in the Soviet Union. Baptists who follow Soviet rules can hold worship services, but the government forbids them to preach the word of God in public or to bring up their children with religious instruction.
Although they have been driven by religious conscience into resisting Moscow's strictures, the Reform Baptists insist that they are not political dissidents. "In accordance with biblical teaching," Vins says, "we believe that every authority is ultimately from God and that we are obliged to submit ourselves to such authority on all civil matters. To work. To pay taxes. To show respect to the government. But when it is a question of faith, then we submit ourselves to God alone."
Vins received a degree in electrical engineering from the Kiev Polytechnical Institute in 1952 and was ordained a minister in 1962. Struggle, and even martyrdom, in the service of religious conviction runs in his family. His father Pyotr was a U.S.-trained preacher who went back to the Soviet Union in 1922 as a missionary. He was arrested three times for his religious activities and died in 1943 somewhere in Stalin's vast Gulag system. Georgi pursued a career in industrial research in Kiev until he dedicated himself full time to religious work in 1963.