The end of religious freedom in Russia

From now on Christians in Russia won’t be allowed to email their friends an invitation to church or to evangelize in their own homes because the country’s most restrictive measures in post-Soviet history place broad limitations on missionary work, including preaching, teaching, and engaging in any activity designed to recruit people into a religious group.

To share their faith, citizens must secure a government permit through a registered religious organization, and they cannot evangelize anywhere besides churches and other religious sites. The restrictions even apply to activity in private residences and online.

Can you imagine what that means? No more religious freedom, zero liberty to share your faith freely. This is how far we have come which means of course also the end of our direct missionary work in that country where once even government officials supported our seminars for school directors and teachers to become familiar with our moral education books called “My world and I”.

How could this tragic reality come about? You may blame some political forces but if you look at the overall situation it is very clear where such a spirit was firmly established first before it bore fruits in these extreme restrictions to religious freedom. As the chosen people of God we definitely are the spiritual centre where core decisions are being made concerning what is happening in our world. And it is in our very midst that such a spirit of blocking witnessing was firmly established thorough various methods like banning people from attending Sunday Service and even excommunicating them.

Such an attitude was implemented under the leadership of Hyung Jin Nim as international president against those working with his elder brother Preston and now against Sanctuarians in various countries like Moldova by FFWPU leaders. So Sean Moon is harvesting what he has been sowing himself and our top leaders in Russian who forbid their members to communicate with those they did not like including myself experience that it is being done to them what they have done to others with these severe restrictions being implemented.

The new law which was proposed by United Russia party lawmaker Irina Yarovaya target religious groups outside the Russian Orthodox church. Because it defines missionary activities as religious practices to spread a faith beyond its members, “if that is interpreted as the Moscow Patriarchate is likely to, it will mean the Orthodox Church can go after ethnic Russians but that no other church will be allowed to,” according to Frank Goble, an expert on religious and ethnic issues in the region. Russian nationalist identity remains tied up with the Russian Orthodox church.

“The Russian Orthodox church is part of a bulwark of Russian nationalism stirred up by Vladimir Putin,” David Aikman, history professor and foreign affairs expert, told CT. “Everything that undermines that action is a real threat, whether that’s evangelical Protestant missionaries or anything else.”

Sergei Ryakhovsky, head of the Protestant Churches of Russia, and several other evangelical leaders called the law a violation of religious freedom and personal conscience in a letter to Putin posted on the Russian site Portal-Credo. The letter reads, in part: “The obligation on every believer to have a special permit to spread his or her beliefs, as well as hand out religious literature and material outside of places of worship and used structures is not only absurd and offensive, but also creates the basis for mass persecution of believers for violating these provisions. Soviet history shows us how many people of different faiths have been persecuted for spreading the Word of God. This law brings us back to a shameful past."

Such unspeakably sad developments did not arise by chance but there is the blueprint, the pattern, well established in our own Movement. Some of you may feel it is tiring that I am pointing out in detail what has been going on in internet groups created in support of Hyung Jin Nim. But my reflections prove that the very same spirit as the one which has led to the creation of this new laws against religious liberty is firmly manifested in the hearts of the admins of these various sites where people are easily banned whenever the administrators feel like it, even stating that no reason has to be given for their doing so.

This means nothing less than absolute totalitarianism being spiritually and practically established in our own Movement to various degrees in the Family Federation as well as in Sanctuary Church. So this shocking new law, as Peter Zoehrer, a main advocate of religious freedom, calls it, is firmly rooted in our own hierarchies, in the fallen practices in our midst.

In the afore introduced article you can read: “Stalin-era religious restrictions - including outlawing religious activity outside of Sunday services in registered churches and banning parents from teaching faith to their kids - remained on the books until the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the government enforced them only selectively. Some have questioned whether the government could or would monitor religious activity in private Christian homes. “I don’t think you can overestimate the Russian government’s willingess to exert control,” Aikman told CT. If history is any indication, the proposed regulations reveal a pattern of “creeping totalitarianism” in the country, he said.

The so-called Big Brother laws also introduce widespread surveillance of online activity, including requiring encrypted apps to give the government the power to decode them, and assigning stronger punishments for extremism and terrorism.” Now the officials are free to accuse anybody of anything in respect to violating this new law because any kind of outreach to people may be interpreted as proselytizing.

The proposal is an “attack on freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and the right to privacy that gives law enforcement unreasonably broad powers,” the humanitarian group Human Rights Watch told The Guardian. This attack is fully supported by Sanctuarians who agree with the behaviour of the administrators of their support groups who have used the method of banning people and kicking them out whenever they felt like it. In the recent reflection serious I described for you in the people’s own words what happened to the son who spoke out in defence of his mother who was completely unjustifiably kicked out of an internet community where she has been a long-time active member, appreciated by so many. The end result for defending his mother was that Thomas himself was thrown out of the group.

The anti-evangelism law carries fines up to US $780 for an individual and $15,500 for an organization. Foreign visitors who violate the law face deportation and imprisonment. This spirit is unshakably manifested in internet communities which support the new king Sean Moon where expressing one’s own conviction in line with what one’s conscience tells you is already enough reason for you to be banned from these groups if the admins feel like it. There is no difference between the kind of attitude which is being practiced by Sanctuary Church supporters and the behaviour of the officials in Russia. Needless to say, the same applies to the top leadership of FFWPU in that country. I have shared with you about their behaviour in previous letters.

 “In Moscow, we shared an office with 24 organizations. Not a single foreign expatriate mission is there now,” Rakhuba previously told CT. “They could not re-register. Missionaries could not return to Russia because they could not renew their visas. It is next to impossible to get registration as a foreign organization today.”

This is the actual situation which has become a reality in Russia and in a similar way in other countries, with the root cause of such developments being right here in our midst where the banning of people is well accepted and supported by our own members.

You can see videos in connection with evangelization being banned in Russia.

Please watch at least the 4 minute presentation by Ben Sasse about the Russian attack on religious freedom.

Not only every human being will harvest in the end what he or she is sowing individually but also we have to bear the consequences of our collective refusal to address root causes in our own Movement where fundamental changes need to urgently happen.

In one of the afore-introduced video links you can hear the preacher speak about the Russian anti-freedom developments coming to America where “Hate speech” has become a “big deal”. No more freedom of speech started in our own Movement for certain individuals and is now more and more manifested in the world which is going downhill like Russia where there was relatively much freedom in the nineteen nineties whereas now we are back in the spirit of the Stalinist era. Having a lot of first-hand experience I know very well what I am talking about.

Hoping for you to finally wake up and not only when it is too late and you have to do so by being yourself behind prison bars, be it physically here on earth or spiritually when you have entered the next world.