"Liturgy and Revolution": The Georgian Baptists and the Pursuit of Radical Democracy
Pictured: Rev. Malkhaz Songulashvili, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia, follows the cross in the Baptist-led ecumenical procession on Good Friday, 2007.
Readers of this blog remember the praise I have given to the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia, a tiny Baptist community that has nevertheless managed to exercise remarkable influence and moral authority in an officially Eastern Orthodox post-Soviet country. I am not the only young theology student in America who has acknowledged and sought to reflect on their experience. In fact, a Duke Divinity grad (now Catholic University of America doctoral candidate), Ben Boswell, recently wrote two articles about the EBCG for the journal Religion in Eastern Europe. For his thesis, Ben draws a parallel between the organizing efforts of the student-led democratic movement Kmara and the corporate life of the Georgian Baptists. Each group, a "radical" force in its society, played an effective role in the 2003 "Rose Revolution" precisely because each practiced its own liturgy, a "revolutionary" or looping-back movement that sustained identity and provided the impetus for engagement with society. Boswell writes:
[T]he EBCG’s ability, as a monastic movement within the Orthodox Church, to recover a democratic polity in the form of a Free Church ecclesiology, was the most significant reform that enabled their successful participation in the non-violent revolution for democracy in Georgia. In their intentional recovery of a Free Church ecclesiology the EBCG refused to abandon the Orthodox liturgical resources that had enriched their worship since the fourth century. Radical Reformed, Free Church ecclesiology, coupled with the ancient liturgical resources of the Orthodox Church, provided the EBCG with an impetus for a revolution in their social relationships and the practical and spiritual foundation to sustain them.
The Georgian Baptists' radical liturgy has taken various forms. As Boswell notes, it has included the adoption of native Orthodox practices of worship and spirituality so that their proclamation of the gospel is contextualized within the broad tradition of the church Catholic and the cultural history of Georgia as well. While the appropriation of tradition is understood as a positive good in its own right, it has helped the Baptists in Georgia because a) they disabuse themselves of the charge that they are a novel "sect" with no respect for the Church of ages past and b) they send a signal that they are committed to being a part of the Church of Georgia and for the Georgian people.
The liturgy has been radical in swinging open doors towards diversity and wide participation. Despite the typically fundamentalist climate of the Eastern European Baptist churches, the EBCG ordains women deacons and pastors. While some churches have adopted the liturgical reforms that bring their worship closer towards the Orthodox, there is no demand for uniformity and congregations are free to construct their liturgies as befit their needs under Christ's Lordship. Although Georgia is riven by ethnic tensions, the Baptist Cathedral in Tbilisi maintains four separate congregations based on language: Georgian, Russian, Armenian and Ossetian. The Baptists have taken seriously Christ's call to minister all people. When Chechen Muslims fled across the border into Georgia, Bishop Malkhaz and other members of the EBCG took a wheeled "mobile Eucharistic table" to the mountain hinterland so that they could feed the refugees and share in table fellowship:
Moved by this act of hospitality one Muslim imam remarked, “When I return to Grozny I will do two things. I will build a new mosque because ours was destroyed by the Russians, and I will build a Baptist church because the Baptists were the only people with us in our time of need.”
Finally, the Baptists have practiced a radical liturgy of ecumenical cooperation and brotherhood. For several years they have organized and led a procession of the cross on Good Friday in which all Christians are invited to participate. The procession begins at the Armenian Apostolic cathedral, moves to the Roman Catholic cathedral, the Lutheran cathedral, and then finishes at the Baptist cathedral. Bishop Malkhaz also aided Christian unity when he led the EBCG to respond to the terrorism of a rogue Orthodox priest with love. Once the priest, Basil Mkalashvili, was apprehended and tried, the bishop made the dramatic gesture of calling for his release and crossing the courtroom to shake the defrocked priest's hand in a gesture of forgiveness. While the court still sentenced the priest, he and Malkhaz continue to exchange letters regularly.
When the revolution for democracy came in 2003, Baptists were active and visible participants in the demonstrations:
During the days of the Rose Revolution, Baptists were actively protesting alongside opposition party leaders and even extended hospitality by bringing hot drinks and food to the demonstrators during the cold and rainy hours of the revolution.10 Alongside the Georgian flags (a neo-medieval flag with five blood red crosses) flown by Saakashvili and opposition leaders in Tbilisi Freedom Square flew the flag of the EBCG, which was designed with an ancient cross from monastic cave paintings found in the Georgian desert. The Baptist flags provided the only visible religious presence of any kind during the revolutionary democratic movement. When demonstrators armed with roses non-violently stormed the Presidential office building during the illegitimate Parliamentary session, a Baptist named Lela Karvelishvili, who worked forthe Liberty Institute, carried the Baptist flag into Shevardnadze’s office as a religious symbol of revolutionary power.
It is Boswell's contention that the intentional construction of a Free Church-Orthodox liturgy by the Baptists gave them the revolutionary character that has allowed them to participate in nonviolent revolution and share an active, compassionate love for the enemy and the other. As Free Church Christians they inherit and uphold a tradition of principled dissent and a commitment to what John Howard Yoder described as an ecclesiology of dialogical reciprocity, which his Anabaptist tradition had dubbed "the rule of Paul." In this church practice openness towards the gifts and voices of all is cultivated and cherished. The EBCG has externalized this process by making itself open to the gifts and insights of other Christians and of democratic movements like Kmara. The result has been a unique form of "radical catholicity" that engages the wider Church and the wider society in pursuit of fuller obedience to the gospel of JEsus Christ. Boswell writes:
To the extent that the EBCG was able to incorporate the deep liturgical resources of the Orthodox tradition within their own Free Church polity, they embodied the most radical form of the “rule of Paul,” in that they were open not only to hearing the voice of the other, of the enemy, but they were open to learning from and embodying the best of their interlocutors practices into their own liturgies as a sign of reconciliation and revolutionary dialogical reciprocity.
The result has been an inspired liturgy, a true "work of the people" that has shaped the EBCG into a vibrant expression of radical and catholic Christianity, committed both to the crucial demands of discipleship and to the beauty and unity of the faith as it has been shared across time and space. I pray that Baptists and all other Christians in America will attend to their example and consider how our liturgies - that is, our life together in proclamation and praise - will in fact shape us to be revolutionaries who continually "loop back" upon the Gospel to order ourselves afresh.
