Forum 18 this week reported on the latest in a series of legal maneuvers against a United Methodist church in the western Russian city of Smolensk. The saga apparently began when the Methodist church put up on its website information about the planned opening in September of a Missionary College. As reported by Forum 18 in February, at that point the local Russian Orthodox Bishop, Ignati (Punin) of Vyazma, asked the Regional Public Prosecutor "to take the measures necessary in this situation to defend the inhabitants of our city, particularly youth, from this pseudo-religious organisation." In response local police officials began investigating the church and demanded that it remove the website information about the missionary college. Feeling intimidated, the church's pastor, Aleksandr Vtorov, filed suit on behalf of the church for moral damages against Bishop Ignati in Smolensk's Industrial District Court. Now, in the latest moves, the Smolensk Regional Court, at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office, has dissolved the Methodist congregation as a legal entity. The grounds for the dissolution were apparently that the church was conducting a brief Sunday school, attended by 4 children, without having a license to be an educational institution. This is a novel interpretation of the law. The dissolution does not totally ban the church, but it does prevent the pastor's suit against Bishop Ignati from going forward.
Friday, March 28, 2008
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I have met a few liberals in Blogville --maybe just one named Mudrake --who would do just as this bishop has done --professing "to protect youth" from evangelicals and fundamentalists. That's how nasty the anti-Christian rhetoric is from some Americans. They do not want evangelicals to share free speech rights in the public forums --and the main issue with them is homosexuality. If the Church doesn't kowtow to homosexuals' demands, the Church should be viewed as the Ku Klux Klan or worse --and denied free speech on the basis that the Bible is "hate speech" on the subject of sexuality.
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