Walls of the mind and heart are harder to tear down than walls of brick and
stone.
The
fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago brought great hopes of a new birth of
spiritual and political freedom, not only in the communist orbit but around the
world. In many ways, those hopes were realized. Old tyrannies began to crumble.
The Cold War ended after more than a generation of East-West conflict. Churches
and believers long imprisoned by persecution and fear were released into the
sunlight of liberty.
The
collapse of the Soviet Union followed the glorious opening in Berlin. Waves of
Christian workers from the West flooded into Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet republics to assist their brothers and sisters in the faith. An exciting era of
evangelism and church planting began.
That
era continues, despite the turmoil that has followed Soviet communism’s demise.
“The wall was an outward symbol of an inward reality,” Mark Edworthy, IMB
strategy leader for Europe, told IMB writer Nicole Lee. “Communism had erected
a spiritual barrier with its incessant denial of God’s existence and its cycle
of cruelty. Spiritually, we eagerly took up a hammer and chisel to work against
that greater barrier.” A quarter-century later, “we can see greater trophies
than stone and mortar as the Lord has continued to build His church throughout
the former Soviet sphere.”
But believers are working with urgency in Eastern Europe, Lee reported,
“because no one knows how long the door to some of these countries will remain
open. The ongoing war in Ukraine highlights the fact that, although the Cold
War is over, communism and other secular philosophies are still at work.”
The social and economic chaos of the immediate post-Soviet years led to
yearning — in Russia, at least — for a “strong hand” at the helm, which has resulted in new tensions with
the West in recent years. Those tensions are pushing the world to the “brink of a new
Cold War,” warned former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a Nov. 8 event in
Berlin marking the Wall’s fall. Gorbachev, whose reforms helped hasten the end
of the Soviet empire, criticized global powers for failing to work together to
end conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and Ukraine.
For now, open ministry continues.
“We really don’t see any comprehensive political pressure that hinders the
advance of the gospel. Materialism and consumerism have replaced communism,”
said one Christian worker based in Russia. Still, he added, “Our time might be
short. Have we planted an apostolic burden among Russian church leaders? There
are some who [are passionate about reaching the lost], but we need many more.”
The message is one that has been repeated again and again throughout
history: There are no guarantees — except for
the presence and sovereignty of the Lord. Walls may fall, while others rise. In
the political realm, the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing occurred in
1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down. Yet the Chinese church, which
suffered one of its darkest hours during the savage persecution of the 1966-76
Cultural Revolution, continues to grow in size, vitality and passion for global
mission.
“God
may seem silent on occasion. At other times, people simply don’t trouble to
hear his voice,” writes Philip Jenkins,
distinguished professor of history at Baylor University, in Christianity
Today. “As an example, we
might look at the experience of China, which over the past two millennia
has remained the world’s most populous nation. The story of Chinese
Christianity is a recurrent cycle of mighty boom years followed by what seemed like
total annihilation at the time, an obliteration so absolute that on each
occasion, it was quite clear that the church could never rise again. That cycle
has occurred five times to date since the ninth century. On each occasion, the
Chinese church has reemerged far more powerful than at its previous peak. Each
successive ‘nevermore’ proved to be strictly temporary.”
Today, the very existence of the church in the Middle
East, the cradle of the Christian faith, seems threatened by the advance of
Islamic extremists. But God will not leave Himself without a witness.
“Even
when institutional churches vanish, believers persist in many different forms,”
Jenkins writes. “As Anatoly Lunacharsky, the frustrated Soviet minister of
education, complained in 1928, ‘Religion is like a nail: The harder you hit it,
the deeper it goes into the wood.’ Sometimes it goes in so deep, you can’t even
see it.”
One
day that nail reappears, stronger than ever.
