Pastor Vitaly Chichmarev doesn’t hesitate to make use of the word persecution.
“Yes,” he told CT, “the Belarusian church is persecuted.”
Chichmarev, who leads Light of Hope, a Baptist congregation in Minsk, recently spent seven months in prison. He was arrested in front of his teenage daughter in early 2022 for his participation in the huge 2020 protests against the controversial reelection of Belarus’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko.
He is back serving his congregation within the nation’s capital now. He’s glad to return to church work, be at home along with his family, and release an EP of some recent music along with his rock band AntiVirus. But he hasn’t forgotten the large picture in his country, Belarus. He believes the situation for Christians there may be dire.
“We are usually not capable of rent rooms for meetings,” he said. “New churches are usually not allowed to register. Catholics have had buildings taken away from them. Among the Protestant pastors, some, like me, have been in jail.”
The Norway-based human rights organization Forum 18 agrees. The group has documented a tightening web of restrictions on the free exercise of faith in Belarus. Secret police surveil evangelicals and other religious groups, raid their churches, contrive evictions, and detain religious leaders. Authorities require extensive bureaucratic paperwork to approve church buildings, to permit any meetings outside of church buildings, or to allow foreign visitors, who’re often denied entry into the country.
These restrictions have grown more serious as Lukashenko has cracked down on every a part of civil society that may challenge his control. He has been in power since 1994 and is often called a dictator by international observers.
The US government can be “concerned in regards to the constraints on religious freedom in Belarus, as a part of the whole-of-society human rights repressions committed by the Lukashenko regime,” in accordance with a spokesperson on the Department of State. US officials, including embassy representative Ruben Harutunian, have met with Belarusian authorities to advocate for more freedom. In particular, the US urged the regime to ease state pressure on clergy for participating in political life in Belarus.
The challenges have deepened due to the international situation. Belarus is sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine, and European Union member states Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. It has grow to be an in depth ally of Russia and supports its eastern neighbor within the war with Ukraine. Because of the conflict, Belarusian churches have found themselves cut off from global partners.
This has taken a toll on churches like Chichmarev’s. Light of Hope had around 100 members in 2020. About 45 remain, with greater than half of the congregation fleeing to Poland, Georgia, and other countries to avoid military mobilization and escape the continued repression.
Article 31 of the Belarusian structure provides accommodations for church gatherings and the general public career of religion. According to the federal government, there are 3,563 registered religious institutions in Belarus, representing 174 religious organizations.
Evangelicals, nevertheless, account for lower than 2 percent of the population. And they’re treated as second-class residents under the law, in accordance with Leonid Mikhovich, president of the Baptist Union in Belarus and rector at Minsk Theological Seminary. Even so, Mikhovich is ambivalent about using the word persecution.
“On the entire, our situation will not be one of the best, but once you compare it to Soviet times or other countries, we don’t have specific persecution,” he said. “We can publish the Bible, hold Bible camps, have theological education, have Christian worship. We have numerous opportunities.”
Mikhovich is less bothered by the constraints in Belarus than by how isolated Christians there have grow to be. Few opportunities exist to attach with brothers and sisters world wide—or simply across the border.
“We used to have a robust relationship with churches in Ukraine. That’s not possible,” he said. “We have many connections with ministries within the West, but those are difficult to take care of in light of worldwide politics. We can work with Russians, but the general situation for cooperation will not be good.”
One of the Baptist Union’s partners is the Slavic Gospel Association (SGA), headquartered in Chicago. Founded in 1934 by Belarusian Peter Deyneka, SGA trains pastors and church planters, sponsors missionaries, and provides equipment and resources to local churches, predominantely in the previous Soviet Union.
SGA president Michael Johnson said the group currently sponsors 55 pastors and church planters in Belarus on an ongoing basis, in partnership with the Baptist Union there. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has cost SGA some support from organizations within the US and Europe, however the work continues. Despite international isolation, he said, the Baptist Union seminary continues to be functioning and seems recent church planters and pastors every yr. The SGA has also partnered with orphanages, camp ministries, and evangelistic efforts up to now two years.
“The abhorrent circumstances they find themselves in are difficult, but they’ve been capable of adjust,” Johnson said. “For me, I believe it’s a privilege simply to carry their bags. To support the work they’re doing.”
Rauli Lehtonen, secretary for the Pentecostal Commission on Religious Liberty who focuses on Eurasia, cautioned that the longer the isolation lasts, the more serious the situation for evangelicals and other Christians within the country will grow to be. It’s getting harder to even know what the situation on the bottom is for churches in Belarus.
“The isolation is casting a dark shadow over the flow of data,” he said. “People are afraid of expressing their thoughts in regards to the current situation within the country. … This allows for the authorities to be bolder of their discrimination, because they’ll suppose that the knowledge of the persecutions is not going to be known.”
Karina, a 27-year-old Belarusian Christian living in Los Angeles, can feel that shadow in her own life. Karina, who asked CT to not publish her last name for fear of reprisals against family and friends back home, left Belarus to pursue a profession in California following the protests in 2020. She’s still in contact with people at her church in Minsk, but there are numerous things she’s afraid to talk over with them about.
“We talk in regards to the weather, what I’m doing here in LA, food, and even sports, but never in regards to the war, never in regards to the state of the church,” she said.
Though Karina is glad she will be able to enjoy many freedoms she wouldn’t have in Belarus, she will be able to’t help but feel cut off.
“I even have been going to church here in town, but my spiritual house is in Belarus. Sadly, I don’t have any meaningful contact with it anymore,” she said.
That is partly why Chichmarev has been posting more music online since he returned from prison. He hopes people like Karina hear his lyrics and feel connected to their families, communities, and churches back in Belarus. He hopes, too, that Christians world wide will know what is going on in Belarus and pray for his country.
“Our dream is a free country where people live, love, and sympathize with one another,” he said. “We ask Christians world wide to hope that the situation will change, to hope for the pastors, for his or her protection, for all believers in our country, and people who left, that they’ll return home.”
Ken Chitwood is a scholar of worldwide religion who lives and works in Germany.
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