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Excerpts from the JRL E-Mail Community :: Founded and Edited by David Johnson
#34 - JRL 2008-113 - JRL Home
Subject: Religion in Russia and Russia With Love
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008
From: jhw@ams.org (John Wilhelm)

On April 24, the New York Times published a detailed article on Religion in Russia [JRL #80] which I thought was a terribly biased picture of the situation. I would like to share with your readers the copy of my unpublished letter to the Times on this matter.

In addition, I would like to bring the attention of any readers, especially Disciples (Members of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ), who might have an interest, to our web site on our Russia With Love project with a link to an article about it on the Disciples World web site (www.russiawithloveaa.org). And I would like to encourage anybody with an interest in what we are doing to contact us. Thank you.

John Howard Wilhelm, Chair,
Russia With Love Steering Committee,
Ann Arbor, Michigan

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letters@nytimes.com

The New York Times

229 West 43rd St.

New York, New York 10036-3959

To the Editor:

As one who has been involved in and supportive of the Christian revival in Russia, I find myself very troubled by your description (art., Apr. 24) of the religious situation there. Based on my own experience in that country, I am quite disturbed by the rather unbalanced picture you present of the Russian Orthodox Church and its attitudes towards other groups which is a much more varied situation than you describe in the article.

There are some very good people at the level of the Patriarchate and at the parish level in the Russian Orthodox Church whom we ought to be supporting rather than spending large resources, as American Methodists have done, on proselytizing.

Since 1998, our Russia With Love project has been involved, along with the Danish St. Paul Society, in supporting a joint Russian Orthodox/Danish Lutheran outreach to the poor in Moscow. It has been a rewarding and exciting experience to work with and see an old and venerable branch of the Christian Church revive itself and its charity work with meager resources after 70 years of unspeakable oppression.

American Protestants concerned with promoting a Christian revival in Russia would find it much more rewarding and effective to follow our example rather than that of the Methodists and other foreign groups involved in proselytizing.

Sincerely yours,
John Howard Wilhelm