Word: dukhonchenko
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...more than 450 worshipers, too many for the building to hold, overflow outside, getting the word through a loudspeaker that echoes down the street. Pastor Yakov Dukhonchenko is Ukrainian senior presbyter for the government-recognized All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, those Soviet Protestants who have chosen to accept state regulation. This makes him a rival of Georgi Vins, a leader of the reform Baptists, who was stripped of citizenship and exiled to the U.S. this year in a prisoner exchange. Says Dukhonchenko: "Georgi Vins said it was impossible to evangelize, but the churches function freely and can preach...
Dissenters reject all state control, including government-required registration. But one Protestant reports 200 Baptist or Pentecostal congregations have been registered in the U.S.S.R. over the past five years, about half of them Ukrainian. Dukhonchenko reckons there are only about 8,000 reformers left in Kiev, and only 18,000 across the Soviet Union...
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