Kaliningrad is an historical and geographical anomaly. A city and larger land area sharing the same name, it is located between Poland and Lithuania on the southern Baltic coast. It formed part of East Prussia before becoming subsumed into Bismarck’s unified Germany in 1871.
After World War II the German population headed west and the territory was settled by people from across the Soviet Union. When the communist state collapsed in 1991 and many former Soviet republics gained their independence, Kaliningrad remained within the Russian Federation. It now has a total population of about 1.2 million people and a land area of slightly under 6,000 square miles. Its strategic significance is amplified by it being the only ice-free Russian port on the Baltic Sea.
Historically, evangelicalism flourished in this former part of Germany, with delegates attending the Evangelical Alliance (EA) conference in London in 1851 and returning home to set up the German EA that same year. And today, according to Evangelical Focus, the future looks equally exciting, as the new Kaliningrad Evangelical Alliance (KEA) is firmly established under the auspices of the Russian Evangelical Alliance (REA).
The REA was set up in 1909, but ceased to function under Bolshevik rule after 1917. It was only re-established in 2003. It has been restructuring for the past two years, as Russia is a huge country with 200 different ethnic groups and many autonomous national territories. It therefore requires a multinational and multiregional federal structure to function effectively, so regional alliances are being formed in Moscow, Siberia, Tatarstan, the North Caucasus and elsewhere. One of these new regional alliances is Kaliningrad.
Forming the new alliance is made simpler because of the remarkable co-operation between local Protestant Christians. Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals and Charismatics already meet regularly for prayer and have worked together successfully. In February, regional church leaders met in Kaliningrad, together with the Head of the Department of Public Engagement of the World Evangelical Alliance, Professor Johannes Reimer. It was agreed to establish the new KEA and work has already started on formalising the structures of the organisation.
It is a timely development. The population that settled in the region since 1945 has come from across the Soviet Union; today it includes ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Lithuanians and others. Congregations of Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Evangelical Christians and others have sprung up alongside the traditional Evangelical Lutheran and Russian Orthodox churches.
Many of these churches are growing and are carrying out impressive social and missionary work, such as evangelical rehabilitation centres for drug and alcohol addicts. There is a Christian college in the city and a major focus is evangelism.
Close co-operation between these churches is essential for both spiritual and economic reasons. Most Protestant Christians in Kaliningrad tend to come from modest backgrounds. Their financial resources are not sufficient to purchase their own church buildings. So congregations are increasingly sharing the spaces they own. For example, the Pentecostally-oriented members of the fast-growing Christian Centre in Kaliningrad meet in the main church of the Evangelical Lutheran congregation.
Closer integration of Kaliningrad evangelicals into the REA and thus also into the European and global Evangelical Alliances will enable these churches to operate even more effectively. As Professor Reimer says: ‘We can only rejoice at the establishment of the EA in former East Prussia’.
