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Communities of the Converted

Ukrainians and Global Evangelism

Catherine Wanner author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cornell University Press

Published:7th Sep '07

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Communities of the Converted cover

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems.

Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

This book is carefully constructed to take account of the social and historical context of the Ukraine, not only in discussing Ukrainian evangelicals themselves but also in helping the reader understand the central role played by evangelism in their communities.... Among other things... it provides what is arguably the most comprehensive socio-historical account of Soviet Pentecostalism in the English language.... In all, this most illuminating study is essential reading for anyone interested in issues of globalization, social involvement, and Pentecostalism in Eastern Europe.

* Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies *

Catherine Wanner's study of evangelical churches in Ukraine is a wonderful addition to the growing body of literature dealing with religion in the former USSR.... She begins with a brief history of Evangelicals in the Soviet Ukraine, explains developments during the late 1980s and early 1990s when the USSR was dissolving, and finally surveys the contemporary scene. The author does all of this very well, but what makes the book especially significant is her careful attention to the dialectic between local and transnational dynamics, and the complex relationships of faith and public life in a desecularizing nation. As a result, this book becomes not merely an excellent introduction to evangelical Protestantism in Ukraine, but also a window into the complexities of contemporary Christianity around the world. Highly recommended.

* Choi

ISBN: 9780801445927

Dimensions: 235mm x 155mm x 25mm

Weight: 907g

320 pages