Church ministry of the Movement

Report about. Sergius Bulgakov at the annual congress When I asked myself how best to express the idea of the Movement, and looked for an answer in the Gospel, then such an answer, like the light of lightning, appeared to me in the words of the Savior, preserved by all three Synoptic Evangelists: “no one puts new wine into old wineskins” (Mk. 2.22, Matt. 9.17, Lk. 5.37). The Savior's word is living and active, it is the truth and the law of life for all peoples, at all times. “I did not come to break the law, but to fulfill it,” said the Savior, but all the time it was as if he was deliberately breaking and abolishing the law. The Savior, in His words and actions, pointed to the need to distinguish between the essential and the inessential, and thereby legitimized the inevitability of the creation of new forms, new wineskins. From this general position, let us turn to the Movement as the creation of new forms. It causes bewilderment and denial among adherents of the old. The “non-canonical nature” of the Movement is especially often pointed out. Of course, the Movement is not canonical in the sense that it is not provided for by the canons, and could not be provided for by them, but it is internally legal, canonical. Canonical institutions grew and were formalized at ecumenical and local councils. They constitute the laws of the life of the church. There are unshakable parts in them (the hierarchical structure of the church, the sacraments, and so on) and there are parts that changed even during the ecumenical councils, as well as those that were not canceled, but in fact are no longer valid. Canonical creativity is not something finished and frozen. Indeed, we will not find a place for the Movement either in the “book of rules” or “in the charter of spiritual consistories.” There are canonical church unities: patriarchates, metropolises, bishoprics. Does the Movement represent a variation of these unities? But it does not fit within the boundaries of any one of them, capriciously spreading between them all: the vertical sections of existing institutions intersect in the horizontal direction. Church units are bound by the unity of episcopal power, the unity of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The movement as a whole does not submit to the jurisdiction of any one patriarch, metropolitan, or bishop. It exists on the territory of different church units, headed by different hierarchs. In this sense, it is, as it were, some kind of inter-formation. The composition of the Movement is also extremely unique. More than once it has been defined as a “Laity Movement”. But this does not in any way mean that the Movement is anti-hierarchical. – This is sufficiently evidenced by the wide participation of priests and hierarchs in the congresses and work of the Movement. The laity do not shy away from the hierarchs, they act together with them. But there is also a peculiarity. In one place or another of its location, the Movement is subordinate to the local ruling bishop, but in its entirety it has in its midst hierarchs not as persons invested with legal powers, but mainly as charismatics, as persons endowed with a special grace-filled power of service. This means that in the Movement it is not the beginning of power that prevails, but the power of love, which dissolves the beginning of power at the beginning of conciliarity. The movement does not fit into the canons, is not provided for by them, but in spirit and meaning it follows entirely from them. The Church is a body that has its own life, its own organic connectedness. There is a hierarchy in the body, there are main irreplaceable organs, and there are, although essential, less important, secondary ones, which nevertheless together form the overall life of the organism, expressing its connectedness. This expression of church connectedness, church communion, the internal organicity of the living body is the Movement. In this sense, it corresponds to the canonical nature of the church. The Church community, the people of God, gathering together in love - this is what the Movement represents. That’s why it requires new furs. After the fierce constitutional debates that we experienced during the congress, full of formalism, it may seem like good-naturedness that I am talking about such an organic unity of the Movement. But there is no grandiosity here. Once such unity has arisen, it is inevitably cast into human forms. These disputes and the search for forms contain the beginnings of church canons, the anticipation of new canonical definitions. After all, this is how the canons were created, which arose in the process of graciously human formulation of the needs of church life at ecumenical and local councils. The most important thing is that the Lord himself testified to the need for new wineskins, and there must be new wineskins. Their absence would indicate petrification, death. Let there be new wineskins if there is new wine! Does it exist? What were we doing here? Issues of religious consciousness, religious philosophy, issues of Russian life, preaching, missionary work, issues of an ecumenical nature - the life of the universal church, the life of heterodox churches, issues of religious education, the religious community, religious action, youth movements, etc. What they did not do! It is characteristic that all this, despite external diversity, is in the deepest internal connection: - all this is the quest for church work, the manifestation of church will - this is church life itself. Do all these questions arise in such a combination and formulation in any of the existing church institutions operating within the limits of their statutory competence? We come to the conclusion that church institutions, although they deal with the same issues as here, treat them primarily in the order of departmental resolution of them; otherwise, they are almost not dealt with at all. The movement, willy-nilly, takes on the task of social and church education and becomes a kind of church parliament, since the latter is an inevitable evil of any society. The movement, in its creative anxiety, organically connects all these issues into a living unity. This can be called differently - ecclesiasticalization of life, church community, but the main thing here is the desire to overcome the separation between faith and life. Precious wish! This is a new wine that is looking for new wineskins. But when the question is posed like this, we are overcome with trepidation. Isn't this insolence, pretentiousness, conceit? Who are we, what are we, so that we can start something great? But seeking greatness does not mean being great. However, greatness is also determined by what we seek and what we serve. The Apostles, as the Gospels testify, in their everyday life, in their empirical reality, sometimes turned out to be only weak people. But they are truly great because their soul saw the great and gave itself to it. The whole question is whether we have also seen the great, whether we are called or not. And if yes, then there is no choice. We are called as we are, and in this we must serve a great task. I've been in the Movement from the very beginning. The first moments of the Movement’s life were distinguished by their special brightness, talent, and poetry. But at the same time they were also characterized by everyday inexperience. In Psherov we experienced, as it were, the establishment of the Old Testament, which prepared the New Testament. In Psherov there was a feeling of finding something great, a spiritual ascent to Sinai, where God handed us the tablets of the Testament. Later, brightness and talent gave way to everyday work, tones of despondency began to sound, there were cases of loss of faith in one’s calling, doubts about the right path. But at the same time, there was a process of the idea becoming overgrown with a living body, albeit amoeba-like for now - the process of the emergence of peculiar “tails” (clubs, schools), numerous concerns that oblige us, before which we are powerless, but cannot refuse them. All this indicates that despite some loss of bright colors, the life of the Movement was not interrupted, but continuously and naturally grew, and the difficulties of our life are difficulties of growth, maturation, and not withering. The most important thing is that here there is not only a human structure, determined by the influx of new forces and means, but precisely an organic growth that occurs in us imperceptibly; Only later do we recognize its presence with amazement. Is this not what is said about the seed? “A man will throw a seed into the ground. And he does not know whether he sleeps and gets up at night and during the day, and how a seed sprouts and grows. For the earth itself produces first greenery, then an ear, then a full grain in the ear. When the fruit is ripe, he immediately sends in the sickle, because the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26-29). Wasn’t it so with us, and isn’t it so, and isn’t this evidence that this is the work of God? But we have a fundamental doubt, the consciousness that maybe all our undertakings in emigration are “gardens of Adonis”, a kind of decorative plantings, especially for holidays in honor of Adonis. We may have grown quickly, but we are doomed to perish. In a certain sense, emigration is doomed to perish outside the promised land: it is naturally declining, because... death has already claimed many, it is naturally dissolving, as processes of merging with the environment are underway, denationalization is underway. But at the same time, she had to do the deed and does it. The job of emigration is to be like an electric spark in a dynamo, giving it a charge. And we note that this is happening. The young growth that has risen around us opens up possibilities for expansion and gives rise to hope for succession. They are different, but they are looking for the same thing. Even in conditions of emigration, there are opportunities for growth. But our main focus, of course, is on Russia. We do not want to be a greenhouse plant that dies when the glass breaks, but we want to be an experimental plant in a nursery, a small tree that, when planted in the ground, grows and bears fruit. We are sowers of the seeds of the future. But perhaps this is also just a proud thought, a consolation for aesthetic dreaminess. It is clear that in foreign dispersion we cannot be completely sure that we are not the “gardens of Adonis.” But the Lord gives us the joy of knowing that the Movement is not the “gardens of Adonis”, that our plant is not a greenhouse plant, but an experimental plant. Every experiment is tested by life. The experimental nature of our Movement was revealed by the Baltic States. At the congress, I saw that in the Baltic states the young plant of our Movement, transplanted into conditions of natural growth and development, displays violent strength. Even if very little has been done yet, but this little speaks about the strength of the seed, about its ability to germinate. This is evidence of what awaits us in Russia. We often do not notice or appreciate the life-giving consequences of great catastrophic shifts and revolutions. The fact that the Movement can sow the seed in the Baltic states is possible because the state structure itself provides a minimum of freedom there. Freedom in Russia will be the basic condition under which only the seed can sprout and germinate. There also seemed to be notes of disbelief at the congress. We are insignificant, we cannot cope with the preaching of godlessness. But one can clearly imagine what we would do if we came to Russia, and how Russian society would respond to this activity. There is no need that we now actually cannot respond to the agitation of the atheists. After all, they are ultimately insignificant, and quite convincing apologetic writings can be created ahead of time. The point is not in particulars, but in what is given to the Movement as a gift from God. The inexperienced, weak Movement carries within itself the most valuable thing - the church community. This is what Russia wants and expects, the church in Russia. She's crushed. The chains of state violence are embedded in her body, but from within these chains have already been ejected. The Church wants to be free, and in freedom it wants to do its church work with dignity. In addition to the correct forms of statehood, in addition to the canonical organization, for the restoration of Russia, the church community is also necessary, like air. It is clear to me how Russia will meet our Movement, how it will accept the seed that God gave us in our daring. And even what exists now contains an undoubted guarantee of the future. We will not go to Russia empty-handed. We will not restore the old, but will bring new strength, we will go with new tasks, with new paths. If so, then how can one express the very essence of the Movement, its creative novelty? It lies not in actual achievements, although they exist, but in the very vital issues being developed by the Movement. Problematic is a word beloved by philosophers, but life knows it too. Where there are no problems, there are no quests, there are no achievements, there is no life. Knowing the problems of life is everyone’s task. If you translate this into the language of the Bible, it is called prophecy. This is what it says: “Do not quench the Spirit, and do not despise prophecy” (1 Thess. 5:19-20). To deny the problems of life means to extinguish the spirit, to disparage prophecy. Prophets, according to the usual interpretation, are understood as soothsayers. But prophecy is not the only thing, and perhaps not the most essential thing in the prophetic ministry; the greatest prophets, Elijah and Elisha, did not predict anything. The meaning of their prophetic ministry, its entire significance, lay in the feeling of the emerging spiritual needs and forces of the future. With all their work, the prophets raised people for the future and called them to it. After all, it has now become commonplace in biblical scholarship to assert that the task and meaning of prophetic ministry was to refine, deepen religious consciousness, impart dynamism to it, tear it away from rigidity in ritual belief, and give it world-encompassing breadth and strength. The human psyche is both dynamic and static. It contains equally strong principles of conservatism, observing the letter, imperceptibly degenerating into ritualism, and the beginnings of dynamism, transforming the present, striving for the future. Prophecy is aspiration towards the future. The movement is ecclesiastically directed towards the future, towards the kingdom of God, in the broad sense of the word. In this sense, the idea of ​​the Movement is a prophetic ministry. Looking back at ourselves, we become numb and horrified, because we are the least suitable for such a calling. It is not in our weakness and infirmity that we want to act, not in our strength to achieve, but we live in the Church. It is Christ Himself who called us and set such tasks before us. Outside of this calling, outside the help of grace-filled forces, we were and are weak and small. “The Lord will raise up men for himself.” Personally they may be strong, they may be weak, but they are all strong when they are doing God's work. Moses led Israel to the promised land, and he died without entering it. All those who were with him did not enter there, except for a select few. But it was Moses who was the spiritual father, who was the creator of the Jewish people, the chosen people, and the promises of God were entrusted to him, and from him comes Christ God in the flesh. In the ways of God, not only the coming is important, but also the procession, and participation in the procession is the great mercy of God. If our procession ends before the coming, then it is still the way to the promised land. Christianity is the path of salvation, understood primarily as personal salvation, as a struggle against one’s own sinfulness. But what we are talking about now, what we are striving for, is the path of not only personal, but also general salvation. We stand at a point where personal salvation is no longer conceivable outside of general salvation. It may seem that there is a violation of the basic ascetic rule, according to which we cannot undertake anything that exceeds our strength. Taking on the task of saving everyone, aren’t we setting illusory, utopian, disastrous goals? Here it is necessary to distinguish between what can be generated by pride, conceit, pretentiousness, and what is born in the heart, as the revelation and manifestation of the power of love. We dare to speak and think about common salvation, not in the sense of claiming to do the impossible, but in the sense of opening the heart, universal church love. And by the knowledge of love we know that our salvation is inseparable from the general salvation. God-knower Moses, when the wrath of the Lord flared up against Israel, praying for his native people who had sinned and was doomed to destruction, said in the fiery boldness of love: “Forgive them their sin. But if not, then blot me out from Your book” (Ex. 32:32). The New Testament Moses, in his fiery prayer for his half-blooded ones who rejected their Redeemer and Savior, burning with love, solemnly testified: “I myself would like to be excommunicated from Christ for my brothers who are related to me according to the flesh” (Rom. 9. 1-3). May this love, this unity in it of both personal and general salvation, be a call, and an answer, and an indication for us of the true path of Christian love. In view of the doubts that have arisen among members of the Movement about the benefits and expediency of the existence of circles and participation in them. The editors considered it necessary to reprint the following article by the late Rev. Sergius Bulgakov, who for several years was the head of a circle for the study of the New Testament.