Communities of the Converted : : Ukrainians and Global Evangelism / / Catherine Wanner.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Wanner, Catherine,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2011]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Series: Culture and Society after Socialism
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.) :; 12 halftones

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION -- INTRODUCTION -- Part One. SOVIET EVANGELICALS -- CHAPTER ONE. SPIRITUAL SEEKERS IN A SECULARIZING STATE, 1905-1941 -- CHAPTER Two. ENLIGHTENING THE FAITHFUL, 1941-1988 -- Part Two. MISSIONIZING AND MOVEMENT -- CHAPTER THREE. THE REWARDS OF SUFFERING: The Last Soviet Refugees -- CHAPTER FOUR. MISSIONIZING, CONVERTING, AND REMAKING THE MORAL SELF -- Part Three. A WORLD WITHOUT END -- CHAPTER FIVE. GOD Is LOVE: New Bonds, New Communities -- CHAPTER SIX. AMBASSADORS OF GOD -- EPILOGUE. Religion as Portal to the World -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX