Once Banned, Evangelicals Seek Flocks in East Bloc : Religion: Some are criticized for capitalizing on converts and being insensitive to traditional faiths.

A letter from the International Bible Society in Colorado Springs trumpets the following proposal: “For a gift of $25, you can give 10 believers in Russia their first Bible.”

A newsletter from the Costa Mesa-based Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International proudly proclaims: “Airlift to Armenia and Russia Dodges Bullets and Food Panic. Thousands Receive Christ.”

And an ad in a Christian magazine promises that “this summer 100,000 students will hear the truth about Jesus” when Michigan evangelist John Guest holds campus rallies in Kiev, Moscow and Romania.

American evangelicals are moving fast into what many of them perceive as a new land of milk and honey now that hostility to religion has faded in communist countries. Numerous independent ministries are heralding their success on the new spiritual frontiers through advertisements, newsletters and pleas to potential contributors.

But amid such euphoria, some religious leaders are concerned about those they believe are as interested in enhancing their reputations and pocketbooks as in making converts. And they fear that religious conflicts will erupt with traditional religions.

“Some will come as self-appointed messiahs, others will arrive because there is money to be raised as a consequence of their visits,” said George Otis Jr., president of the Sentinel Group, Seattle-based consultants on evangelism strategy.

“Stormy times are coming between Eastern Orthodox and evangelicals,” warned Kent Hill, executive director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington.

But evangelicals once banned from Communist Bloc countries counter that they are being welcomed, and in some cases even courted, in the wake of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms and the opening of Eastern Europe.

“Interest in spirituality is absolutely enormous,” said the Rev. Peter Deyneka Jr.

Deyneka, president of Slavic Gospel Assn. in Wheaton, Ill., points to his own experience as an example.

For years he had to spread the word by smuggling Bibles in with tourists and producing radio programs beamed across the border.

But since April, 1989, Deyneka has been to the Soviet Union five times, once delivering 43,000 New Testaments that were distributed in Moscow.

Indeed, government authorities are accepting millions of donated Scriptures. Religious broadcasters are being asked to provide programming. Westerners have started rudimentary seminary classes. Pirated and officially distributed copies of a movie about Jesus are being hotly sought.

Last September, Portland evangelist Luis Palau scored a first by conducting open air revivals in five Soviet cities. Billy Graham, who held rallies in Hungary last year, is negotiating for a crusade next summer at a Moscow stadium. And Jerry Falwell traveled to Bucharest in July to present 40 Romanian students with scholarships to his Liberty University in Virginia.

Although some of the most dramatic religious thrusts are coming from enterprising evangelicals, mainline religious bodies are offering support to regenerate faiths long forced underground.

U.S. rabbis and cantors are helping Soviet Jewry rediscover its heritage. Episcopal, Lutheran and other Protestant denominations are strengthening sister churches and improving ecumenical contacts. The Salvation Army has resurrected work in Eastern Europe that went clandestine 40 years ago. Unitarian Universalist churches have linked up with their counterparts in Romania’s Transylvania region.

Whatever the motives, Hill, author of “The Puzzle of the Soviet Church,” and others say it is essential to “show respect to the Orthodox tradition.” A danger, he said, is that many conservative evangelicals in America imply that non-evangelicals are not true Christians.

Some have inferred that view from a mail appeal in June from Bill Bright, head of the San Bernardino-based Campus Crusade for Christ. He was seeking $1 million to finance 1,000 more theater showings in the Soviet Union for the agency’s vastly successful movie “Jesus,” plus money for follow-up evangelistic literature.

Christians, the letter said, feel a burden for “the eternal destiny of 280 million Soviet citizens,” the country’s total population. Trouble is, Bright ignored an estimated 60 million to 70 million Orthodox Christians, 10 million Catholics, 4 million Armenian Christians, more than 1 million Lutherans and at least 1 million other Protestants in the Soviet Union.

“Somehow they think Orthodoxy is folklore,” complained Father George Stephanides, pastor of St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine.

Bright acknowledged in an interview that his letter “could have been phrased differently. I don’t want to offend anyone. It is true, there are millions of believers in the Soviet Union.”

While it is “very invigorating” to see Western Christian bodies rushing to Communist countries, Father Leonid Kishkovsky, president of the National Council of Churches, expressed worries about what he called certain “abrasive, pejorative” evangelical methods.

“The historical record is troublesome,” said Kishkovsky, a priest in the Russian-heritage Orthodox Church in America. “There might be a tendency to associate Russian icons with idolatry,” he said.

A number of Eastern Orthodox bishops, including a high-ranking prelate who traveled with Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I this summer in the United States, have said they are afraid that evangelical Protestants and, in some cases, Roman Catholics may replenish their flocks at the expense of Orthodoxy.

Kishkovsky pointed to Graham as a model he hopes others will follow. During the evangelist’s unprecedented preaching trips to Soviet churches in 1982 and 1984, his message was typically evangelistic. “But you also had a profound sense that the non-evangelical Christians, mostly Orthodox, were being treated as authentic Christians,” Kishkovsky said.

Of all the big-name Protestant ministers moving behind what used to be the Iron Curtain,the Rev. Robert Schuller of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral might prove to be the most palatable.

With the diplomatic help of industrialist Armand Hammer, a longtime friend of the Soviets, Schuller delivered upbeat messages twice on Soviet television in recent months and hopes to begin a monthly television program before the end of the year.

As he does in this country, Schuller indicated he would talk mainly to nonbelievers, emphasizing a self-esteem message not heavily laden with “Jesus talk.” His program will also emphasize American-Soviet friendship, he said.

Schuller has conceded that his new venture should help him in this country where his television ministry has been running a deficit.

“I think it has given me tremendous credibility,” he said. “It virtually assures the fact that our position in America will remain strong and sure.”

Schuller is not the only American Protestant moving into Soviet television.

Southern California broadcaster Paul Crouch, president of Trinity Broadcasting Network, signed a preliminary contract in April with Leningrad officials to jointly operate a televisionstation. A final agreement allowing TBN to essentially run the station and show substantial amounts of religious programming may be near, a spokesman for Crouch said.

A children’s animated television series of biblical stories, produced by Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, will soon be shown on Soviet television.

In addition, the evangelical-oriented Trans World Radio, based in New Jersey, has launched the first radio production studio to be run by Westerners in the Soviet Union. Four other studios are envisioned by the end of the year.

Charles Colson, who went to jail for his Watergate sins, has visited Soviet prisons to talk about religious services for inmates--a relatively new phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Colson’s Prison Fellowship International in July was a co-sponsor of the first national conference on prison ministries in Kiev.

All this religious fervor became possible after the June, 1988, celebration of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Russia. At a meeting with patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, Gorbachev apologized for how religion had been abused in the past.

During a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome the next year, Gorbachev promised a new Soviet law on freedom of conscience. Such legislation was given a first reading in the Soviet Parliament in May and may be debated this month.

Hopes for coordinating evangelical activities in the Soviet Union are focused on an international conference scheduled for Oct. 22-26 in Moscow. The plans grew out of a large world evangelization gathering last summer in Manila where a dramatic highlight was the entry--three days late--of 68 delegates from Soviet churches.