Protestants: A Church for Moscow

“Christianity begins in the home,” says the Rev. Donald V. Roberts, 36, and for him it is literally true. Last week Presbyterian Roberts conducted dedication services at the first American Protestant church ever organized in Moscow: one room of his new apartment, near Moscow University and the Red Chinese embassy. About 75 people crowded into “Christ Church” for the ceremony, and U.S. Ambassador Foy Kohler and Britain’s Sir Humphrey Trevelyan read Scripture lessons.

Formerly pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Tonawanda, N.Y., Roberts in 1962 became the first Protestant chaplain ever assigned to Moscow’s U.S. colony. With his wife and daughter, he spent a year in Room 306 of the Sovietskaya Hotel, holding services on alternate Sundays at the British and American embassies. Finally the Soviet agency responsible for helping foreigners found him two adjoining apartments in a new building. Roberts had the wall separating his two living rooms torn down to create an area large enough for his church.

Following services there, lay volunteers will teach Sunday school classes for children of the congregation in the Roberts’ bedroom, study, dining area and one of the double apartment’s kitchens. “It’s a mishmash,” Roberts admits. “This is the place where we worship, where we have our friends, where I work, where the baby plays.” Small as it is, Roberts’ church outshines the facilities afforded Father Joseph Frederic Richard, latest of the Roman Catholic priests who have ministered to Americans off and on in Moscow for 30 years; the chapel in Richard’s apartment holds only 40 people.

Roberts has friendly relations with some members of the Russian Orthodox

Church, although no Russians attended his dedication ceremony. He thinks that Christ Church, with its makeshift, homespun quality, is appropriate to the role of Christianity in the Soviet Union and is a better symbol of what the church means than a cathedral. “A church isn’t a building,” he says. “It’s a fellowship of people who come together to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The idea of the church in the home is one way of saying that every home has within it the potential of becoming a church. It has been said that religion is an opiate. I know differently. I know of faith in God as an awakening.”