UCEC Says Information about Split in Church Is Exaggerated
In response to a recent statement by a number of clergy who left the Ukrainian Christian Evangelical Church (UCEC), the UCEC issued a statement regarding the situation. The UCEC believes that information about the split in the church is exaggerated, the correspondent portal Religion in Ukraine reports.
A statement signed yesterday by Ihor Lukyanov, an assistant in church-state relations to UCEC senior bishop Leonid Padun, rejects the accusations by former UCEC ministers because they “are groundless and do not reflect the real reasons for the differences arising between the Ukrainian Christian Evangelical Church and the Swedish center Livets Ord and the organization Word of Life International centered in Uppsala, Sweden.”
In particular, the UCEC points out that “the statement of the pastors and ministers who resigned from the UCEC specified inaccurate information about the list and the number of communities that have adopted such a decision. The UCEC received far fewer declarations with protocols of general meetings of religious communities including a decision to withdraw from the union.” In the opinion of the UCEC, this is due to the fact that “many of the signatories of the said statement in their secessionist initiatives are not supported by most members of the church communities in which they are pastors.”
It also points to the “misuse of information about religious communities, taken from the database of Ukrainian Christian Evangelical Church and its regional offices.” The statement says that the database was “stolen by the assistant of the UCEC senior bishop in the middle of November 2012, who was among the initiators of the split with ministers from Sweden, which caused a lot of distress and led to differences in the churches of Ukraine, which still continues.”
The UCEC perceives the position of its opponents “as misleading and a threat to all evangelical Christianity” and called to put a stop new controversies and to the spreading of false information.
