Blog

In the period following the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, many American Protestants viewed Russia and all of war-torn Europe as a field for the exercise of mercy. To commemorate the centennial of that momentous 1917, we recall the work of the Federal Council of Churches, and its representative to Russia, the Presbyterian minister John Sheridan Zelie.

In 1919, the Federal Council was chiefly concerned with the maintenance of Orthodox Christianity, establishing that February an ad hoc Committee on Religious Conditions in Russia. Conflict within Orthodoxy would...