Pogosyan says most converts here grew up like Ayvazyan: secular under the Soviet regime, but now seeking something more. Even those church members who do not become missionaries are encouraged to circulate information among family and friends, recruit curious “investigators” to visit services and keep track of lapsed members. In LDS, where congregants are encouraged to share their experiences and participate in Bible-study classes, she has a role to play. In a traditional Armenian service, she says, “You just stand there and the priests pray.” Many Armenians cannot even understand the classical Armenian used in services. Yet her encounters with LDS missionaries in the early 90's left her with a sense of spiritual fulfillment she had not found in her parents’ Armenian Apostolic services. Like Pogosyan, Ayvazyan grew up nonreligious during Soviet rule, adopting atheism as a philosophically inclined teenager. It is this sense of involvement that inspired his colleague, Margarit Ayvazyan, to convert. “I could be involved in the life of the church.” In the absence of formal clergy, the LDS church offers ordinary members a greater role in church affairs, Pogosyan explains. But an encounter with a Mormon missionary made him realize he could do more than just attend services. Then an expatriate in Russia, he attended a local Armenian church, both for spiritual reasons and for the opportunity to socialize with other ethnic Armenians. Pogosyan’s journey started shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. I believe in Jesus,’ ” says Varuzhan Pogosyan, president of the LDS Mission in Armenia. “Ask any Armenian on the street and they’ll say, ‘Yes, I believe in God. These may be small numbers, but they are significant in this country of 3 million, where practitioners of other faiths tend to be members of minority ethno-religious groups, such as Jews or Muslim Kurds.īoth Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons identify as Christians, although their non-Trinitarian doctrine - both deny that Jesus Christ shares a single fundamental divine essence with God the Father and the Holy Spirit - has often brought them into conflict with mainline Christian tradition. In Armenia, the number of Jehovah’s Witnesses here hovers around 11,000 LDS claims more than 3,000 members (also known as Mormons). Now, many ethnic Armenians and Georgians are gravitating toward American evangelical sects with an emphasis on attracting converts and a strong missionary presence in the region, such as LDS and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Christians in Armenia and Georgia - which in the fourth century became the first two countries worldwide to adopt Christianity as their state religion - almost uniformly belong to the Armenian Apostolic and Georgian Orthodox Churches, respectively (93 percent in Armenia, 83 percent in Georgia).īut a near-century of Soviet-imposed secularism dramatically weakened the standing of state churches. Here in the Caucasus region, ethnicity and faith are often treated as one. On one Sunday in May, more than a hundred Armenians - most in their 40s and 50s - are sharing what Mormons call spiritual “testimony,” their words translated via earpiece to attending American missionaries. Unlike the crumbling towers that surround it, this building sports an impeccably white façade. In the Armenian town of Artashat, a grid of Soviet concrete and corrugated tin roofs an hour from the capital city of Yerevan, few buildings stand out like the meeting hall of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
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