IN A rare show of dissent, the Russian Orthodox Church has criticised new Soviet-style legislation in the State Duma which will ban religious services and prayer meetings in blocks of flats.
“This Bill’s adoption will lead to the closure of Orthodox house churches,” the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s legal department, Abbess Xenia Chernega, said in a statement.
“The sacraments of communion, unction, and other religious rites performed by clergy in residential premises at the request of citizens, including those seriously ill or dying, will also be threatened with a ban. . . Because of this, the Bill needs revision.”
The Abbess, Russia’s most senior female church hierarch, was reacting to the Bill, tabled by the Duma’s pro-Kremlin New People faction, formed in 2020, which said that religious gatherings in housing blocks both violated fire safety and inconvenienced local residents, as well as “increasing crime risks and raising concerns about public order”.
She said that Orthodox church leaders shared the concern of legislators about unauthorised services by “religious groups of migrants”, whose “significant concentration” in residential buildings often provoked “domestic conflicts”.
Unless revised, however, the measure would also impede essential church ministries in areas lacking formal places of worship, the Abbess said.
The Bill’s withdrawal was demanded by the Consultative Council of Protestant Churches, which said that flats had long been used for services “without mass complaints from citizens”.
“Where religious and public organisations play a key role in maintaining the moral and ethical values of society, their activities should be supported by state bodies,” the general secretary of Russia’s Evangelical Alliance, the Revd Vitaly Vlasenko, said in a statement.
“We call on all interested parties — religious leaders, legislators, and public representatives — to work together to find reasonable solutions protecting the rights of believers and taking into account the interests of all citizens.”
The Bill, amending Article 16 of Russia’s 1997 Freedom of Conscience Law, which authorises services in “places made available to religious organisations”, has been approved for debate in early 2025 by a Duma committee.
Russia’s Roman Catholic bishops said that home services remained essential, however, where churches had been destroyed or confiscated; and that they would also express their “shared concerns” in writing to legislators.
The country’s Adventist Church said that it was also “categorically against the Bill”, believing that it violated freedom-of-conscience provisions in the Russian constitution.
“Religious faith is human life — faith is where people live,” the Church’s chief pastor, Oleg Goncharov, said in a communiqué. “If we follow the logic of this law, then shops, clubs, restaurants, and offices should all be removed from residential buildings. In this difficult time for Russia, this Bill will only worsen the situation, creating ground for social and interfaith conflicts.”
The Russian 1997 law was tightened by President Putin in 2016, to restrict missionary and evangelistic work in line with anti-terrorism regulations, although a previous move to ban services in private homes was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2019.
Russian Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist communities have also strongly criticised the proposed new curbs, and urged the government to allow the construction of more non-Orthodox places of worship instead.
The Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists said that it would debate the Bill and other “problematic issues” at a conference of legal experts in Moscow this weekend.