The Russian with the $100 Bill

At the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver last week, a bearded ecclesiastic startled the desk clerk by trying to get change for a napkin-sized, 1914-era $100 bill, given to him, he explained, by his grandmother. The well-heeled visitor was one of 16 Russian church leaders who showed up at the National Council of Churches' General Board meeting, to be greeted coldly by some protesting right-wing fundamentalists and warmly by two of the nation's most prestigious Protestants: J. Irwin Miller, layman president of the council and Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, Stated Clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.

The Soviet visitors represented six churches: the Russian and Georgian Orthodox Churches, the Armenian Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Churches of Estonia and Latvia, and the All-Union Council of the Evangelical Christians (Baptists). They came in response to an invitation issued by National Council leaders on their trip to the Soviet Union last year. "This is not a cultural exchange but a Christian exchange," explained Dr. Blake. "The difference between these men and other Russian delegations is that these men, like ourselves, are practicing Christians."

They sounded like practicing Russians. At a Denver press conference. Archbishop Nikodim of Yaroslavl and Rostov, who also led the Russian Orthodox delegation to the third Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, boasted that "we come to you from a socialist state, where our people are creating a new, dynamic society. The Russian Orthodox Church supports the aspirations of our people for friendship with all peoples of the earth." At the close of the board meeting, the Russians will divide into smaller groups, spend most of their three weeks in the U.S. visiting churches across the nation. Against the prospect of finding U.S. food distasteful, they came well supplied with made-in-Russia canned goods.

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