GEORGIA is a country of outstanding natural beauty. Spring comes early to its fertile fields and vineyards protected beneath the towering peak of Mount Kazbek and the Caucasus range, the highest in Europe. It has one of the oldest Christian civilisations in the world, dating from 326, and its Church is in the mainstream of the Orthodox tradition. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is also a land of chaos.

Stalin, who was born there, attended a seminary and always granted his homeland special privileges — not least allowing the Church to exist under its own identity, while abolishing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He encouraged a semi-independent economic development, so Georgian agricultural entrepreneurs prospered, while collectivisation brought famine to other places.

This relative prosperity suffered its first blow when Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign led to the grubbing up of some of Georgia’s best vines. Ethnic strife tore the country apart in the early years of independence under Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Gorbachev’s former Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, a man of international reputation, returned to his homeland to become president — and, incidentally, to be baptised into the Orthodox Church — but he failed to bring the separatists back under central control.

The “Rose Revolution” in 2003 brought Mikhail Saakashvili to power in a well-monitored election, but the strange death of the Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania in a gassing accident this month is a huge setback.

Church life, too, has been troubled beyond measure over the past decade. Even in the heyday of Soviet atheism, Georgians were proud of their ancient Christian heritage and since the 1960s its Orthodox Patriarchate took part in international ecumenical affairs — until 1997, when they withdrew from the World Council of Churches, stating that they no longer recognised other faiths as legitimate.

Malkhaz Songulashvili, born in 1963, is perhaps the most remarkable figure in Georgian church life today. He was secretly baptised in a river at 17. Gifted at languages, he also studied history and archaeology at Tbilisi University, before Patriarch Ilia II invited him, as a Baptist, to collaborate in the first modern Georgian Bible translation.

In his mid-thirties he made the first of periodic visits to begin a thesis on church relations in Georgia, in which he set out to demonstrate that Protestants and Catholics were not peripheral to the Georgian Christian scene, but were part of its lifeblood. Baptists had existed in Georgia since the mid-19th century. Pastor Songulashvili struck all his new friends as a gentle, quiet man. No one guessed that he would soon be propelled into the centre of the stage, butt of a wave of violence which erupted against non-Orthodox believers in the late-1990s.

The Georgian Baptists, who in their tradition have bishops, conferred that title on Pastor Songulashvili, as their leader. From 1997 they were victims of a campaign of violence instigated by Basil Mkalavishvili, a defrocked Orthodox priest, now claiming to be an “Old Calendarist” and subject, he says, to the jurisdiction of this tiny branch of the Orthodox Church in Greece. He has led dozens of assaults against “sectarians”, targeting Jehovah’s Witnesses, a well as Baptists. Unrestrained by police over nearly a decade, he stole and burnt what he called “anti-Orthodox” books in March 1997. On February 3, 2002, he led a mob which looted the Baptist Union’s warehouse in Tbilisi and burnt more books, including Bibles.

Even worse was a pogrom against a united Christian service (including Orthodox representatives) held in the main Baptist church on January 24, 2003, marking the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Worse violence was averted only when the organisers of the service told the worshippers to disperse before the service had begun.

President Shevardnadze condemned this and other incidents, but Mkalavishvili continued unchecked. Only after the “Rose Revolution” were he and his gang brought to account.

At the trial last November there was a dramatic moment when Bishop Songulashvili publicly forgave Mkalavishvili and heard words of repentance in reply. The case dragged on, however. Of the seven defendants, five were charged only with resisting arrest, while Mkalavishvili received a sentence of six years, an associate four years. Hundreds of others have gone unpunished, however, and Songulashvili has called for a full investigation into the background, on the lines of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. He estimates that more than one hundred incidents have occurred.

Amid this turmoil he has found time to devote himself to the causes he passionately embraces: building up the work of his own Baptist community, promoting ecumenism and teaching at Tbilisi State University. After the violence of January 24, 2003, he worked with other Christian leaders to reinstate the prayer service on March 14, attended by President Shevardnadze in person. On Holy Saturday 2003, Bishop Songulashvili wrote to me: “Yesterday we celebrated Good Friday. It was a great occasion for us. We observed it by a six-hour-long procession with a Cross in the streets of Tbilisi and devotions in different churches (the Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic Cathedrals, the Lutheran Church of Reconciliation), followed by a service in our own Baptist church.”

Further shocks were to follow, however. On the following Whit Sunday fanatics, still unidentified, burnt down the Baptist church in the Kvareli district of eastern Georgia.

This did not deter Songulashvili from promoting his ecumenical work in practical ways. Most notably, in December 2004 he went with two Orthodox priests to support the Ukrainian democrats on Independence Square, Kiev. They met Christian leaders and appeared on television (with a fishing rod converted into a staff to carry the Georgian flag they had brought to identity themselves).

Peaceful inter-church relations may still seem a long way off for members of Georgia’s minority denominations, but the commitment and bravery of Bishop Songulashvili and his supporters stand out as a beacon of hope for the future.

Canon Michael Bourdeaux is the founder and president of Keston Institute, Oxford, which monitors religious freedom in the communist and former communist countries (www.kesto.org)