An Interview with Rev. Dr. Pavel Černý
Rev. Dr. Pavel Černý is the retired head of the Church of the Brethren [Czech: Cirkev Bratrská], a Prague-based Protestant denomination whose mixed origins include a U.S. Congregationalist mission sent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1860s and a local Presbyterian spiritual revival during the same period. The term “Brethren” in the church’s title—used by several Protestant denominations in the Czech Republic—indicates that it is also deeply influenced by the distinct tradition of the Czech Reformation, of which Rev. Dr. Černý is a scholar (see his article on pp. 13-15).
Supporting a large Christian bookstore, Rev. Dr. Černý’s 300-strong downtown Prague congregation attracts numerous intellectuals due to the proximity of Charles University and other Czech national institutions. It is also the oldest community in the Church of the Brethren: Founded in 1880, it has remained on its present site since 1907. Since 1989, the community’s daughter congregations in the Czech capital have grown from four to thirteen, and several more are in an early stage of development.
The editor of the East-West Church Report met with Rev. Dr. Černý at the church premises in downtown Prague in November 2019. The original conversation took place in English.
Your experience as a pastor here encompasses the later Communist period in then Czechoslovakia. What were conditions like for Czech Protestants back then?
Inside the church, we were relatively free. The situation varied from country to country in the Communist bloc. In East Germany, for example, the churches were able to conduct social work. In Czechoslovakia, the Communists stopped all our social work—only worship inside religious buildings was allowed. We also had to be constantly vigilant, as there were some people coming to church in order to spy on us, sometimes bringing a tape recorder in their bags. When I used the telephone I could sometimes hear strange noises, because I was being surveilled.
It proved a great advantage to me that my father had been persecuted, as I had some training in how to deal with this. My father was a pharmacist who started a factory producing different medicines. Being a factory chief was an important position, and in 1958 the Communists told him he had to stop all his activities in the church— he was a lay preacher—and join the Communist Party in order to continue running his factory. When he refused, he was fired immediately. For some time he was unable to find work. Also when I was a boy, our pastor and four of our church elders were sent to prison simply for working with young people. [See the East-West Church Report, vol. 26, no. 3 (2018), 2.]
I became a pastor in 1974. I was aware of [local human rights] initiatives like Charter 77, and I knew some pastors from the mainline Presbyterian Church who had signed that, but I was not sure whether this was the best way of proceeding. I had a professor of church history who taught me that our vision, our eschatology, should be long-term. If you signed Charter 77, you would immediately lose your license to preach and be assigned other work, such as responsibility for the boilers in several buildings. A boilerman’s wages were two or three times higher than a pastor’s wages, but you were not allowed to preach, whereas I was running a church and wanted to carry on helping people there.
Were you ever interrogated by the secret police?
Yes. Uniformed police typically delivered the request, but after that there were only secret police, without uniforms. I was interrogated for the first time in 1971, while I was studying theology at the state-run theology faculty in Prague—that was the only place where you could study theology. I was the leader of a student organization, and of course we students were opposed to the official Communist propaganda. One evening, around 250 of us gathered in the student dormitory—it was the anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, who had set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square [in central Prague, in protest against the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968]. We invited a famous music group, Spiritual Kvintet. There was also one student there who was very good at composing protest songs. He started to sing about Palach, and the group began to sing songs like, “We Shall Overcome.” It was reported immediately. The director of the seminary was expelled, as were the students directly involved in inviting the musicians.
Later on, I was also interrogated about church activities, and the relationships between different pastors. It is interesting to read the government files of that time on our church today. They say that this church must be watched very well, because on the surface it looks quite peaceful, but inside it is very dangerously indoctrinating young people. They knew that we had quite big youth groups in many congregations, and some Communists were getting nervous about it.
Was theology the only study path available to you, given your background? I originally started a degree in biology, also at Charles University. I simply love nature, and I longed to study biology from a young age. I had to wait a year to do so because my father had been persecuted—I was not allowed to go to university immediately after school. During that year I worked in a laboratory and received a positive recommendation. I was accepted for study starting in the fall of 1968. Then the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia took place and it was awful— there were other students besides Jan Palach who committed suicide, and many students fled abroad. It was a very bad time. My studies began, and I started to ask myself: Is it right to study biology in this situation? There were many students who wanted to study biology, but I had heard that there were not enough pastors in the church. So I prayed to try and find out God’s will for my life. That is how I transferred to the theology faculty.
How did the collapse of the Communist regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 seem to you at the time?
When Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and the liberalizing policy of perestroika began [1985 onward], we had a clue that something could happen. But being born in this country, I have to confess that I did not expect that we could be released without some kind of fight: a war. It was truly marvelous what God did here, because our revolution was truly a “velvet” revolution, without one shop window being broken. There was a tremendous sense of national unity at the time.
Did your church participate? Wenceslas Square, where major demonstrations took place, is a 20-minute walk from here.
Of course. When it began on the evening of 17 November [1989]—when student demonstrators were beaten by the police—we were holding a youth conference in this church. We immediately sent a letter to the prime minister in the name of our conference, protesting about the beating of those students. It was a conference for all the Church of the Brethren congregations, and there were around a thousand young people squeezed into this building. Many of them participated in the demonstrations quite spontaneously. The involvement of Václav Malý [now auxiliary Catholic bishop of Prague] in Charter 77 is well known. [See the East-West Church Report, vol. 28, no. 2 (2020), 5]. But there were also Protestant pastors who participated and became quite well known. The churches had a great reputation at that time. I am afraid that we lost that reputation—but the expectations of society were very high.
What happened, do you think?
Many people in our country came to realize that the churches were islands of freedom under the totalitarian regime. Everything—schools, businesses, and factories —was run by the Communists, but there was still discussion within the churches, and they were like small islands of freedom in each town or village. People also appreciated that many in the church had suffered—not just interrogated, but put in prison for years. From one perspective it was easier at that time, because the situation was almost black and white, and it was possible to identify a clear enemy. On the whole, the churches were in opposition to the regime. Very sadly, however, there were also church people who collaborated with it.
What happened since then is complex, and I would not like to oversimplify it. But one problem occurs when the church almost wants to be part of society—to be so open, so accepting of the ethics of secular society, that the church diminishes and disappears into secular culture. I believe we have to be the light and the salt of the world. We must be more open—in the Communist period we had to have very closed relationships in order to support one another, and sometimes we developed quite closed communities as a result. There was no other way to operate. But when the churches opened up and tried to penetrate society after the Velvet Revolution, the bridge they built to connect with society was unfortunately used by society the other way as well, to undermine the unity and ethics of the church. The statistics for Czech churches show this to be a great problem—only a handful of communities are now experiencing growth or planting new congregations.
Do you think a particular approach is required when ministering to Czech society?
I would say so. I think our people are very sensitive toward being manipulated or pushed. This is partly because of our heritage of Counter-reformation, and also the periods of Nazism followed by Communism. All of these were trying to indoctrinate and manipulate people, so they are very sensitive about being led in a particular direction. They like to discover the Gospel in their own way, so we have to be very careful not to manipulate or push in our worship, but to let people go to Christ by themselves.
As you know, the Czech Republic is something of a laboratory of secularism, as we are one of the most secularized countries in Europe. The percentage of believers is very low—compared with neighboring Poland, where statistically 87 percent are believers, we have 21 percent. But if you compare the number of criminals in each country, the results are proportionally similar. So where are those Christians in Poland? Our atheism is actually not as atheistic as it seems. If you speak to people on a personal level, you will often discover that they are not atheists at all. They have room for transcendence. Our first president after the Velvet Revolution, Václav Havel, was like that. He often said that there must be something there, even that there is something watching us, so we must behave morally. Many people have this concept of an impersonal god.
Not long ago, I met up with my former classmates from elementary and high school at a school reunion. They all knew that I was a pastor, and it became a little like a pastoral counselling session. (Smiles.) One by one they were coming up to me and opening up about their lives. On a personal level, then, people here are very open.
Is this open, personal approach reflected in your activities at this church?
Yes. There is a growing need for pastoral care, for example—these days there are many marital and other family problems, and people come here for counselling. We have a special department for family life, with several professional psychologists. In the Theological Seminary we try to integrate theology and psychology and to train more workers for pastoral counselling.
We also have a club called Samari, meaning Samaria— this name points to the fact that we are sometimes somewhere between the sacred and the secular world, just as Samaria was between Judea and Galilee. Here we organize public programs that are not always religious, such as music and poetry, or talks with speakers from different walks of life, such as economists or writers. For example, one of our pastors—a theology professor and expert on C.S. Lewis—will soon give a talk on Ernest Thompson Seton, who was one of the pioneers of the Scouting movement. For some people, it is a huge struggle just to step inside a church, so this club is something in between. This approach is in fact the same missiological strategy of the Apostle Paul to become “like a Jew to the Jews, like one under the law to those under the law, so as to win those under the law… for the weak to become weak, to win the weak.” [1 Cor. 9:20-22]
It seems to me that today we need more of an emphasis on religious experience and the practical living out of our faith. The God of the Bible is not a system of teaching, but a relational being.
