The God-Worshippers

The bogomoljci — the “God-Worshippers” or “God-praying ones” — were a lay revival movement of intensified prayer, fasting, and preaching that grew among the Serbian Orthodox peasantry around the turn of the twentieth century and flourished after the First World War. Nikolai Velimirović became its recognized patron and leader, winning the Church’s acceptance for a movement it might otherwise have suppressed.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

Origins

The Bogomoljci movement (Serbian bogomoljci, from Bogu se moliti, “to pray to God”) arose among the Serbian Orthodox laity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and gathered force in the aftermath of the First World War (Radmila Radić and others, “The God-Worshipper Movement in Serbian Society in the Twentieth Century: Emergence, Development, and Structures,” in Orthodox Christianity and Modern Europe, Springer, 2017; the movement is also treated in the studies collected under “The God-Worshipper Movement and Pilgrimage”). Scholars trace its emergence to a hunger for deeper religious experience among ordinary believers, to a perceived lethargy in the Church’s own inner mission, and — a point the scholarship emphasizes — to the influence on Serbian folk Orthodoxy of Protestant pietist currents, above all the Nazarene movement (a pietist, revivalist form of Protestantism that had spread among the South Slav peasantry), whose fervor, lay preaching, and moral rigor the Orthodox God-Worshippers in some measure paralleled and absorbed (Radić et al., “The God-Worshipper Movement,” Springer, 2017).

The movement was thus, in origin, a spontaneous lay phenomenon rather than a clerical initiative — a grassroots intensification of piety among peasants and townsfolk — and this is essential to understanding both its power and the wariness with which parts of the institutional Church initially regarded it. Enthusiastic lay movements with a strong emphasis on personal experience, lay preaching, and moral separation from the surrounding society can sit uneasily with a hierarchical Church, and there was real potential for the Bogomoljci to drift toward sectarianism or to be pulled into the orbit of the Protestant groups whose piety had partly inspired them.

Practices

The characteristic life of the God-Worshippers was one of intensified traditional Orthodox devotion. The scholarship and the movement’s own memory describe brotherhoods and sisterhoods whose practices included: frequent visits to churches and monasteries, where they gathered for assemblies and prayer meetings; strict observance of the Church’s fasts; frequent reception of Holy Communion (notable in an era of infrequent lay communion); a lively expectation of divine help and miracle; the singing of religious folk hymns; and missionary preaching and exhortation by lay members (Radić et al., “The God-Worshipper Movement,” Springer, 2017). The tone was ardent, penitential, and communal — a warm, participatory, and morally demanding piety set over against both religious indifference and mere formal observance.

Pilgrimage was central: the God-Worshippers traveled in companies to monasteries and holy places, and these gatherings — part retreat, part revival meeting, part pilgrimage — were the movement’s characteristic form of life (see the treatment in “The God-Worshipper Movement and Pilgrimage”). It was a Christianity of the feet and the voice as much as of the book, well suited to a largely rural and semi-literate population, and it drew heavily on the devotional folk culture of the Serbian village that Nikolai himself came from (see Lelić and Early Life).

Nikolai’s Role

Nikolai’s decisive contribution was to bring the movement into the Church rather than let it drift out of it. Where the enthusiasm of the lay brotherhoods might have provoked suppression or led to schism, Nikolai — himself a man of the same village piety, and by temperament sympathetic to fervent popular devotion — became the movement’s patron, protector, and organizer. The scholarship credits him with the central role in “obtaining the Church’s acceptance and blessing of the movement,” channeling its energy, giving it episcopal cover and guidance, and by the 1920s helping it grow into a body that engaged thousands and bridged the gap between clergy and laity (Radić et al., “The God-Worshipper Movement,” Springer, 2017). He preached to their assemblies, wrote for them (the Prologue from Ohrid and much of his devotional output served exactly this readership — see The Prologue from Ohrid), and lent them the immense authority of his name and office.

This act of ecclesial statesmanship is one of Nikolai’s most consequential achievements. By embracing the God-Worshippers he did two things at once: he kept a powerful current of lay renewal within Orthodoxy and under the Church’s discipline, and he made himself the leader of a mass devotional movement, with a following among the pious laity that no administrative office could have given him. The Bogomoljci were, in effect, the popular base of his influence — the “his people” who would remember and defend him — and they are one reason his memory remained so powerful among ordinary Serbs even through the decades when the communist state branded him a traitor (see Legacy and Assessment).

A Movement Read More Than One Way

As with much in Nikolai’s life, the God-Worshippers admit of more than one reading, and the collection notes this without adjudicating. To his admirers, the Bogomoljci are the great modern renewal of Serbian Orthodoxy from below — a Spirit-driven awakening that Nikolai had the pastoral wisdom to guide rather than crush. To more critical observers, the movement’s fervent, sometimes anti-modern and morally-separatist character, and its later entanglement (through some of its members and sympathizers) with the interwar Serbian religious right, are part of the same complex that produced the contested political and cultural writing of Nikolai’s later years (cf. Jovan Byford, Denial and Repression of Antisemitism, CEU Press, 2008, on the milieu of interwar Serbian Orthodox conservatism). Both readings attach to the same movement, and the companion file traces its longer influence and its mixed legacy (see Spiritual Renewal in Serbia).

See Also

References

  • Radić, Radmila, et al. “The God-Worshipper Movement in Serbian Society in the Twentieth Century: Emergence, Development, and Structures.” In Orthodox Christianity and Modern Europe (Springer, 2017). link.springer.com. (Origins after WWI; the Nazarene/Protestant-pietist influence on Serbian folk Orthodoxy; the practices of fasting, frequent communion, assemblies, and lay preaching; Nikolai’s central role in obtaining the Church’s acceptance; the thousands engaged by the 1920s.)
  • “The God-Worshipper Movement and Pilgrimage: Religious Revival in the Past and Present.” academia.edu. (The centrality of pilgrimage and monastery-visiting to the movement.)
  • “Bogomoljci: A Missional Movement of the Orthodox Laity as a Blessing and a Challenge to the Church.” academia.edu. (The movement as lay mission, blessing and challenge.)
  • Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The milieu of interwar Serbian Orthodox conservatism in which the movement is variously read.)