A religious community operating for almost four decades applied to the Seimas for state recognition last year.
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The laws stipulate that a religious community can request state recognition only after 25 years have passed since its initial registration or that of its affiliated communities.
The Ministry of Justice consulted with several experts for almost a year, mostly from Vytautas Magnus University (VDU), and completed the preparation of the conclusion this July, submitting it to the parliament – which will have the final say.
This is already the sixth religious community seeking recognition in the past decade; the path was not easy for all: such status was won at the end of 2024 by the Ancient Baltic religious community “Romuva,” but only after long legal disputes that even reached the European Court of Human Rights. And the similar request of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious community, rejected in June 2024, is currently still under review by the Constitutional Court (KT).
This would grant many privileges to the community: the right to their own religious lessons in schools, recognition of church marriages, social guarantees for clergy, and the possibility to have religious broadcasts on the national broadcaster’s airwaves.
What is LEBB?
The Ministry of Justice indicates that the origins of LEBB’s faith are linked to the Full Gospel movement (sometimes the word “full” is used, English Full Gospel Churches), which began worldwide in the 1950s.
“This movement is attributed to the Protestant charismatic movement, which recognizes the main Christian doctrines and emphasizes the importance of the Holy Spirit’s gifts in the believer’s life.
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A characteristic feature of the Full Gospel movement is to emphasize the importance of faith and to expand the usual Christian promises of eternal life to today’s realm, claiming that faith also brings, for example, health and financial prosperity,” the ministry states.
In Lithuania, this evangelical Christian community of Protestant origin traces its beginnings to 1988.
Sociologist and religious studies scholar, head of the Sociology Department at Vytautas Magnus University (VDU), Milda Ališauskienė, one of the experts who provided conclusions to the ministry, writes that LEBB was formed based on the Full Gospel community “Word of Faith” established in the mentioned year.
The founder of “Word of Faith” was Jurijus Melechas, a Lithuanian of Tatar origin, who belonged to the underground Pentecostal church in Vilnius since 1983, but in 1989 he moved to the USA, and leadership of the community was taken over by Kęstutis Tumasonis and Giedrius Saulytis.
According to M. Ališauskienė, witnesses claim that the creation of “Word of Faith” was prompted by tensions within the evangelical Pentecostal community due to ethnic differences between Lithuanian and Russian-speaking believers, and at the end of 1988, the church’s “Word of Faith” newspaper appeared, which was distributed for some time together with “Sąjūdis News.”
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