The 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017 was held in Ger‑ many for the first time as an ecumenical event. Within its framework, a number of important official church documents about rethinking the history of the Reformation were adopted, common worship services held, and a large number of projects implemented at the region‑ al, national and international levels.

This article is devoted to the history of the World Congress of Families (WCF) and its interaction with Russian partners. The article begins with a story about Allan Carlson’s trip to Moscow in 1995, where as a result of a meeting with sociologists, the idea of creating a WCF was born. The author then analyses the cooperation between the WCF and the Russian Orthodox Church as an example of so‑called “conservative ecumenism,” which partly replaces classical, more liberal ecumenism, such as that presented by the World Council of Churches.

The article continues the discussion of the concept of “conservative ecumenism”, proposed by the author in 2017 to describe conservative Christian alliances in defense of traditional values. Main debates have revolved around the use of the term “ecumenism” in the case of such alliances. The article proposes minimal criteria of being “ecumenical” — those that the author calls “ecumenical consciousness”. The question of whether striving for Christian unity is a necessary criterion of ecumenism is considered.

This paper investigates the role of the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity in the deployment of Russian state family policy since 2006. It argues that the holiday is emblematic of a cooperative, rather than synchronous, relationship between Church and state in the promotion of pronatalism and so-called “traditional family values”, and highlights the ways in which public discourse around the holiday intentionally obscures internal contradictions within the dominant family ideologies of both institutions.

The scope of the present research is the evolution of marriage and family ideas in the Evangelical Christian Baptist movement after World War II in the Soviet Union. The author analyzed the special views on marriage among the Russian Baptists, found in the Baptist bulletin “Bratsky Vestnik” (Fraternal Bulletin), as well as in the archival documents from the Evangelical Christian Baptist churches of Tambov, Voronezh and Lipetsk regions. The author reconstructs the model of marriage relationships and family practices among the Evangelicals.