“We are not in conflict with the church. The church conflicts with us. Otherwise, it should answer that question,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said.
According to him, if some clergymen make a political bid, they admit their failure or inability to exercise spiritual leadership. “By the way, you can observe. Today, in Armenia, there are clergy who exercise spiritual leadership. What is spiritual guidance? It is to help people, to support them in their relationship with God, so that a person finds harmony with his inner world and with himself. Today, there are clerics who carry out exactly that activity,” he said.
According to the Prime Minister, the clerics who have failed in spiritual leadership, the mission of connecting people with God, are making a political bid. “Unfortunately, many high-ranking clerics have found themselves in that position. Not all, but many. Among the high-ranking people, many are engaged in spiritual guidance. But I’m afraid, at the highest level, it was the spiritual leadership that failed.”
He also gave an example from his experience. “One can communicate, have communication dozens of times, and never once from those dozens of times hear nothing about the Bible, hear nothing even about the New Testament and the Gospel, hear nothing about denominational issues, but hear many things about cement, concrete, to carry the goods, to import, to clear customs, to put money here, to take it out there, to replace this route line with this one, to replace this one car with another, to compare the new “Mercedes” vipusk with the old vipusk. I am surprised that these people are making a political bid because they have nothing to do in the spiritual field. It is not theirs. I understand they may not have read the Bible from the beginning to the end. Even in their terminology, you can understand that they haven’t opened the New Testament for a long time; they don’t know evangelical subtleties.”
He also noted: “An interesting discussion took place in my eyes related to spirit, soul, and all that. I understood from here that people either do not know the spiritual service, the Gospel, or they are deliberately engaged in the preaching of impurity because when the clergy speak and preach about the spirit, in the Gospels, the word spirit is used exclusively with the adverbs “vile” and “evil.”
