Saving Souls in Siberia
American Evangelical Christians Struggle In A Cold, Hard Land
KRASNOYARSK, RUSSIA--Grace Church rests on a high hill on the north bank of the Yenisey River, above the iridescent fog that rolls over the cold, black waters on winter mornings. Built with American money and Russian hands, the Baptist church is a marriage of Protestant austerity and Slavic tradition, a sober, gray edifice with a single onion dome and cavernous insides painted in a sort of wedding-cake motif--peach and rose walls stenciled with flowery peasant artistry and Bible Scripture.
The church's cornerstone was laid not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, a time when thousands of American missionaries flooded into the void left by seven decades of godless communism. And Russians, fascinated by what had been forbidden for so long, welcomed these foreigners with open arms. "There was an initial deep curiosity in anything that was western, especially literature, so distributing free Bibles was extremely easy," recalls Chad Wiebe, a Mennonite pastor who grew up on a hog and cattle farm outside Wichita, Kan. "It was enough to say something was free, and they would line up."
But despite the initial enthusiasm, any hopes of sparking a Protestant-style spiritual revival soon faded as missionaries increasingly found their message falling on deaf ears. Their bootstrap ethos and self-determination didn't meld in this nation of fatalists and dictators. Then again, some Russians simply couldn't bring themselves to believe in God; for others, the Russian Orthodox Church, for centuries synonymous with Russian national identity, would always be the only rightful church in Russia. Faced with a harsh climate and dashed hopes, most of the missionaries went home.
Most, but not all. Several hundred families stayed behind, as others came and went, scattering over the vast Siberian steppe, which spans eight time zones from west of the Ural Mountains to the shores of the Pacific in the east. In the bleak expanse, they struggled to build their congregations, gathering to pray where they could--in schools and apartments and garages. They searched for congregants in alleyways littered with dirty heroin needles and bus stations crammed with the poor, inviting into their budding churches those members of society left behind in the new order--the elderly, drug-addicted, and sick. "Our job is to sow the seed and get the message out," says Ron Winkler, an evangelical Christian who moved his family from California to Krasnoyarsk two years ago. "It's God's job to bring in the harvest."
Even so, the missionaries would need helping hands. In 1994, Wiebe was dispatched by a mission organization called SEND International to establish the Krasnoyarsk Bible Institute on the second floor of Grace Church. He knew it would be tough-going and slow, but Wiebe believed he had found his life's calling, and he soon met a Ukrainian translator named Leanna, got married, and bought an apartment in an old, Soviet-era housing block. "There are frustrations, there are days that feel like there isn't a response that there was in the earlier days," says Wiebe, as his three blond daughters flit in and out of the Wiebes' modest living room. "[But] we're here because we continue to feel that we're making a difference."
advertisement
