Saving Souls in Siberia
American Evangelical Christians Struggle In A Cold, Hard Land
That difference is difficult to quantify and, with lackluster results, the interest by religious groups in the United States is waning. Russia has, in recent years, fallen out of fashion in the missionary world, and mission boards are redirecting funds to lands where a Protestant revival has taken root, such as Latin America and parts of Africa. "It's easy to talk about something exciting--there's kind of a romantic feel, and people want to give to that," says Wiebe. "But when the romantic feeling is gone and you're left in the trenches with blood and sweat, suddenly people don't dig so deep into their pockets."
Modest contributions. The Baptist Union, a network of churches that Wiebe helped establish, currently cannot survive without American dollars. Local fundraising produces little results because of cultural and economic factors, and most of the members of the congregation do not have the means to make serious contributions. "Russians learned how to sacrifice their life, their time and their families, but they haven't learned to sacrifice their money," says Wiebe.
Financial sacrifice, self-governance, empowerment were just some of the things Wiebe discovered didn't come naturally to passive Russians. An energetic mover and shaker, Wiebe found the way of life here slow and the people slow to change their ways. Even a simple chore like getting a driver's license could take a day or longer. Planting churches, getting people to catch on to his ideas of entrepreneurship, seemed as though it could take a lifetime. "Russians are different from Americans," says Alexander Sisko, 34, a Russian pastor who took over for Wiebe as director of the Bible institute two years ago. "You schedule things by the minute, and we schedule things by the week."
After Wiebe trained the preachers and the trainers, men like Sisko who help in the college or preach the Sunday sermons, he set out to make the Baptist Union a more efficient operation. In order to ensure continued growth, Wiebe needed to make church building more cost-effective, and that put Grace Church at the heart of a cultural clash. The main hall is capacious and has a lofty ceiling, making it expensive to heat through the long Siberian winter, when temperatures plummet to 50 below zero. But when Wiebe brought in plans to build a new church, a "quick-build" model developed in the Canadian tundra that was cheaper to construct and maintain because it was a compact structure made from sheetrock, the Russian pastors were incredulous--it would look like a suburban car garage next to the towering multi-colored Orthodox temples. "It took a while," says Wiebe, recounting how he coaxed the pastors by comparing the thin, insulated walls of the quick-build church to the thin shell of an airplane. When the quick-build church was finally erected in a nearby hamlet, the locals predictably tagged it as they perceived it: the American Church.
There was also the business of growing a congregation. Over 10 years, Wiebe graduated 152 ministers from the Bible institute, half of whom devoted themselves to full-time evangelism in the wilds of Siberia. The Baptist Union grew from 22 to over 100 churches scattered over the Krasnoyarsk region, which stretches from the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the north down to just above the Mongolian border in the south. Now, the pews of Grace Church are nearly full on Sunday mornings with 900 members. The congregants greet one another with an easy familiarity, and the din of the children in Sunday school mixes in with the preacher's sermon when the doors to the basement swing open. It could be a church in Anytown, U.S.A., except for the Russian pastor's occasional references to communism.
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