Saving Souls in Siberia
American Evangelical Christians Struggle In A Cold, Hard Land
Thinking big. With the backing and resources of his mission board, Wiebe invited pastors from American seminaries to teach at the institute. He instructed the emerging church leadership on the virtues of small-group Bible study. He showed newly minted evangelists how to recruit through team sports and group activities like fishing trips. He taught his congregants to reach out to orphanages and homeless shelters. "We want our students to think big in the Bible college," says Wiebe, opening his arms to demonstrate magnitude. "Jesus was a big thinker."
But Wiebe had a difficult time reaching the middle class which, after an initial curiosity, went the way of secular western Europeans. So he started approaching people who were open to his message: pensioners nostalgic for the religious traditions of their childhood and a generation of disaffected youth drowning in a flood of cheap and easy drugs. Wiebe opened a drug-rehab center in the mountain village where the quick-build church was raised and funneled recovering heroin addicts into the Bible institute. "People who were once addicted to drugs now find themselves clinging to God for life," says Wiebe. "We want people to see the love of God, and usually needy people are the people who are most ready to receive God's love."
Arguably, Wiebe is helping those who are in most need of help and perhaps in most need of faith, but there are questions over the viability of Grace Church and whether the next generation will be able to sustain the growth. After 10 years of evangelism in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial city of 1 million, the proportion of pensioners in Wiebe's congregation dramatically outweighs every other age group, and while the recovering addicts have embraced their new faith with ardor, it is not clear that they come to Grace Church because they prefer the nuts and bolts of the Baptist Church to Orthodoxy or simply because that's where the door is open. "I went where help was offered. I didn't know who they were," says a graduate and former heroin addict, Vladimir Tsapkov, 33. "If the Orthodox Church had offered help, I would have gone there." Or as the coordinator of the rehab center put it: "Junkies don't have denominations."
"Underhanded tactics." Post-Soviet Russia is a country caught in a spiritual crisis and afflicted by physical decay. Siberian villages are drained of life, as people flee for industrial cities and towns, while rampant unemployment and graft have infected those city streets with drugs, crime, and disease. The Russian government has largely left these problems unchecked, whether because of ineptitude or an unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of the situation.
When evangelicals like Wiebe stepped in with American dollars and opened drug-rehab centers and invited HIV-infected youth into their churches, some regional and local authorities were grateful for the help. But the Orthodox Church felt threatened by these meddlesome outsiders, who were making them look bad. Some clergy even denounced foreign missionaries who do humanitarian work or hand out Bibles as using "underhanded tactics" and accused evangelicals of giving away free goods in order to seduce souls into their faith. "The Russian Orthodox Church [is] scared by the financial power and efficiency of the evangelicals," says Victoria Clark, author of Why Angels Fall: A Journey Through Orthodox Europe From Byzantium to Kosovo. "They see it as very aggressive indeed to come and fish for Russian souls when Russians are already Christian by being Russian. It's an attack on nationhood, not just spiritual identity."
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