Saving Souls in Siberia
American Evangelical Christians Struggle In A Cold, Hard Land
Pranger, his wife, Laura, a pious woman from rural Indiana, and two of their five children moved to Krasnoyarsk last year, with the support of their home church in Cleveland. "I love Russia. I would rather be here than anywhere in the world," says Pranger. "People think it's a sacrifice, [but] it's easier living here. There's a lot of politics in churches in the States, but being here and being on our own, we're free to follow the Bible."
But the Prangers discovered that life in Russia came with its own set of limitations. After the 1997 law was passed, obtaining a visa became a cumbersome and costly process. If and when the visa is granted, American missionaries are required to leave the country every six months to renew their registration. For a family with children, the processing fees, airplane fare, and hassle to daily life are too big a burden. Region to region, the law is interpreted differently by local administrators and is in constant flux. "The law may not be capricious, but the way it's applied is," says one American missionary, who asked to keep her name private to avoid getting in trouble with the authorities over her precarious visa status.
Low profile. The Prangers used the local Independent Baptist Church to secure their religious visa, but they remain independent of even the Independent Baptists (and the Union Baptists and any other sort of Baptist or Christian branch that doesn't share their deeply conservative views). The ex-pat evangelical community itself is largely fractured. Missionaries seldom mix with other Americans for fear of becoming more visible or being lumped with an offending denomination. Some people suspect strongly that they have a file with the security services. Others were afraid to give their name for this article for fear that the Russian authorities would search their names on Google. These missionaries periodically surf the Net to see if any information about them is in the public domain that may possibly contradict what the authorities know about them.
Their fears are not baseless. Scores of missionaries have been kicked out for evangelizing and proselytizing, tagged by the government as security threats or as agents of U.S. imperialism. In order to get around the bureaucracy, some have gone underground, registering under the auspices of a student or business visa. They teach English, do humanitarian work, and evangelize surreptitiously. These missionaries perhaps feel the most discouraged by the reality of their situation, and when they watch families around them pack up and go home, they wonder how they'll ever hold out. "Our ultimate goal is to see more churches here, but everyone we talked to that has experience in church planting says that you can't expect it to take less than 10 years, and part of that is because of the law you have to convert people one on one," says the American missionary who was afraid to give her name for this article. "I've said I just wanted to go back to being a secretary in an office, but we have too much invested here. However many years we have under our belt, that's just toil under our brow."
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